William Shockley (1910-89), American physicist, Nobel laureate, and coinventor of the transistor. William Bradford Shockley was born in London and worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1936 to 1956, when he became director of the Shockley Transistor Corp. in Palo Alto, California. He lectured at Stanford University beginning in 1958 and became professor of engineering science in 1963. His research on semiconductors led to the development of the transistor in 1948. For this research he shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics with his associates John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain. More recently he published several controversial papers arguing that intelligence is primarily hereditary.