Shockley Labs

In 1956 William Shockley moved to Mountain View, CA to start Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. Shockley was a physicist and researcher at Bell Labs in New York where he co-developed the first transistor.

His labs in Mountain View was the start of the semiconductor industry in Santa Clara Valley. Shockley’s paranoia and poor management style led to The Traitorous Eight who left Shockley Labs and went on to start 65 new businesses; including Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce who left to start Fairchild and then Intel.

The original Shockley Labs building was torn down on April 3, 2015. It was most recently a grocery store and fruit stand. Here’s the video of it being torn down. Good-bye Shockley Labs thanks for the original spark!

This is pretty much the reason I’m doing this project, to document and record some of the historic places involved in creating Silicon Valley. I got lucky I stopped by to shoot Shockley Labs on a lunch break and found that they are tearing it down. If I was a day later it would already have been gone, as it is, I wasn’t able to capture the original building.