1) Inventors were John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley.

2) Shockley, a very competitive and sometimes infuriating man, was determined to make his imprint on discovery.

3) The last century greatest invention let Shockley obtain the Nobel physics prize in 1956.

4) Backed by private venture capital, the eight quit Shockley and founded Fairchild Semiconductor, a signal moment in the emergence of California's "Silicon Valley."

5) He once worked with William Shockley, who was then at Fairchild Semiconductor.

6) Terman similarly helped woo William Shockley to the Valley of Heart's Delight, promising him a flow of top-notch students eager to work with, and learn from,[http:///shockley.html] a leading physicist.

7) William Shockley was probably named by the same people that write Batman comics, because he invented the transistor.

8) William Bradford Shockley was born in London, where his father, a mining engineer, and mother, a mineral surveyor, were on a business assignment.

9) It was Shockley who brought the silicon to Silicon Valley.

10) Not content with his lot at Bell Labs, Shockley set out to capitalize on his invention.

11) Shockley and his team figured out how to accomplish this trick.

12) The "traitorous eight," as Shockley described them, lucked out by attracting the attention of Arthur Rock, an East Coast investor.

13) Shockley, credited as a co-inventor of the transistor in 1947 (he was then with Bell Labs), selected Mountain View, California, as the new home for his silicon-based semiconductor start-up.

14) For some reason, the public responded negatively to this, forcing Shockley to, uh, pull out, so to speak.

15) In February 1956, with financing from Beckman Instruments Inc. , he founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory with the goal of developing and producing a silicon transistor.

16) They were two of the "traitorous eight," a group that left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to begin their own rival company.

17) Three actually participated but none admitted it except for Shockley, who also added that the Nobel winners that refused to donate should be ashamed.