Initiation
In the winter of 1954–1955, William Shockley, an inventor of the transistor and a visiting professor at Stanford University, decided to establish his own mass production of advanced transistors and Shockley diodes. He found a sponsor in Raytheon, but the project was discontinued after a month. In August 1955, Shockley turned for advice to the financier Arnold Beckman, the owner of Beckman Instruments. Shockley needed one million dollars. Beckman knew that Shockley had no chance in the business, but believed that the new inventions of Shockley would be beneficial for his own company and did not want to give them to his competitors. Therefore, Beckman agreed to create and fund a laboratory, under the condition that its discoveries should be brought to mass production within two years.
The new department of Beckman Instruments was named Shockley Semi-Conductor Laboratories (the hyphen was conventional in those years). During 1955, Beckman and Shockley signed the deal, and bought all necessary patents for 25 thousand dollars. and selected the location in Mountain View, near Palo Alto, California. The place was not very successful: the colleagues of Shockley at Bell Labs and RCA refused to move to a rural place with no long-distance phone. The vast majority of semiconductor-related companies and professionals were based on the East Coast, thus Shockley posted ads in The New York Times and New York Herald Tribune. Among the first respondents were Sheldon Roberts of Dow Chemical, Robert Noyce of Philco and Jay Last, a former intern of Beckman Instruments. The newspaper campaign had brought some three hundred responses, and fifteen people, including Gordon Moore and David Allison, Shockley recruited himself at a meeting of the American Physical Society.
Selection continued throughout 1956. Shockley was addicted to social technologies, which later led him to eugenics, and asked each candidate to pass a psychological test in New York, followed by an interview.
Blank, Last, Moore, Noyce and Roberts started working in April–May, and Kleiner, Grinich and Hoernie came during the summer. By September 1956, the lab had 32 employees, including Shockley. Each successful candidate had to negotiate his salary with Shockley. Kleiner, Noyce and Roberts settled for one thousand dollars per month; less experienced Last got 675 dollars, whereas Hoernie did not bother about his payment. Shockley set his own salary at 2,500 dollars and made all payrolls accessible to all employees. Two choices of Shockley later appeared to be mistakes: William Happ was insufficiently competent for the work, whereas technologist Dean Knapic forged his university degree and certificate of military service, and later brought Shockley's technologies to competitors.
| Traitorous eight in 1956: education and work experience | ||
|---|---|---|
| Name and birth year | Degree and education | Work experience |
|
1925 |
Mechanical engineer. BA from City College (New York, 1950). | Engineer at Babcock and Wilcox (1950–1952);. Designer at Western Electric, Kearny, New Jersey (1952–1956). |
|
1924 |
Electronics engineer. PhD from Stanford University (1953). | Engineer at SRI International (1953–1956 ), design of computer and TV circuits.. |
|
1924 |
Physicist. PhD from the University of Geneva (1950) and Cambridge University (1952). | Researcher in crystallography and solid state physics at the Faculty of Chemistry at Caltech (1952–1956) with publications in Nature and Physical Review |
|
1923 |
Mechanical engineer. MA from the University of New York (1950). | Designed naval artillery and industrial machinery. Together with Blank worked at Western Electric, where he was also teaching evening courses.. |
|
1929 |
Physicist. PhD from MIT (1956) | No practical experience |
|
1929 |
Physical chemist. PhD from the California Institute of Technology (1954). | Studied gas spectra of ballistic rockets at John Hopkins University.. |
|
1927 |
Physicist. PhD from MIT (1953). | Researcher at Philco 1953–1956, working on germanium transistors.. |
|
1926 |
Metallurgist. PhD from MIT (1952). | Between 1952 and 1956 worked at the Naval Research Laboratory and Dow Chemical. |
The members of the traitorous eight were aged between 26 (Last) and 33 (Kleiner); six of them held a PhD. Hoerni was an experienced scientist and gifted manager, and, according to Bo Lojek, matched Shockley in intellect. Only Noyce was involved in semiconductor research, and only Grinich had experience in electronics.
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