Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [75]
Three weeks later, one of their Bell Labs colleagues unwittingly forced Shockley’s hand. John Shive had had a similar idea, and mentioned it in a seminar talk. Shockley, worried that Bardeen and Brattain would quickly fill in the gaps and reinvent his amplifier, got to his feet and upstaged Shive’s talk with a complete description of his new design. Bardeen and Brattain were dumbfounded to discover that their boss had been keeping such a well-developed idea from them. With nothing more than an exchange of glances, war was declared.
Bardeen and Brattain had a working device, and could accelerate their patent application. Shockley had nothing to experiment with, but he did have one thing his enemies didn’t: authority. Within a few days, Bardeen and Brattain found that all the labs’ resources had been redirected to focus on developing Shockley’s device.
It was too late, however. Bardeen and Brattain’s invention worked. They refined and renamed it, ready for launch, as the ‘transistor’. All Shockley could do was tack a supplement onto their work. The transistor was launched in three papers in the 15 July 1948 issue of Physical Review. Two were, as Riordan and Hoddeson put it, ‘ageless classics’ written by Bardeen and Brattain. The third was a ‘largely forgettable’ paper by Shockley and an experimental collaborator, Gerald Pearson.
Shockley was down, but he was not beaten. Having failed to halt the birth of the transistor, he resolved to find another way to write himself into the history books. He called in favours with his managers, and mounted a PR offensive that would make Stanley Prusiner blush. Astonishing as it now seems, Shockley managed to get his friends in the upper echelons of Bell Labs to insist that no photographs of Bardeen and Brattain were to be taken without Shockley in the frame. At the press conference to launch the transistor, Bardeen and Brattain were completely sidelined. Shockley’s boss, Ralph Bown, made the announcement. When his demonstration of the transistor’s power was over, Bown handed the floor to Shockley, who fielded the press’s questions.
The evidence of Shockley’s anarchy is still there for anyone to see. The classic Bell Labs photograph of the trio at work shows Shockley sitting at the laboratory bench making adjustments to the transistor while looking through a microscope. Bardeen and Brattain are standing behind him, watching. The pained expressions on their faces are of men worried that their most precious possession is about to be broken by an inexpert hand. Bardeen, a man of very few words (but the holder of two Nobel Prizes), once let slip that Walter Brattain ‘sure hates this picture’.
And it wasn’t over even then. Shockley had dealt with the transistor affair, but he wasn’t going to risk letting something similar happen again. He began a campaign of systematic exclusion, creating what Bardeen later called ‘an intolerable situation’. When Shockley’s research team moved to a new building, Bardeen and Brattain were allocated space on the floor beneath Shockley and his close collaborators. Complaints to Bown got them nowhere. By 1950, six years before the trio were awarded their Nobel Prize, Bardeen had given up. He moved into a different field entirely – research into the electrical properties of materials known as superconductors – and left Bell Labs a year later. ‘My difficulties stem from the invention of the transistor,’ he wrote in his resignation letter to the research director. Walter Brattain stayed put but, sore at the loss of his friend and collaborator, he refused to work with Shockley ever again.
William Shockley is not an unusual type of character to find in science. He was a great scientist, but an even greater combatant. When he died in 1989, it was recorded in Stanford University’s memorial notice that ‘He set extraordinarily high standards for everyone, including himself, and virtually every activity was an all-out race in which he was an intense competitor.’ It seems that when he was losing that race, he wasn