The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter - Страница 42

• Предыдущая
• 42/155
• Следующая

He and Kelly met one afternoon in the wood-paneled study of Kelly’s home in the nearby suburb of Short Hills. Brattain laid out their grievances, describing how ham-fisted Shockley was as a manager and colleague. Kelly batted away the complaints. “So finally, without thinking of its impact, I inadvertently said to him that John Bardeen and I knew when Shockley invented the PNP [junction] transistor,” Brattain recalled. In other words, he had let slip a veiled threat that some of the concepts in the patent application for the junction transistor, which listed Shockley as the inventor, had actually arisen from the work that Brattain and Bardeen had done. “Kelly realized that neither Bardeen nor I, if we ever went on the stand in a patent fight, would lie about what we knew. This changed his whole attitude. And after that, my position in the Laboratories was a little bit more satisfactory.”⁴³ Bardeen and Brattain no longer had to report to Shockley.

The new arrangement turned out not to be enough to satisfy Bardeen, who turned his focus away from semiconductors and began working on superconductivity theory. He took a job at the University of Illinois. “My difficulties stem from the invention of the transistor,” he wrote in a resignation letter to Kelly. “Before that there was an excellent research atmosphere here. . . . After the invention Shockley at first refused to allow anyone else in the group to work on the problem. In short, he used the group largely to exploit his own ideas.”⁴⁴

Bardeen’s resignation and Brattain’s complaints did not help Shockley’s standing at Bell Labs. His prickly personality meant that he was passed over for promotions. He appealed to Kelly and even the president of AT&T, but to no avail. “The hell with that,” he told a colleague. “I’ll go set up my own business, I’ll make a million dollars that way. And by the way, I’ll do it out in California.” When he heard of Shockley’s plans, Kelly did not try to dissuade him. Quite the contrary: “I told him that if he thinks he can earn a million dollars, go ahead!” Kelly even called Laurence Rockefeller to recommend that he help finance Shockley’s proposed venture.⁴⁵

As he grappled with his situation in 1954, Shockley went through a midlife crisis. After helping his wife fight ovarian cancer, he left her while she was in remission and found himself a girlfriend, whom he would later marry. He took a leave from Bell Labs. And this being a classic midlife crisis, he even bought a sports car, a green Jaguar XK120 two-seat convertible.

Shockley spent a semester as a visiting professor at Caltech and took a gig consulting with the Army’s Weapons Systems Evaluation Group in Washington, but much of the time he traveled the country trying to figure out his new venture, visiting technology companies, and meeting with successful entrepreneurs such as William Hewlett and Edwin Land. “Think I shall try to raise some capital and start on my own,” he wrote his girlfriend. “After all, it is obvious I am smarter, more energetic, and understand folks better than most of these other folks.” His journals for 1954 show him struggling to make sense of his quest. “Lack of appreciation by bosses, means what?” he wrote at one point. As happens in many biographies, there was also the theme of living up to a late father. Contemplating his plan to create a company that would make transistors ubiquitous, he wrote, “Idea of setting world on fire, father proud.”⁴⁶

Setting the world on fire. Despite the fact that he would never turn out to be successful in business, Shockley would accomplish that. The company that he was about to found would transform a valley known for its apricot orchards into one famed for turning silicon into gold.

SHOCKLEY SEMICONDUCTOR

At the February 1955 annual gala of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, two pioneers of electronics were honored: Lee de Forest, who had invented the vacuum tube, and Shockley, an inventor of its replacement. Shockley sat with a distinguished industrialist, Arnold Beckman, the chamber’s vice chairman. Like Shockley, Beckman had worked for Bell Labs, where he developed techniques for making vacuum tubes. As a professor at Caltech he had invented a variety of measuring instruments, including one that measured the acidity of lemons, and he used his invention as the foundation for building a large manufacturing company.

That August, Shockley invited Beckman to serve on the board of his proposed transistor company. “I asked him a little bit more about who else was going to be on the board,” Beckman recalled, “and it turned out that he was going to have a board composed of almost everyone who was in the instrument business, all of whom would be his competitors.” Beckman realized how “unbelievably naive” Shockley was, so in order to help him devise a more sensible approach, he invited him to spend a week in Newport Beach, where Beckman kept his sailboat.⁴⁷

Shockley’s plan was to make transistors by using gas diffusion to dope silicon with impurities. By adjusting the time, pressure, and temperature, he could precisely control the process, thus allowing different varieties of transistors to be mass-manufactured. Impressed by the idea, Beckman convinced Shockley not to launch his own company and instead to lead a new division of Beckman Instruments, which Beckman would fund.

Beckman wanted it located in the Los Angeles area, where most of his other divisions were. But Shockley insisted that it be located in Palo Alto, where he had been raised, so that he could be near his aging mother. They doted on each other intensely, which some found weird but which had the historic significance of helping to create Silicon Valley.

Palo Alto was still, as it had been in Shockley’s childhood, a small college town surrounded by orchards. But during the 1950s its population would double, to fifty-two thousand, and twelve new elementary schools would be built. The influx was partly due to the boom in the cold war defense industry. Canisters of film dropped from America’s U-2 spy planes were sent to the NASA Ames Research Center in nearby Sunnyvale. Defense contractors took root in the surrounding areas, such as the Lockheed Missiles and Space Division, which built submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and Westinghouse, which produced tubes and transformers for the missile systems. Neighborhoods of tract houses sprang up to accommodate young engineers and Stanford junior professors. “You had all these military companies on the cutting edge,” recalled Steve Jobs, who was born in 1955 and grew up in the area. “It was mysterious and high-tech and made living there very exciting.”⁴⁸

Sprouting alongside the defense contractors were companies that made electrical measuring instruments and other technological devices. The sector’s roots stretched back to 1938, when the electronics entrepreneur Dave Packard and his new wife moved into a home in Palo Alto that had a shed where his friend Bill Hewlett was soon ensconced. The house also had a garage—an appendage that would prove both useful and iconic in the valley—in which they tinkered around until they had their first product, an audio oscillator. By the 1950s Hewlett-Packard had become the pace horse for the region’s tech startups.⁴⁹

Fortunately there was a place for entrepreneurs who had outgrown their garages. Fred Terman, a doctoral student of Vannevar Bush’s at MIT who became Stanford University’s dean of engineering, created an industrial park in 1953 on seven hundred acres of undeveloped university property, where tech companies could lease land inexpensively and build new offices. It helped transform the area. Hewlett and Packard had been Terman’s students, and he had persuaded them to stay in Palo Alto when they founded their company rather than move east, as most of Stanford’s top graduates had been doing. They became one of the first tenants in the Stanford Research Park. Throughout the 1950s Terman, who went on to become Stanford’s provost, grew the industrial park by encouraging its occupants to have a symbiotic relationship with Stanford; employees and executives could study or teach part-time at the university, and its professors were given leeway to advise new businesses. Stanford’s office park would end up nurturing hundreds of companies, from Varian to Facebook.

• Предыдущая
• 42/155
• Следующая