Inquiring into Archetypes

Leslie Berlin. The Man behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. xi + 402 pp. $30

Joel N. Shurkin. Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age. New York: Macmillan, 2006. ix + 378 pp. $27.95.

Reviewed by David C. Brock

Robert Noyce and William Shockley represent distinct archetypes of the successful technologist: the mad scientist and the charismatic bad boy. Two recent books mix biography and history of technology to create accessible, scholarly studies of these two archetypal figures from the early days of Silicon Valley. The unhinged inventor is ubiquitous and of older vintage; the charming rule breaker has enjoyed a more recent, dot-com related boost (think Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google). Leslie Berlin sets Noyce—inventor of the planar integrated circuit and cofounder of Intel—as the first in a long line charismatic Silicon Valley bad boys. Joel Shurkin places Shockley—the inventor of the junction transistor at Bell Labs and the founder of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory—as Silicon Valley’s originating mad scientist (a self-defeating one in the vein of Dr. Frankenstein). In cradle-to-grave narratives, the biographers set out to explain these archetypes by recovering rich detail about their subjects’ private lives, their technical achievements, and the processes by which they became icons.

Both books are pleasurable reads. While Shurkin employs more evocative language than Berlin’s measured expression, both narratives carry the reader along with them, conveying with rich detail the intrinsic interest of their subjects’ lives and the importance of their technical contributions. Berlin conducted dozens of interviews in the course of her research on Noyce, and Shurkin moved into Shockley’s home office to wade through a vast collection of personal and professional materials. For their depth of research, both biographies should serve as standard references on their subjects.

Shockley and Noyce were solid-state physicists, but their inventions were deeply chemical and illustrate the inextricable links between semiconductor electronics and chemical and materials science—part of what I have called the “chemical history of electronics.” Shockley junction transistor was formed by chemically altering layers of semiconductor material. Noyce’s silicon planar integrated circuit relied on the chemical properties of silicon’s natural oxide.

Notably, both innovations were produced in industrial contexts. Bell Labs (where Shockley devised the junction transistor) may have shared some features with a university research setting, but it was an industrial R&D organization. Likewise, Fairchild Semiconductor, where Noyce formulated his concept of the planar integrated circuit, was an early Silicon Valley start-up. Historians often paint fundamental developments as the natural and nearly exclusive province of the university laboratory. Shockley and Noyce’s stories provide a tonic to this repetitive strain.

The stories also give a twist to the concept of innovation. Often innovation and discovery are conceptualized as events or processes in which the unknown becomes known. The situations were different for the junction transistor and the planar integrated circuit: they were developed in races toward somewhat-known goals that had yet to be realized. The concept of a solid-state transistor and the idea that an entire circuit could be fashioned from a single block of material both preexisted and helped to motivate their realization in the transistor and the integrated circuit. This made the inventions instantly recognizable to the technical community: there was an “it” that the inventors had finally “done.”

In connection to the theme of innovation as a race, both Shurkin and Berlin identify their subjects as extremely competitive. The authors could have done more with this trait to interpret the scientists’ careers or their rise to iconic status. Nonetheless, Shurkin’s Broken Genius is refreshingly liberated in its attempts to fit psychological diagnoses to Shockley’s troubling behavior as a scientist, manager, and public intellectual. Unfortunately, Shurkin gives perhaps too many diagnoses. While Broken Genius grants the reader a satisfying portrait of Shockley the person, the treatment of Shockley’s technical contributions stands on shakier ground. There are several clumsy typos and odd factual errors. There are inaccurate descriptions and half-wrong names in the section about which I am most knowledgeable, on the relationship between Shockley Semiconductor and its parent, Beckman Instruments. I was left wondering what other details were scrambled elsewhere.

At the other end of the spectrum, Berlin’s exquisitely factual and wonderfully referenced work gives her readers a solid understanding of Noyce’s technical and business contributions, but is reticent in its interpretation of Noyce as a person. Berlin captures how Noyce’s iconic image as an inspirational, charming, and reckless preacher’s son functioned in developing Silicon Valley, but does not provide a satisfying grasp of the human being behind the myth. After a close study of these valuable and rewarding texts, I wondered just what Shockley did in a technical sense—the essence of his contribution—and puzzled over who Noyce was to have made such accomplishments.