William Shockley, The Co-Inventor Of The Transistor

William Shockley shared the invention of the transistor, won a Nobel Prize for it, and started the chain of events that turned a stretch of California orchards into Silicon Valley. The device he helped create is the physical foundation of all modern computing, and understanding it is genuinely part of understanding the hardware being built to run quantum algorithms. The reason a quantum publication records his work is direct rather than decorative. A transistor is a quantum device, the semiconductor industry it created is the industry that fabricates quantum processors, and in the silicon-qubit approach the qubit and the transistor are near neighbours on the same wafer. The line from Shockley’s junction transistor to a modern quantum machine runs through six decades of engineering, and it is worth tracing. Shockley co-invented the transistor. He shared the 1956 Nobel Prize with Bardeen and Brattain, and his junction transistor became the commercially dominant design. The transistor is a quantum device. It works because electrons in a semiconductor obey the same quantum mechanics of electrons in a solid that a silicon qubit is built on, though a qubit goes further and exploits superposition and entanglement that a transistor never uses. He started Silicon…