The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (45 page)

One of those men was Gordon Moore. Eventually, Moore would become famous for cofounding the Intel Corporation and for making an observation about the rapid rate of progress in semiconductor engineering—namely, that the number of transistors that can fit on a silicon chip tends to double about every two years. This was not a law in any scientific sense, but after having been proven true for several decades it nevertheless became known as Moore’s law.
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In his recollection, working for Shockley was largely an exercise in frustration. In a
Time
magazine story he authored some years after the fact, Moore recalled that Shockley “extended his competitive nature even to his working relationships with the young physicists he supervised. Beyond that, he developed traits that we came to view as paranoid.” Shockley suspected his employees were purposely trying to undermine the semiconductor work; in response, he refused to let some of the scientists and engineers have access to the lab. “He viewed several trivial events as malicious and assigned blame. He felt
it necessary to check new results with his previous colleagues at Bell Labs, and he generally made it difficult for us to work together.” The young men under Shockley now understood what Bell Labs’ research staffers had long known: Shockley was an exceedingly poor manager, or perhaps something worse. In 1957, Moore and seven other colleagues, later nicknamed the “traitorous eight,” decided to leave Shockley’s company to form their own. Shockley felt that someone within the office was sabotaging the firm’s work. “The final straw,” Moore noted, had been when Shockley asked his entire staff to take polygraph tests.
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“One of Shockley’s characteristics,” his former Bell Labs colleague Ian Ross recalls, “was that he didn’t like to be ignored. He didn’t like people to reject his ideas. And that’s really what got him started on this unfortunate path that he ended up on.” The unfortunate path that Ross describes was not Shockley’s struggling transistor business, which was later sold to another company and was folded in the late 1960s. Rather, the path was Shockley’s near-total immersion, during the final decades of his life, into what he termed “dysgenics.” At some point between 1963 and 1964, Shockley came to the conclusion that the long-term health of the human race was imperiled by the reproductive tendencies of society’s least intelligent members. “The unfit,” he noted, “may increase faster in our population than ever was true in the past.” He believed that too many children hailed from these “inferior strains.”
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At first, he didn’t connect this perceived inferiority with race. But that would soon change.

There are varying explanations as to why Shockley became fixated on genetics and race. Some former colleagues speculate that a serious car accident in the early 1960s may have led indirectly to changes in cognition. It’s worth asking, however, whether Shockley’s fixation was merely an accentuation of beliefs he had long harbored. Fred Seitz, who accompanied Shockley on a cross-country car trip in 1932 from California to the East Coast, remarked that even as a young man, Shockley was warm to the idea that intellectual superiority should be rewarded with authority and influence. “He was inclined to believe that society should be governed by what one might regard as an intellectually elite group … rather than by majority decisions as in a democratic society.”
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Shockley maintained
a heightened interest in IQ scores all through his life. He would become notorious for screening some of the applicants at Shockley Semiconductor, in 1956 and 1957, through psychological and intelligence tests. But he had been interested in applying such tests to people he hired at Bell Labs well before that, perhaps as early as 1950. “It was at least a year, maybe two, after I started working for Shockley that he came up with the test idea,” recalls Walter Brown. “It was given by a psychologist in New Jersey, but I don’t actually remember where. It was essentially an IQ test. It did not have mathematical- or scientific-type problem-solving questions, but I believe there were logical-thinking questions. Shockley didn’t require me to take it, but posed it as an interesting effort he was making to try to quantify potential for creativity, or something like that, with the idea that a test of this kind might be of value in future hiring.” Several Bell Labs veterans recall that the difference between Shockley’s own scores and other Bell Labs employees was not significant. It must have been a blow to Shockley’s self-esteem.

In fact it was only a temporary setback. In Shockley’s case, the leap from his early question (How does intelligence translate into scientific creativity?) to his later question (How do genes influence intelligence?) was not especially controversial. But then came a more precarious leap: How does race determine intelligence? It was likely the case, as some of Shockley’s former colleagues contend, that he didn’t begin his effort out of any deep-seated bigotry. But it is almost certainly true that Shockley’s sensitivity to rejection led him in that direction.
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He would often say that his views on genetics were clarified when he read a news account in 1963 of a deli owner in San Francisco who was blinded by a teenager hired to throw acid in the owner’s face; the perpetrator, according to Shockley, was one of seventeen children borne by a woman with an IQ of 55. Whatever the precipitating event, as Shockley encountered increasing resistance to his views—they were first made public in a 1965 interview in the weekly newsmagazine
U.S. News & World Report—
it stoked the fires of his defiance. And after that, his opinions, though cloaked in scientific jargon and the rhetoric of statistical analysis, took a turn toward the grotesque.

All during 1966 and 1967, Shockley urged the National Academy of Sciences, the organization of America’s most distinguished scientists, to focus more deeply on the question of how heredity affects intelligence. In April 1968, at a meeting of the academy, Shockley charged that the country’s leading thinkers were showing a “lack of responsibility and courage” by not examining correlations of race and intelligence.
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He delivered a paper at the meeting as well. “An objective examination of relevant data,” he declared, “leads me inescapably to the opinion that the major deficit in Negro intellectual performance must be primarily of hereditary origin and thus relatively irremediable by practical improvements in environment.”
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He sent copies of the speech to Bill Baker, Jim Fisk, Mervin Kelly, and John Pierce.

By his own choice, Shockley then began transforming himself from the most esteemed solid-state physicist in the world to a fringe eugenicist. He was likewise starting to think that his work on genetics could become far more important than anything he had so far accomplished in his lifetime. Echoing the honorary language of the Nobel Prize, he told friends it was how he would now make “the greatest contribution to the benefit of man.”
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D
URING THIS INCENDIARY PERIOD
, Bell Labs hired Shockley back as a consultant. At the time he held an endowed chair at Stanford’s engineering school. He had already become the subject of student demonstrations. Shockley seemed to relish the attention. At the same time, it didn’t seem to detract from his abilities as an instructor. Students who were willing to take his physics class—sometimes he gave it in the living room of his own home—were fortunate to encounter one of the great college physics teachers of the twentieth century. The problem with this arrangement, at least to Shockley, was that his Stanford salary was modest. And so at about the time Shockley first went public with his views on genetics and intelligence, he began talking with his old friend at Bell Labs, Jack Morton, about coming back to earn some extra money. Years before, Morton had spearheaded the development of the transistor. The two men had a
great deal in common. Both were driven and competitive; both were also bullies, especially when confronted by an idea they disagreed with. During the early 1950s, Morton would often confide in Shockley, unloading his problems on the research physicist. Both men had reached a place in the Bell Labs hierarchy where it was clear that their personalities (and, for Morton, his drinking) precluded further advancement. But in the mid-1960s, as a Bell Labs vice president, Morton nevertheless wielded a certain amount of power. It likewise helped that Shockley’s old MIT friend Jim Fisk was now president of the Labs. In late 1965, Shockley secured a consultant deal.

The plan was that Shockley would advise Morton, several weeks a year, on device development. He was no longer a research man. During his periodic visits to the East Coast, Shockley would take a room in Summit, New Jersey, in a comfortable Tudor-style hotel known as the Summit Suburban. Visitors to the Labs offices in Murray Hill were often directed to stay there, and Bell Labs would pick up the tab. One week in the mid-1960s, Chuck Elmendorf—John Pierce’s old college friend—ran into Shockley at the Suburban. Elmendorf, too, was visiting the Murray Hill offices; his main job at the time was running a branch laboratory for Bell Labs in Massachusetts. The two men shared dinner in the hotel dining room. Years before the transistor was invented, Elmendorf had sat on Shockley’s living room couch while Shockley patiently tutored him on the principles of solid-state physics. Several years after that, Shockley had again tutored Elmendorf, this time on the principles of radar. Now, Elmendorf recalls, his old friend who at one time ate, slept, and breathed physics—a teacher who was “decent, wonderful, pleasant”—wanted only to talk about race and genetics. Like other colleagues from long ago, Elmendorf found Shockley both single-minded and intolerable.

Almost certainly the dinner conversation exemplified how Shockley seized every moment that he was not at the Bell Labs offices as an opportunity to discuss eugenics. The agreement he had struck with Morton stipulated that he would refrain from mixing his racial theories, which he pursued most of the year out of his home in California, with his development work at Bell Labs. It soon became clear, however, that Shockley
could barely abide by such an agreement. Indeed, after only a few years of consulting work at the Labs, he asked to scale back. Dysgenics was now his actual career; the main thrust of Shockley’s life from 1970 on was to attract attention to the idea. He had always enjoyed publicity, but now he actively courted the press, making sure that any speech or controversy he initiated—a suggestion, for instance, that the United States might begin a voluntary sterilization plan for those with low IQs—would be mentioned in the next day’s newspapers. He meanwhile began a systematic effort to record and catalog all his phone conversations and correspondence. Often he would ask journalists who sought to meet him to undergo a series of “pre-interview interviews”; sometimes, too, he would provide inquiring reporters with quizzes on science and statistical concepts and belittle their performance. His ultimate intention was to pass judgment on their abilities and intentions. He now carried a tape recorder everywhere he went. On occasion, he surreptitiously recorded conversations without the knowledge of the participants.

Shockley and his wife seemed well aware that there would be consequences to a life on the scientific fringe. “Someday,” Emma Shockley told the writer Rae Goodell in the late 1970s, “we may actually be terribly alone.”
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To a large extent this was already true. Shockley had become mostly estranged from the children of his first marriage. His friends in Palo Alto had distanced themselves, too. Fellow academics, and especially members of the National Academy, feared to be seen with him. His old friends at Bell Labs, meanwhile, were slipping away. Pierce and Shannon avoided contact with him. Jack Morton, Shockley’s sponsor at the Labs, died in December 1971, a tragedy that rattled Shockley. (Morton had been murdered following a disagreement at a New Jersey bar—his body was retrieved from his burning car, which had evidently been set alight by his attackers.) Shockley’s consulting job at Bell Labs ended not long after. Of Bell Labs’ Young Turks, perhaps his only remaining friend was Jim Fisk—and then Fisk died, too, after an illness and brief retirement, in 1980. In 1981, Shockley contacted Bill Baker, but not to reminisce. He was looking for funding—several hundred thousand dollars, according to Baker’s notes—for an organization Shockley had started
called FREED. The name stood for the Foundation for Research and Education on Eugenics and Dysgenics. Baker, who sat on the boards of numerous philanthropies and foundations, told him, “I can’t think of any source of funds.”
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The great tragedy of Bill Shockley’s life, Ian Ross remarks, was that he did almost nothing of scientific worth after leaving Bell Labs. Arguably, his successes were as a teacher and as an impresario of talent—that is, in assembling the team at Shockley Semiconductor that ultimately drove the success of America’s computer chip industry. “Had he stayed in that environment,” Ross says of Bell Labs, “it would have been a very different story.” With a larger enveloping group, in other words—with a slew of supervisors who understood how to compensate for his weaknesses, and a veritable army of technicians who could prepare semiconductor materials to exacting specifications—Shockley might not have been overcome by his poor management skills and defective judgment. As it was, his final years were a succession of serial embarrassments. He decided in his seventies to declare publicly, in the
Los Angeles Times
, that he had donated his sperm to a project that was attempting to create a sperm bank of Nobel Prize winners. When
Playboy
magazine asked him about it in a lengthy interview, he defended the idea; at least to him, a sperm bank of superachievers made perfect sense. When he was asked in the interview how his own children turned out, he replied, “In terms of my own capacities, my children represent a very significant regression. My first wife—their mother—had not as high an academic achievement standing as I had.”
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In 1982, he ran for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in California. He acknowledged that it was unlikely he would win. Mostly, he did it to air his racial theories. “My conscience will be clear if I give it a good try and succeed in getting this idea around,” he told the Associated Press.
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He received less than 1 percent of the vote.