# William Shockley American physicist and co-inventor of the [[wiki/Transistor|transistor]] at [[wiki/Bell Labs|Bell Labs]] (1947), for which he shared the 1956 [[wiki/Nobel Prize|Nobel Prize]] in Physics with [[wiki/John Bardeen|John Bardeen]] and [[wiki/Walter Brattain|Walter Brattain]]. Shockley left Bell Labs in 1956 to found [[wiki/Shockley Semiconductor|Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory]] in [[wiki/Mountain View|Mountain View]], California — the act that physically located the semiconductor industry on the San Francisco Peninsula and gave [[wiki/Silicon Valley|Silicon Valley]] its name. His management failures triggered the defection of the [[wiki/Traitorous Eight|Traitorous Eight]], seeding the entire Silicon Valley ecosystem. His role is central to [[articles/Bell Labs and the Distributed Architecture of American Power|Bell Labs and the Distributed Architecture of American Power]].