Race to the Sky: The Wright Brothers Versus the United States Government Book

[NOTE: This review is not in a typical review format. It is simply a list of notes and oddball items I found in the book that were interesting or noteworthy. Some spoilers are included below.]

- This book focuses on the life & brilliance of William B. Shockley, father of the electronic age, Nobel Laureate in physics, Stanford professor, world-traveler, inventor of the "junction transistor", and supervisor & director of the two Bell Labs men (John Bardeen and Walter Brittain) who invented the very first transistor (a "point-contact transistor", for which Shockley mistakenly received credit though his name is not on the patent), and one of the first to document (along with co-author Fisk) how an atomic fission reaction might be produced, several years before the Manhattan Project completed its goal.

- The book follows Shockley's rise through Bell Labs, his undeniable usefulness to the Pentagon and to the US & British Armed Forces in improving bombing efficiency over German targets, and his contributions to what would later become known as the Science of Efficiency. His grasp of statistics and operational research (aka, operational efficiency) were stunning for the time.

- The book also catalogs his demise & self-destruction of his considerable reputation, when people began to misinterpret his intentions when he tried to demonstrate that intelligence is genetically factored and that by suggesting more research into this area is warranted. His talks on directing conception (or limiting/not-rewarding those with low IQs to reproduce) were taken to be programs for Nazi-styled eugenics and bigotry. Best summed up by Richard Goldsby, one of the few African-American scientists to take Shockley seriously, he declared Shockley was a racist but not a bigot. "He's a racist because he thinks he can make statistical prediction of behavior by population. He's not a bigot because he apparently does not despise blacks."

- Still, in his long-standing defense of eugenics, Shockley did much damage to himself by refusing to let go of such a lightning rod. He pushed for more studies into the field of intelligence and genetics and whether they were race-related, simply because statistically IQ tests have shown whites with more than a standard deviation uptick in intelligence over African-Americans. Opponents countered that these tests were unfair to the latter (which was later shown not to be the case). And no one is sure exactly what the IQ tests measure: is it truly intelligence? Or the ability to take these types of tests? It doesn't matter because Shockley was promoting that whites as a group/class were superior to blacks, but not on an individual basis (surely, there are many blacks and Hispanics and Orientals that are much smarter than your average Caucasian). Shockley wanted to draw everyone's attention to do more testing to explain the statistical samples he thought he saw. In the end, many scientists agreed with him but were afraid to say so publicly or doubted how the results would benefit our society. They also thought the results would be ripe for abuse (and considering the slack journalism at places like Fox News or right-wing & left-wing extremists groups, that's probably not a bad assumption).

- What did amaze me were the tidbits of data tossed out by the author regarding the Minnesota twins studies, famous for tracking down twins separated at birth, obviously influenced by radically different environments, yet demonstrating that so many of the twins were very much alike in intelligence and mannerisms. One pair of brothers, the "Jim Twins", Jim Springer & Jim Lewis, were "adopted by separate working-class families in Ohio as infants but never met. Both were found to like math, mechanical drawing and carpentry, and were bad spellers. Both worked part-time as sheriff's deputies; both vacationed in Florida, both drove Chevrolets; both had dogs named Toy; both married and divorced women named Linda and then married women named Betty; they named their sons James Allan and James Alan respectively; they had identical drinking and smoking habits; and they chewed their nails." [p.269].

- Interesting book, but at times, I felt the author oversold (via hyping & hinting in early chapters) the downfall of this obviously brilliant man. I thought most interesting of all was the demonstrated fact Shockley could not let anyone be smarter than himself, which greatly affected his management style, putting him in direct competition with his subordinates. Eventually, no one wanted to work with him, not even John Bardeen and Walter Brittain who developed the very first ("point-contact") transistor under him at Bell Labs. Even after Shockley left Bell Labs with such reprimands in mind to start his own company, Shockley Semiconductor, he still repeated the same career-ending blunders in his management of the "Traitorous Eight" which included Gordon E. Moore and Robert Noyce, the two founders of Intel in 1970, a dozen years after leaving Shockley Semiconductor. Moore was worth $8.8B by 1998; Shockley never made a cent for his company. And because Shockley's management style ran from paranoia to domineering to passive-aggressive, that's the biggest irony of his life: despite being brilliant, he was a horrible manager. He meddled constantly in the work affairs of his underlings, micro-managing at almost every turn. If he'd not forced Noyce & Moore & team to explore the "Shockley Diode" (which had little possibility of money-making applications), they instead could have done what Fairchild Semiconductor (then later, Intel) did. And Shockley could have been fabulously wealthy, something he'd always dreamed about.

- Shockley is credited with being the father of Silicon Valley because he grew up in Palo Alto and he wanted to build silicon-based transistors (otherwise, the area may have been named Germanium Valley'seriously!).