born Feb. 13, 1910, London, Eng.
died Aug. 12, 1989, Palo Alto, Calif., U.S.
U.S. engineer and teacher.
He received a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He joined Bell Labs in 1936, where he began experiments that led to the development of the transistor . During World War II he was director of research for the U.S. Navy's Antisubmarine Warfare Operations Research Group; later (195455) he was deputy director of the Defense Department's Weapons Systems Evaluation Group. He established the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory at Beckman Instruments in 1955. In 1956 he shared a Nobel Prize with John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain for their work at Bell Labs on the transistor. He taught at Stanford University (195874). From the late 1960s he earned notoriety for his outspoken and critical views on the intellectual capacity of blacks.