1910-1989

American physicist awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain for developing the transistor at Bell Laboratories (1948). Shockley conceived of the junction transistor shortly thereafter, which Brattain successfully built and tested by 1950. The commercially successful Shockley Transistor Corporation was later founded to produce miniaturized circuits for radios, televisions, and computer equipment. In the 1960s Shockley advanced the controversial theory that the genetic component of intelligence was determined by racial heritage.