WASHINGTON. Today, July 5, is the anniversary of a technological marvel – the invention of the first practical electric transistor 74 years ago. It was the size of a person’s palm. Today, the GF100 computer graphics card contains roughly 3 billion transistors crammed together on a tiny silicon chip. Digital technology – computers to cellphones – would be impossible without all those little devices amplifying and switching electronic signals and power. It was the first door opening onto Silicon Valley. And it has a past steeped in academic racism from William Shockley (Silicon Valley’s Godfather) and the woke Harvard academic Claira Janover
The man who invented Silicon Valley
The first transistor of 1947. Wikipedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Replica-of-first-transistor.jpg.
Bell Lab researchers, William Shockley Jr., John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain won the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for their revolutionary invention. It’s unveiling in 1947 marks the beginning of what would become Silicon Valley.
At a time when mobs tear down statues of Confederate generals and American Founders to erase the memory of racism, there remains the William Shockley problem. His invention, which permeates every aspect of our technologically-dependent lives, is the product of a vehement racist.
Racism masquerading as science
William Shockley appears on “Tony Brown’s Journal” with host Tony Brown in 1974. PBS screen capture.
Appearing in 1974 on the PBS program “Tony Brown’s Journal,” Shockley said:
“My research leads me inescapably to the opinion that the major cause of the American Negro’s intellectual and social deficits is hereditary and racial genetic in origin and thus not remediable to a major degree by practical improvements in environment.”
Host Tony Brown, an African American, noted that Shockley’s views claiming “Black people are genetically inferior” were made without “the benefit of any formal background in genetics.”
When Brown likened the Nobel laureate’s racial views to the eugenics theories postulated by Nazi Germany, Shockley countered,
“Uh, eugenic programs, uh, are not inconceivable, they’re not inhumane.”
Shockley somehow forgot the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
The ups and downs of the Liberal Racism Rollercoaster
During the 1970s, Shockley proposed America institute a voluntary “Sterilization Bonus Plan” designed to “reduce the number of [Black] babies who don’t get a fair shake from their parental dice up.” (Silicon Valley’s First Founder Was Its Worst)
Ironically, Shockley was briefly in the running for a Stanford University study of “gifted children” in 1921. But the study’s lead investigator, Professor Lewis Terman, rejected young Shockley because he found the boy’s 129 IQ too low.
Biographers say Shockley never got over the slight.
Educated idiots
But what is old and discredited is new again. For example, a high IQ Harvard University graduate, Claira Janover, took to TikTok and announced in a viral video that she had her fill of people paraphrasing the sentiments of the martyred Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Harvard’s ‘Joan of Arc,’ Claira Janover, Burns Herself at the Stake)
“The next person that has the sheer nerve, the sheer intitled caucasity [audacity of white people] to say, ‘All lives matter,” I’m gonna stab you. I’m gonna stab you. And while you’re struggling and bleeding out, I’m gonna show you my paper cut and say, ‘My cut matters too.’”
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Albert Einstein. Photo: Library of Congress via Wikipedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Albert_Einstein_Head.jpg.
The controversy generated by her pro-Black Lives Matter video ended up getting her fired from the job she “worked really hard to get.” She could not believe someone of her high IQ and woke racist ideology would be affected so adversely.
The racist views of William Shockley Jr. and the weepy Claira Janover is reminiscent of an old advertisement for a hair salon. Under a photo of world-renowned physicist Albert Einstein, his hair exploding in all directions like an atomic blast, the tagline reads:
“A bad haircut can make anyone look dumb.”
Just like the racist notions of those woke idiots who think themselves, well, smart.
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*Top Image: From left: John Bardeen, William Shockley and Walter Brattain, the inventors of the transistor, 1948. Photo: AT&T via Wikipedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bardeen_Shockley_Brattain_1948.JPG.*
