Transcript
Introduction
"I believe that William Shockley was one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. He led the group at Bell Labs that created the seminal invention of the modern world: the transistor. Every home has thousands or even millions of transistors. World commerce totally depends on them as do health care, culture, defense, transportation and civilization in general. He was a key player in the development of the modern science of operations research.
"During the Second World War, he used statistics to show the Air Corps how to maximize its bombing efficiency and the Navy how to destroy more U-boats. His efforts won the National Medal of Merit, the highest possible civilian decoration. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He put the silicon in Silicon Valley and his failed company was the grandfather of all Silicon Valley companies.
"He was a tenured professor at Stanford University, was happily married and had all the money he needed to live happily, quietly and well. He chose not to. He instead set himself up for public ridicule and squandered his public reputation. He lost all of his friends. His oldest friend became his most potent enemy. He became a notorious scientific pariah. I wanted to know how that could happen. Why would a man as unquestionably brilliant as he knowingly and deliberately destroys himself?"
That was an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, The Creator of the Electronic Age and is written by Joel Shurkin. So the name William Shockley is not going to be new for longtime listeners. The most recently on -- back on Founders# 157 in the book The Innovators, he's in that book quite a bit, and I talked about him in the podcast. After that podcast came out, a listener sent me a message and said, "Hey, if you want to learn more about Shockley, there's actually a good biography on him." And he recommended reading this book.