How the valley start-up was invented – Fifty years ago this weekend, silicon began its journey to the region that would one day be dubbed “Silicon Valley” in its honor. On Sept. 3, 1955, William Shockley — the Nobel Prize-winning co-inventor of the transistor who enticed Gordon Moore, Bob Noyce, Eugene Kleiner, and more than a dozen other of the world’s top young semiconductor researchers to come to the San Francisco Bay Area to work for him — signed the contract that launched the valley’s first all-silicon research lab-cum-company: Shockley Semiconductor Lab.

He chose the Bay Area as the home for his eponymous company because his mother lived in Palo Alto and because the electronics industry — seeded by World War II and nurtured by Frederick Terman at Stanford — had already begun to take root in the valley’s famously fertile soil.

More info on Schockley – Hubris and the Transistor

William Bradford Shockley clearly was one of the brightest scientists of the 20th century, yet he lived a life of noisy desperation.

He was a modern hero taken from one of the ancient Greek tragedies, caught in an age he helped invent. Like Orestes and Oedipus, Shockley was driven by the internal demon of hubris. Unlike Orestes and Oedipus, however, he never found redemption. Yet without him, you would probably be doing something less interesting right now.