Father of Silicon Valley

[paserbyp]

William Shockley (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley) shared the 1956 physics Nobel Prize with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain for research on semiconductors and the discovery of the transistor effect. Shockley was brilliant, driven, a dazzling problem solver, and may have known the secret of semiconductors more intimately than anybody else on the planet. His place in semiconductors more intimately than anybody else on the planet. His place in semiconductor history was cemented when he returned to his childhood home of Palo Alto and started Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories. Shockley Semiconductor, in the Genesis account of Silicon Valley, begat Fairchild, and Fairchild begat Intel, and Intel is still fertile.
But later in life, Shockley said that he hoped to be remembered not for his semiconductor work but for his work in a field outside his area of expertise - eugenics. He became convinced that dark-skinned people were intellectually inferior to light-skinned and pushed for policies and views that most educated people today would find repugnant. His views didn't have such a great reception then, either: He was vilified for them.