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Speaker 1: at Pushkin, dot fm, slash plus. It's a beautiful morning
Speaker 1: in northern California. I flew in last night, drove down
Speaker 1: from San Francisco Airport to Mountain View, and then I
Speaker 1: got up first single morning and I'm here at last
Speaker 1: three ninety one San Antonio Road, in the heart of
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley. On the wall of an office building, there's
Speaker 1: a small plaque and next to it a chart, a
Speaker 1: family tree of companies, dozens of them, National Semiconductor, Fairchild,
Speaker 1: Variant Intel. It's the kind of display you could easily
Speaker 1: miss if you weren't looking for it, which is a
Speaker 1: shame because it's a monument to the origins of one
Speaker 1: of the greatest technological revolutions in human history. It's an
Speaker 1: office building on a four lane six lane road, kind
Speaker 1: of a main thoroughfare through Mountain View. Apartments on one side,
Speaker 1: office buildings on the other. I think three ninety one
Speaker 1: is a might be a Facebook building. I think I
Speaker 1: read that somewhere. But back in the day, it was
Speaker 1: just a little quantset hut on this site, a little
Speaker 1: wooden structure and big windows up front with a sign
Speaker 1: over the door, and I I just sort of read
Speaker 1: a plaque that is on the front of the building
Speaker 1: today the birthplace of Silicon Valley nineteen fifty six. At
Speaker 1: this location three ninety Antonio Road, the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory
Speaker 1: manufactured the first silicon devices in what became known as
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley. Some of the talented scientists and engineers initially
Speaker 1: employed there left to found their own companies, leading to
Speaker 1: the birth of the silicon electronics industry in the region.
Speaker 1: Hundreds of firms in electronics and computing can trace their
Speaker 1: origins back to Shockley Semiconductor. Here's my question that brought
Speaker 1: me all the way from New York City to this
Speaker 1: building in the middle of Silicon Valley. Why was Shockley
Speaker 1: semi Conductor Laboratories here on San Antonio Road, Of all
Speaker 1: the places in America? Why did Silicon Valley start right
Speaker 1: where I'm standing? Dun dun dun dun dun d. My
Speaker 1: name is Malcolm Blackwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my
Speaker 1: podcast about things Overlooked and Misunderstood. This episode is about
Speaker 1: how the long, narrow valley that lies between the Santa
Speaker 1: Clara Mountains and San Francisco Bay became the epicenter of
Speaker 1: the modern age. The transistor, the forerunner of today's computer chips,
Speaker 1: was invented in nineteen forty seven by the team headed
Speaker 1: by a physicist named William Shockley. Before that, computers and
Speaker 1: everything electronic ran on vacuum tubes, which were underpowered, oversized, fragile.
Speaker 1: In the late forties, that changed forever. Shockley invented the transistor,
Speaker 1: and then there was the chip, and then out of
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley came a stream of technologies that gave us
Speaker 1: the world we live in now. But Shockley didn't invent
Speaker 1: the transistor in northern California. He invented it in New
Speaker 1: Jersey at the famous Bell Labs in Murray Hill, about
Speaker 1: ten miles outside of Newark. Then he left Bell Labs
Speaker 1: and took a teaching job at Caltech in Pasadena, just
Speaker 1: outside of Los Angeles. And after a stint there and
Speaker 1: a stint at the Pentagon, he decides to strike out
Speaker 1: on his own. He lines up a wealthy backer. He
Speaker 1: starts a company called Shockley Semiconductor, and he recruits the
Speaker 1: best and the brightest from all around the country. Everyone
Speaker 1: comes from somewhere else to a quantt hut on three
Speaker 1: ninety one San Antonio Road in Mountain View because William
Speaker 1: Shockley wants to set up shop in a quantt hut
Speaker 1: on three ninety one San Antonio Road in Mountain View.
Speaker 1: The first question I have is really about looking at
Speaker 1: this from the perspective of the mid fifties, the very beginning.
Speaker 1: If you and I were having a conversation in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty five and we were told a computer revolution was
Speaker 1: coming in the United States, and I asked, I said
Speaker 1: to you on a where do you think think that
Speaker 1: revolution will take place? What would you've told me? My
Speaker 1: first call to Anno Saxonian, professor at Berkeley, who has
Speaker 1: spent her career trying to understand why certain parts of
Speaker 1: the country are home to innovation and others aren't.
Speaker 2: Probably I would have said Boston, Boston, maybe New Jersey,
Speaker 2: you know, maybe Chicago, less so New York, you know,
Speaker 2: definitely on the Northeast where all the big manufacturing operations were.
Speaker 1: And that it's that's the reason. It'd be more specific
Speaker 1: about what it was about those three cities that would
Speaker 1: have led you to think that's where the revolution was coming.
Speaker 2: Well, first of all, you know, the transistor was being
Speaker 2: invented at Bill Labs, so there's technical capability. Also, you
Speaker 2: know MI T Also, you know activities around Columbia. So
Speaker 2: there's there's there's universities, there's money. I mean, it's the northeast.
Speaker 2: So you've got New York right there. So you've got finance.
Speaker 2: It's expensive to invent you know, transistors and then computers
Speaker 2: and whatnot. You got proximity to Washington, DC. You know,
Speaker 2: military contracts really supported the early decades of development. Uh
Speaker 2: So you've got people, you've got capital, you've got contacts,
Speaker 2: and you've got existing corporations. That's where the expertise was,
Speaker 2: That's where all the action was.
Speaker 1: I asked the same question of Nathan Miervold, one of
Speaker 1: the key figures in the growth of Microsoft and one
Speaker 1: of the ogs of the computer industry.
Speaker 3: New Jersey and Philadelphia has been the best bad Well
Speaker 3: you Von Neumann would still have been at in Suit
Speaker 3: for Advanced Study, and he had was super involved. Aeronoff
Speaker 3: and the team that build ENIAC were at University of
Speaker 3: Pennsylvania and Bell.
Speaker 4: Labs was there.
Speaker 3: It also had oh at RCA and sonof Labs.
Speaker 1: Oh wow. So the Sonoff Labs of.
Speaker 3: RCA are in Princeton, New Jersey, and that was where
Speaker 3: David Sarnoff was sort of ruling the rust technically in radio,
Speaker 3: and that was a big, big, big, big deal. So
Speaker 3: that's where you would have thought it was, because it
Speaker 3: was already the center of a ton of both radio
Speaker 3: and electronics and computing.
Speaker 1: Now, there are a few theories out there about why
Speaker 1: Shockley chose to set up in Santa Clara Valley. One
Speaker 1: that might seem obvious is that right next door to
Speaker 1: Mountain View is Polo Alto, and Palo Alto is the
Speaker 1: home of Stanford University, a world class institution spitting out
Speaker 1: one brilliant mind after another. But you're thinking of today Stanford.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about Stanford, brumff. Why are you
Speaker 1: rolling your eyes?
Speaker 2: Because Stanford always gets all the attention, and it became
Speaker 2: very important in the fifties, it was not important. It
Speaker 2: was kind of a hic regional place, so it can't
Speaker 2: have been the important institution. Mit was way ahead at
Speaker 2: that time.
Speaker 1: The whole thing makes no sense. When he's thinking of
Speaker 1: setting up his startup, Shockley criss crosses the country. He
Speaker 1: goes to see one of the Rockefellers, He visits the
Speaker 1: leading electronics companies of the day. He combs through their
Speaker 1: financial statements. He does a comparison of the cost of
Speaker 1: living in Cambridge, Washington, d C. And Michigan. Yale says,
Speaker 1: we'll give you everything you want. Bell Lab says, come back.
Speaker 1: Everybody wants him. And what does he do? He says no.
Speaker 1: He finally finds a backer. He likes, a wealthy entrepreneur
Speaker 1: named Arnold Beckman who is based near Caltech in Pasadena.
Speaker 1: Beckman loves Shockley, loves his ideas. Beckman's company makes sophisticated
Speaker 1: scientific equipment. He has resources, infrastructure, skilled technicians. He says
Speaker 1: to Shockley, set up here in Pasadena. My guys can
Speaker 1: help out. I want you here. Shockley already knows Pasadena.
Speaker 1: He literally worked at Caltech. His benefactor, the man giving
Speaker 1: him all his money, wants him to be there. Shockley says, no.
Speaker 1: I want to be in the apricot orchards off the
Speaker 1: Santa Clair Valley. I find all of the seemingly obvious
Speaker 1: explanations to be unconvincing.
Speaker 4: It's a mystery.
Speaker 1: It's a mystery. Next on my list, Richard Florida, author
Speaker 1: of the hugely influential study Rise of the Creative Class,
Speaker 1: another take on why certain regions take off and others don't.
Speaker 1: But here's the one I really want to talk you about,
Speaker 1: which is the weather? Is it? Is it at all?
Speaker 1: Why are you looking at me like this? Why I
Speaker 1: hear the weather explanation and I just roll my eyes
Speaker 1: as you should, as I should tell Okay, so tell me,
Speaker 1: tell me, tell me why the weather explanation is nonsense.
Speaker 4: Well, I mean, Boston was pretty good at this stuff.
Speaker 4: And you know, I mean, if anything, Silicon Valley emulated
Speaker 4: Boston right.
Speaker 1: In the standard explanation for Silicon Valley. Right after people
Speaker 1: say it was all because of Stanford, they add, oh,
Speaker 1: and the weather is amazing, as if that settles it.
Speaker 1: But Florida's point is, since when is there some magical
Speaker 1: correlation between technological revolutions and good weather? He's totally right.
Speaker 1: I have to say the weather argument has always driven
Speaker 1: me crazy. How many times do people say, as a
Speaker 1: way of explaining the decline of Rust belt cities like
Speaker 1: Buffalo or Detroit or Cleveland, Well, the weather's terrible, who
Speaker 1: would want to live there? Meanwhile, north of the border,
Speaker 1: directly on the other side of Lake Ontario, there are
Speaker 1: two of the most successful tech hubs in the world,
Speaker 1: Toronto and its sibling down the road, Waterloo. Which have
Speaker 1: exactly the same weather as Detroit, Buffalo, and Cleveland.
Speaker 4: I was a professor at Carnegie Mellon for nearly twenty years,
Speaker 4: and you know, we were trying to figure out why
Speaker 4: Pittsburgh had not turned into a tech hub of the
Speaker 4: sorts of Grick, Boston, Cambridge or Palo Alto, the Bay Area, Slicon,
Speaker 4: Morley Bay Area. And then somebody said to me, well,
Speaker 4: one of our peer institutions is Waterloo. You should look
Speaker 4: at them because they're really good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the weather in Waterloo, as someone who grew
Speaker 1: up outside of Waterloo, is strocious.
Speaker 4: It's not great.
Speaker 1: It's I was just there, it's freezing. I was like,
Speaker 1: it's not the weather. And I was thinking, your good
Speaker 1: friend Bill Gates drops out of Harvard because he wants
Speaker 1: to start a software company, but doesn't go to Silicon Valley,
Speaker 1: goes home to Seattle. When I was talking to Nathan Meherveld,
Speaker 1: Microsoft came up.
Speaker 4: Naturally.
Speaker 1: Microsoft is the reason Seattle turned into a major tech hub.
Speaker 1: That's why Amazon's there. But why was Microsoft in Seattle?
Speaker 1: The story on that is very funny.
Speaker 3: What's the story He and Paul started the company Microsoft
Speaker 3: that is in New Mexico, because the first PC company
Speaker 3: was in Albuquerque.
Speaker 1: He being Bill Gates, Paul being his co founder Paul Allen.
Speaker 1: They were high school friends from Seattle.
Speaker 3: And so they literally went across the street from this
Speaker 3: first PC company and readed some space and they started Microsoft.
Speaker 5: Well.
Speaker 3: Within a few years that company had gone under and
Speaker 3: Microsoft was doing super well. And so Bill sort of
Speaker 3: characteristically does this big analysis and decides they had to
Speaker 3: be near either O'Hare Airport or Dallas Fort Worth Airport
Speaker 3: because from those airports you could get to anywhere in
Speaker 3: the United States with a commercial because no one's thinking
Speaker 3: private aviation back then. You could get there and get.
Speaker 1: Back and be more.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and Paul says, God, the weather is terrible those places.
Speaker 1: Let's just go home. Exactly. Paul Allen tells his Microsoft
Speaker 1: co founder Bill Gates that they shouldn't move to Chicago
Speaker 1: or Dallas, they should go home to Seattle because the
Speaker 1: weather is better there. And you and I both know
Speaker 1: the weather in Seattle is not better. It's terrible. It
Speaker 1: does nothing but rain. And by the way, since when
Speaker 1: does a software programmer care about what the weather's like?
Speaker 1: They never go outside. I think about this mystery every
Speaker 1: time I go to northern California. You land at San
Speaker 1: Francisco Airport, you drive south down the one oh one
Speaker 1: fog everywhere, traffic is appalling, strip malls on one side,
Speaker 1: bad office buildings on the other. And Stanford. Enough already
Speaker 1: about Stanford. It's supposed to be this crown jewel. Have
Speaker 1: you ever been there? It looks like someone gave a
Speaker 1: billion dollars to Taco Bell and said, build me a university.
Speaker 1: Democracy had as its ucible Athens, the Renaissance had Florence,
Speaker 1: the Impressionists at Paris. The Digital Age as best buy
Speaker 1: an in and out burger. I don't get it.
Speaker 6: My father was a mining engineer, and I maintained that
Speaker 6: I am probably a Cockney because I believe in the
Speaker 6: right weather conditions you could hear the sound of bow
Speaker 6: bells from the apartment where I was born.
Speaker 1: That's Shockley being interviewed by the Palo Alto Historical Association
Speaker 1: in the nineteen sixties. Picture a shiny bald head, thick glasses,
Speaker 1: chiseled features, handsome fit, and that even relentless delivery. He
Speaker 1: was born in London. In nineteen ten. The Shockleys returned
Speaker 1: to the United States when he was three. He skipped
Speaker 1: middle school all of it, just went straight from elementary
Speaker 1: school to high school, Hollywood High in Los Angeles.
Speaker 5: And then you went on to college.
Speaker 6: Yes, I went to Caltech for my undergraduate work and
Speaker 6: then to MIT for a PhD. I was a physics
Speaker 6: major all from about my sophomore year in college.
Speaker 5: And after your PhD, armed with your diploma, where.
Speaker 6: Did you go? I went to belt Holephone Laboratories at
Speaker 6: that time, where I worked for CJ. Davison, who won
Speaker 6: the Nobel Prize around nineteen thirty eight for electronic fraction.
Speaker 6: And he was one of the attractions that brought me
Speaker 6: to Bell Laboratories.
Speaker 1: Shockley's father was older. He died when Shockley was young.
Speaker 1: Shockley was an only child, raised by his mother, May Bradford.
Speaker 1: Shockley a steer, intimidating, emotionally withholding. She grew up in
Speaker 1: New Mexico. A tomboy, comfortable on horseback, and handy with
Speaker 1: a gun. She had a math degree in an era
Speaker 1: whe most women didn't have degrees at all. One of
Speaker 1: the first female mining surveyors in the country, she was
Speaker 1: an accomplished artist who made a small fortune trading stocks
Speaker 1: on the side. He was one hundred and sixty one.
Speaker 1: I mean, come on, if we're going to understand Shockley's
Speaker 1: great decision, we have to understand Shockley, right. So I
Speaker 1: called up the New York psycho Analytics Society and I said,
Speaker 1: I need to talk to someone about William Shockley because
Speaker 1: this combination absent father, brilliant only child, dominant mother is
Speaker 1: just a freudient field day. And they got right back
Speaker 1: to me with a name Philip Herschenfeld, Upper east Side.
Speaker 1: The psychoanalytic community, and William Shockley, for reasons that will
Speaker 1: become obvious, turned out to be well acquainted. So, as
Speaker 1: I explained to you, I had this notion in my
Speaker 1: head that Freud was very interested in this question of
Speaker 1: the brilliant only child and the strong mother. Am I
Speaker 1: right that Freud had thought about it? What did he
Speaker 1: have to say about that?
Speaker 5: He's said? And I think he was also talking about himself.
Speaker 1: Just to be clear, when a member of the New
Speaker 1: York Psychoanalytics Society uses the pronoun he, there's about a
Speaker 1: ninety nine percent chance they're referring to Freud.
Speaker 5: That any son who is the This is not the
Speaker 5: exact quote. The undisputed favorite of his mother goes through
Speaker 5: life with the feeling of being a conqueror. Uh huh,
Speaker 5: and that's a very powerful feeling.
Speaker 1: When Shockley was eight, his mother May wrote in her diary,
Speaker 1: I woke up with the thought in my mind, the
Speaker 1: only heritage I care to lead to Billy is the
Speaker 1: feeling of force and the joy of responsibility for setting
Speaker 1: the world right on something. He's eight. What mother writes
Speaker 1: of her eight year old that she desires to leave
Speaker 1: him with a feeling of force? Good lord, what is that?
Speaker 1: What was for explanation for why that relationship would have
Speaker 1: imbued the son with such power?
Speaker 5: Because it's what any young child strives for. If you
Speaker 5: are a fan of the Oedipus complex, which I am,
Speaker 5: you know there's evidence of it everywhere in Shakespeare, in literature,
Speaker 5: in life, that young child has a feeling of conquering,
Speaker 5: of overpowering his father perhaps and basking in this love.
Speaker 5: And there are many examples of that in history. So yeah,
Speaker 5: I think it can be a very powerful feeling.
Speaker 1: So we have this brilliant mother who is a little
Speaker 1: emotionally reserved the sun. Shockley is handsome, unbelievably brilliant. I mean,
Speaker 1: everyone I mean beyond he said his first word at
Speaker 1: four months You know that kind of right from the
Speaker 1: get go. Kinder, brilliant, unbelievably competitive and self confident, a
Speaker 1: champion athlete to this day. There's a the in the
Speaker 1: You're not a mountain, time are?
Speaker 5: There's a I live right near the Gonks?
Speaker 1: Oh, the Gnks. Do you know about Shockley's cliff?
Speaker 5: Yes, I do, I know?
Speaker 1: Ceiling The Shawna Gunks are a mountain range in the
Speaker 1: Catskills just outside of New York City. Shockley conquered a
Speaker 1: particularly challenging rock formation there and immediately they named it
Speaker 1: after him. Literally, there is no mountain he cannot climb.
Speaker 1: There's a really wonderful biography of Shockley written some years
Speaker 1: ago by Joel Shirkin, Broken Genius, which begins with the sentence,
Speaker 1: I believe that William Shockley was, in terms of practical
Speaker 1: impact on the world, one of the most important scientists
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century. And then Shirkin goes on to
Speaker 1: convince you why that's true. And here's the strange thing.
Speaker 1: The most compelling chapter of the book is not the
Speaker 1: part about Shockley's role in the invention of the transistor
Speaker 1: arguably one of the one or two most important innovations
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century. No, it's the chapter on what
Speaker 1: Sharkley did during the Second World War. It's insane. Basically,
Speaker 1: he's working at Bell Labs, then the premiere industry research
Speaker 1: and development organization in the world, and the government comes
Speaker 1: to him just before the war and says, hey, we're
Speaker 1: doing some interesting things with uranium. Do you think it
Speaker 1: might someday be possible to generate power from nuclear fuel.
Speaker 1: Two months later, Shockley comes back and says, here you go,
Speaker 1: this is how you do it. Work gets around that
Speaker 1: there's this genius in New Jersey, and so he signs
Speaker 1: on as the kind of problem solver in chief with
Speaker 1: the Secretary of War. He gets an official pass the
Speaker 1: government that allows him to board any commercial flight, and
Speaker 1: over the course of the Second World War he flies
Speaker 1: all around the world solving problems. The Navy says, we're
Speaker 1: having trouble hitting German submarines with underwater explosives. Can you help.
Speaker 1: Within two months, Shokli has increased their hit rate by
Speaker 1: five hundred percent. Shirkin estimates that Shockley's ideas about protecting
Speaker 1: the Navy's ships saved thousands of lives in the North Atlantic.
Speaker 1: Some of you may remember the series we did at
Speaker 1: Revisionist History about Curtis le May's fire bombing campaign of
Speaker 1: Japan at the end of the Second World War. Who
Speaker 1: flew to the South Pacific to teach bombing cruise about
Speaker 1: how to use radar during night attacks. Shockley, I could
Speaker 1: go on. He's the guy who writes one of the
Speaker 1: crucial memos proving that many, many more millions of lives
Speaker 1: would be lost if America invaded Japan at the end
Speaker 1: of the Second World War, then if it dropped the
Speaker 1: atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the war ends.
Speaker 1: The Pentagon won't let him go. They've never met anyone
Speaker 1: like him before. Then he helps invent the transistor, wins
Speaker 1: the Nobel Prize, has the idea to start the first
Speaker 1: the original computer age startup, and Chris crosses America, convincing
Speaker 1: one brilliant mind after another to join his new venture.
Speaker 1: This dynamic genius walks into the labs of twenty somethings
Speaker 1: graduate students across the country and announces, I am Shockley.
Speaker 1: I am here representing the future. Here's the physicist Victor
Speaker 1: Jones remembering his first contact with Shockley. Everyone, by the way,
Speaker 1: who met Shockley remembers the first time they met Shockley.
Speaker 7: I was saying my working talks in the lab, but
Speaker 7: Shockley said, why don't you go get cleaned up and
Speaker 7: we'll go off for lunch. And we walked for lunch
Speaker 7: at the farewea hotel for a for a starry graduates.
Speaker 7: It was a bit of a shock, but it was
Speaker 7: the probably the most intense after the physically I had
Speaker 7: them quite a long time.
Speaker 1: They talked for seven hours. Then Shockley was off to
Speaker 1: jump on a plane or a train to recruit another
Speaker 1: young talent. Here is Jay Last, another of Shockley's best
Speaker 1: and brightest. In an interview with the historian David Brock.
Speaker 8: Yeah, personally visited me at MIT and I was calling
Speaker 8: him some of the problems I was having with my
Speaker 8: doctoral work and why I can just figure it out
Speaker 8: in the second really just an unbelievable mind. So that
Speaker 8: must have impressed you greatly, yes.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And.
Speaker 9: So then.
Speaker 8: Then I went down to visit him and another visiting
Speaker 8: Washington at the Cosmos Club and sitting down and join
Speaker 8: me for breakfast as I took a night trained down
Speaker 8: on there, and here was sitting the table with like
Speaker 8: Admiral Rickover.
Speaker 10: Man of har Boys, everybody I've ever heard about, it
Speaker 10: was sitting at that table having breakfast with Shockley, and
Speaker 10: so it was quite overwelted, quiet, overwhelmed.
Speaker 1: Admiral Rickover was one of the most famous military figures
Speaker 1: of his day, the pioneer of nuclear propulsion. Vanavar Bush was,
Speaker 1: and there's no better way to put it, the king
Speaker 1: of American science at the time. That was just breakfast.
Speaker 1: There are countless stories like this. Here's a young physicist
Speaker 1: named Julius Blank who Shockley summoned to meet him at
Speaker 1: Newark Airport between flights.
Speaker 9: Did he describe to you then or we're early on
Speaker 9: in the in the whole conversation about what his what
Speaker 9: he wanted to do with Shockley's semiconductor.
Speaker 11: Really, I didn't think you knew he was, just he
Speaker 11: was his name, Ross's Silicon would work focus on silicon
Speaker 11: and in ways to make devices out of it. They
Speaker 11: weren't sure whether they were going to use, whether they're
Speaker 11: gonna do alloy or diffusion. They were exploring to find
Speaker 11: on what the best way he was and they didn't
Speaker 11: even know what to make just to make it a
Speaker 11: transistor with silicon.
Speaker 1: At the time, most people were trying to make computer
Speaker 1: chips out of something called germanium, which is far inferior
Speaker 1: to silicon. Not to mention that germanium valley doesn't sound
Speaker 1: nearly as glamorous. Shockley was like, no, no, I have
Speaker 1: a better idea. But and this is a crucial butt.
Speaker 1: Why is his biography called broken Genius? Because there's another
Speaker 1: side to Shockley. There always is, isn't there. It shows
Speaker 1: up early. He's an impossible child. He bites his parents,
Speaker 1: breaks things, throws tantrums. Once he fires the stone at
Speaker 1: the docks and hits the dog squarely between the eyes,
Speaker 1: that temper never goes away. He's called grandiose. He turns
Speaker 1: on the charm when he's recruiting all those brilliant young
Speaker 1: scientists to join his startup in Mountain View, but once
Speaker 1: they arrived, they quickly realize he's a monster. He's controlling paranoid.
Speaker 1: Here's Harry Cello, one of Shockley's earliest tires.
Speaker 9: What was the initial contact.
Speaker 12: The initial contact was an invitation to come and talk
Speaker 12: to him, okay, and he told me about who he
Speaker 12: was and just get acquainted. But what he didn't tell
Speaker 12: me was what I had to go through before I
Speaker 12: could be accepted, and that was three days with intense
Speaker 12: psychological examinations. And that's a story practically in itself. I mean,
Speaker 12: I can went weekends, I couldn't go from work. So
Speaker 12: I went on Saturdays and Sundays, three successive weekends, and
Speaker 12: went through a battery of psychological tess You wouldn't believe.
Speaker 1: Shockley forced every one of his recruits to take Ruschach tests,
Speaker 1: the thematic op perception to brain teasers, imagined a tennis
Speaker 1: tournament with one hundred and twenty seven entrants, blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: He wanted to make sure they were smart enough to
Speaker 1: work for him, but not smarter than him.
Speaker 12: And the reason for those test is we probably already know,
Speaker 12: was that he did not trust the behavior of the
Speaker 12: scientists and that he had already run across or felt
Speaker 12: he had run across. It was a reflection of the
Speaker 12: trouble he was beginning to have with his senior scientists.
Speaker 1: Once Shockley's secretary cut herself on a pin that was
Speaker 1: sticking in a door, Shockley was convinced someone had deliberately
Speaker 1: put it there, in an attempt to injure him. As
Speaker 1: he opened the door, he confronted his staff. They denied it,
Speaker 1: so he tried to ship everyone up to San Francisco
Speaker 1: to take a light detector test.
Speaker 13: Roberts later on was the one who solved the famous
Speaker 13: episode of the pin which you probably heard about.
Speaker 1: Roberts another of Shockley's best and brightest.
Speaker 13: Oh the push Yeah, the push pin that Shockley felt
Speaker 13: somebody at place to try to get him, and Roberts
Speaker 13: simply took the pin out of the wall, stuck and
Speaker 13: under the microscope, and so was a thumbtack which had
Speaker 13: broken off.
Speaker 11: Shockley never believed.
Speaker 1: That this is why, in fact, Shockley Semon Conductor ends
Speaker 1: up spawning so many other companies. Shockley brings the world's
Speaker 1: computer geniuses to Mountain View, and then after just a year,
Speaker 1: eight of Shockley's most brilliant hires decide enough is enough
Speaker 1: and leave En Masse to start other companies. From that
Speaker 1: point on, they're known as the Traitorous Eight, and the
Speaker 1: reason they start their new companies in the Santa Clara Valley,
Speaker 1: by the way, as opposed to going back to the
Speaker 1: East Coast, is that they've all bought houses in Palo Alto,
Speaker 1: which is something that someone in their twenties could do
Speaker 1: back then, if you can imagine that.
Speaker 5: Well, one thing that.
Speaker 8: Shockley told me a story, and I could see it
Speaker 8: was more than a joke to him. It was something
Speaker 8: fairly serious.
Speaker 14: It was about a fellow in a mental institution that's
Speaker 14: looking out through the mars and sees a truck driving
Speaker 14: under an underpass and a truck gets stuck and they
Speaker 14: can figure out how to get the truck out, and
Speaker 14: the guy in asylum shouts, I will just let the
Speaker 14: air out of the tires a little bit, and then
Speaker 14: he pushed it through and he said, well, how's the
Speaker 14: guy in a mental institution figure that out?
Speaker 8: And the guy said, I may be crazy, but I'm
Speaker 8: not stupid. And I could see the sort of attention
Speaker 8: to his voice to me is telling me. And he
Speaker 8: told that story twice, so I could tell I could
Speaker 8: see something that he was thinking along these lines that.
Speaker 14: With his brilliancy, he had some very serious other problems.
Speaker 1: Oh yes he did. By the way, we're about to
Speaker 1: talk about suicide and mental health difficulties.
Speaker 5: So let me tell you what I think some of
Speaker 5: the foundations of his personality might have been.
Speaker 1: Back on the couch with doctor Herschenfelder.
Speaker 5: Number one, the genius level, intellectual endowment. Number two, the
Speaker 5: infusion of his mother's approval, encouragement, or that for developing
Speaker 5: those muscles. Number three. One of the reasons she homeschooled
Speaker 5: him was because he had uncontrollable temper tantrums. Now, what's
Speaker 5: that about. Lots of kids have temper trans rooms, but
Speaker 5: it doesn't they're not to that degree that it keeps
Speaker 5: them out of school at least for some period of time.
Speaker 5: So what I put that together with is again speculation
Speaker 5: of how as he got older he became more and
Speaker 5: more weird. After he was such a brilliant scientist inventor
Speaker 5: of the transistor, he became a really nutty racist, coming
Speaker 5: up with all sorts of what I would call delusional
Speaker 5: thinking about race. When I put that all together, I
Speaker 5: come up with a bipolar disorder, Oh wow, which showed
Speaker 5: itself early with this uncontrollable aggression and showed itself later
Speaker 5: with paranoid thinking.
Speaker 1: I left this part out. Over the last twenty years
Speaker 1: of his life, Shockley becomes a full on eugenicist who
Speaker 1: uses his celebrity to mount an offensive and increasingly embarrassing campaign.
Speaker 1: He wants the government to pay people who he considers
Speaker 1: to be of inferior genetic stock not to have children,
Speaker 1: by which he means black people. This is why Shockley's
Speaker 1: role as the father of Silicon Valley hasn't given him
Speaker 1: the enduring celebrity of his mid century peers like say
Speaker 1: Linus Pauling or Richard Feynman, because he completely goes off
Speaker 1: the rails. Even Shockley ceiling, that legendary rock climb in
Speaker 1: the Shaunagunks eventually gets renamed. You know about Shockley's suicide attempt,
Speaker 1: I do not, okay, which was more kind of interesting.
Speaker 1: It's when his first marriage is on the rocks and
Speaker 1: he plays Russian Roulette and writes out a suicide note
Speaker 1: which he then was put in a safe and was
Speaker 1: discovered upon his death, in which he, you know, explains
Speaker 1: that this was the only course of action he felt,
Speaker 1: and he does. He puts the gun to his head
Speaker 1: and spins the bins, the cylinder and the revolver and
Speaker 1: pulls a trigger and survives. So you know, this was
Speaker 1: a man prone to extremes. Shockley's suicide note, by the way,
Speaker 1: is so Shockley, and so heartbreaking. It's written to his
Speaker 1: wife Jene. Dear Gene, I am sorry that I that
Speaker 1: I can no longer go on. Most of my life
Speaker 1: I have felt that the world was not a pleasant place,
Speaker 1: and that people were not a very admirable form of life.
Speaker 1: I find that I am particularly dissatisfied with myself, and
Speaker 1: that most of my actions are the consequence of motives
Speaker 1: of which I am ashamed. Most people do not feel
Speaker 1: this way, I am sure. Consequently, I must regard myself
Speaker 1: as less well suited than most to carry on with
Speaker 1: life and to develop the proper attitudes in our children.
Speaker 1: I see no reason to believe other than that I
Speaker 1: shall continually become worse in these regards as time passes.
Speaker 1: I hope you have better luck in the future. Shockley's
Speaker 1: marriage to Jeanne was always rocky. It's clear he did
Speaker 1: not consider her his equal, but who was. He didn't
Speaker 1: even think the best and the brightest to be convinced
Speaker 1: to join him on San Antonio Road were his equal.
Speaker 1: He grew disenchanted with his brilliant hires, and he was forced,
Speaker 1: over the rest of his life to watch his proteges
Speaker 1: go on to become Silicon Valley, multi millionaires and billionaires. Intel,
Speaker 1: the biggest chip maker in the world, was founded by
Speaker 1: Robert Neiss and Gordon Moore. Nois and Moore were brought
Speaker 1: to the Santa Clair Valley by Shockley, and Noise and
Speaker 1: Moore abandoned Shockley. He spent his final years giving crazy
Speaker 1: lectures on college campuses in favor of eugenics. An isolated
Speaker 1: and reviled figure, but he still had mom. May Bradford Shokley.
Speaker 1: Boxes and boxes of their letters sit in the Stanford
Speaker 1: Library Archives. Shockley inviting his mother to join him on
Speaker 1: a trip, May giving her son stock tips. Two emotionally
Speaker 1: repressed geniuses communicating the best way they know how in short,
Speaker 1: concise notes. Here was Shockley running to his mother sometime
Speaker 1: in the early nineteen fifties, at a time when he
Speaker 1: here is to have suffered something like a nervous breakdown.
Speaker 1: The letter begins, Dear May, he always called his mother
Speaker 1: by her first name. To bring you up to date,
Speaker 1: I am planning to leave the Washington job between the
Speaker 1: tenth of July and the tenth of August. Gene and
Speaker 1: I are planning a divorce. No particular hard feelings. I hope,
Speaker 1: but we do not get along. I am also probably
Speaker 1: leaving Bell Labs currently. It is my intention to start
Speaker 1: a company of my own, just to be clear. In
Speaker 1: three sentences, in the first paragraph of a two page
Speaker 1: letter to his mom, Shockley A tells her that the
Speaker 1: work with the Pentagon that has defined his life since
Speaker 1: the outbreak of the Second World Boar is over. B
Speaker 1: He's leaving his job at Bell Labs, where he has
Speaker 1: worked since getting his pH d almost twenty years before c.
Speaker 1: He intends to start a new company, which will, of
Speaker 1: course prove to be the most important startup in the
Speaker 1: history of startups. And d oh, by the way, he's
Speaker 1: divorcing his wife of twenty years, with whom he has
Speaker 1: three children. Then next paragraph he changes the subject. May
Speaker 1: writes back, dear Bill, your letter quote filled me with
Speaker 1: sadness and helplessness. But be assured that always you have
Speaker 1: my loyalty, sympathy and affection, and never any questions asked,
Speaker 1: my loyalty and affection, and never any questions asked. That's it,
Speaker 1: That's all she needs to say, and then she changes
Speaker 1: the subject. They are forever bound together, peas in a pod.
Speaker 1: A little bit later, Shockley wins a nobel who does
Speaker 1: he send a telegram to immediately Mom? Of course, congratulations
Speaker 1: on being the mother of a nobel laureate. And you
Speaker 1: can feel her heart burst, can't you? To the extent
Speaker 1: at least that her heart could burst because her prediction
Speaker 1: about her eight year old Vunderkin has come true. The
Speaker 1: only heritage I cared to leave to Billy is the
Speaker 1: feeling of force and the joy of responsibility for setting
Speaker 1: the world right on something. The telegram is addressed by
Speaker 1: the way to missus W. H. Shockley to sixty one
Speaker 1: Waverley Street, Palo Alto. Let me read that to you
Speaker 1: again in case you missed it, to sixty one Waverley Street,
Speaker 1: Palo Alto, California. William Sharckley's mother, May Shockley lived in
Speaker 1: Palo Alto. You could walk from her house to three
Speaker 1: ninety one San Antonio Road, where Shockley so mysteriously chose
Speaker 1: to launch his revolution. Why did the Santa Clara Valley
Speaker 1: become the birthplace of the computer age because someone wanted
Speaker 1: to be close to Mom. So let's now turn to
Speaker 1: what interests me the most, which is this whole episode
Speaker 1: is an attempt to make sense of this hugely consequential
Speaker 1: decision Shockley makes, which is to cite his new enterprise,
Speaker 1: Shock Elapse in Mountain View, Palo Alto. Basically and rationally,
Speaker 1: it makes no sense. The last place you would start
Speaker 1: a semiconductric company if you irrational in nineteen fifty six
Speaker 1: is Palo Alto. And the only thing that's in Palo
Speaker 1: Alto is his mom. Oh is that all? Well?
Speaker 5: I'm reminded of a paper I read years ago, and
Speaker 5: I can't remember where it was, But a couple of
Speaker 5: psychologists started studying the histories of virtuoso pianists and violinists,
Speaker 5: and they found one thing in common throughout all of them,
Speaker 5: and only one thing, which is that when they were
Speaker 5: young children, when they were practicing, their mothers sat with them.
Speaker 5: Oh really, yeah, really, Now, that doesn't mean if your
Speaker 5: mother sits with you, you're going to turn into a
Speaker 5: yasha hiphex because you also have to have the gift.
Speaker 5: But your mother sitting with you does a lot to
Speaker 5: bring out that gift. Yeah, to win her approval, to
Speaker 5: win her admiration.
Speaker 1: Wait, Philips is so lovely. So here we have a
Speaker 1: man making the biggest taking the biggest risk of his career.
Speaker 1: He's just won the Nobel and he's putting it all
Speaker 1: on the line to start to strike out from his
Speaker 1: own on his own, leaving Bell Labs the most aim
Speaker 1: as well funded. He's leaving all that behind and get
Speaker 1: a setup shop in a little garage with a bunch
Speaker 1: of people who he's convinced to come and join him.
Speaker 1: And you're saying he needs his mother on the piano
Speaker 1: bench beside him.
Speaker 5: I'm also saying that people with this kind of a
Speaker 5: disorder are extremely impulsive. Often they don't think it out clearly.
Speaker 5: But I'm also saying that maybe this was a spark
Speaker 5: of genius that he knew, for whatever reason, that Palo
Speaker 5: Alto was the place to have this new beginning.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but that the specific psychological function of needing to
Speaker 1: be near his mother as he takes this enormous step
Speaker 1: into the unknown. Right, that's that's not trivial.
Speaker 5: No, No, is your mother trivial in your life? No, no,
Speaker 5: man minus not even.
Speaker 1: We construct a history of the greatest technological revolution of
Speaker 1: our time, and we build our theory out of macro forces, institutions,
Speaker 1: structural advantages. We look for a grand logic, a reason
Speaker 1: big enough to match the magnitude of the outcome. But
Speaker 1: there is no grand logic. There's just an aging widow
Speaker 1: living on a quiet street in Paloualdo who wanted her
Speaker 1: golden boy next to her, and the golden boy himself
Speaker 1: stretched to the limit by his own demons, who needed
Speaker 1: her next to him. Why in when we come to
Speaker 1: do a formal accounting for something like this, are we
Speaker 1: so allergic to the personal explanation.
Speaker 5: Because we want to ignore it because that would apply
Speaker 5: to us also, and we want to paint a rational picture. Sure,
Speaker 5: we're in Palo Alto because of somebody's mother. This was
Speaker 5: Freud's biggest struggle. This is why he was not accepted
Speaker 5: in eighteen ninety five and why he is still vilified
Speaker 5: today because people don't like to think about their irrational side,
Speaker 5: their unconscious side, the fact that yeah, we're smart, we're rational,
Speaker 5: we do all of these various things, but we also
Speaker 5: have an unconscious which is full of sexuality and aggression.
Speaker 5: And who in the right mind would want to think
Speaker 5: about that.
Speaker 1: The shrine at three ninety one San Antonio Road is incomplete?
Speaker 1: Can we fix it?
Speaker 10: Please?
Speaker 1: Maybe in time for next Mother's Day. In the middle
Speaker 1: of the massive reas search campuses, the miles and miles
Speaker 1: of office buildings, the coders and engineers and technological wizards
Speaker 1: hunched over their laptops. We need a proper monument, A
Speaker 1: statue of May Bradford Shockley, front and center, on her horse,
Speaker 1: gun in hand, watching over her little boy, the grandmother
Speaker 1: of Silicon Valley. This episode of Revisionist History was produced
Speaker 1: by Tally Emlin, Ben Nadaph Haffrey, Kiara Powell, and Jacob Smith,
Speaker 1: editing by Peter Clowney and Sarah Nix, original scoring by
Speaker 1: Luis Garra, fact checking by Arthur Gompertz, mastering by Jake Gorsky,
Speaker 1: and engineering by Nina Lawrence. I'm Malcolm Glamo.