American Physicist and co-inventor of the transistor who ushered in the electronics revolution and directly led to the electronics boom in Silicon Valley. He shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work.
After completing his education at Caltech and MIT, he joined Bell Labs in New York, before opening up his own laboratory in Mountain View, California.
Although a brilliant man himself, his dictatorial style turned away many of his brightest workers - eight of them went on to start Fairchild Semiconductor, an immediate success, while his own company was sold to Beckman Instruments.
He was born in London, England, his father william Hillman Shockley a mining Engineer.
He also became a strong proponent of Francis Galton's theory of eugenics, arguing that other races were intellectually inferior to whites, and that their high birthrate threatened humanity as a whole.
