The traitorous eight was a group of eight employees who left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1957 to found Fairchild Semiconductor. By 1956, William Shockley had recruited a group of young Ph.D. graduates with the goal to develop and produce new semiconductor devices. While Shockley had received a Nobel Prize in Physics and was an experienced researcher and teacher, his management of the group was authoritarian and unpopular. This was accentuated by Shockley's research focus not proving fruitful. After the demand for Shockley to be replaced was rebuffed, the eight left to form their own company. Shockley described their leaving as a "betrayal." The eight who left Shockley Semiconductor were Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts. In August 1957, they reached an agreement with Sherman Fairchild, and on September 18, 1957, they formed Fairchild Semiconductor. The newly founded Fairchild Semiconductor soon grew into a leader in the semiconductor industry. In 1960, it became an incubator of Silicon Valley and was directly or indirectly involved in the creation of dozens of corporations, including Intel and AMD. These many spin-off companies came to be known as "Fairchildren."
Initiation
In the winter of 1954–1955, William Shockley, an inventor of the transistor and a visiting professor at Stanford University, decided to establish his own mass production of advanced transistors and Shockley diodes. He found a sponsor in Raytheon, but Raytheon discontinued the project after a month. In August 1955, Shockley turned for advice to the financier Arnold Beckman, the owner of Beckman Instruments. Shockley needed one million dollars (equivalent to $12 million in 2025). Beckman knew that Shockley had no chance in the business, but believed that Shockley's new inventions would be beneficial for his own company and did not want to give them to his competitors. Accordingly, Beckman agreed to create and fund a laboratory under the condition that its discoveries should be brought to mass production within two years. The new department of Beckman Instruments took the name Shockley Semi-Conductor Laboratories (the hyphen was conventional in those years). During 1955, Beckman and Shockley signed the deal, bought licenses on all necessary patents for $25,000, and selected the location in Mountain View, near Palo Alto, California. Though Shockley did recruit four PhD physicists, William W. Happ (from Raytheon Corporation) George Smoot Horsley and Leopoldo B. Valdes (both from Bell Labs), and Richard Victor Jones (a fresh Berkeley graduate), the location provided limited enticement for new employees. The vast majority of semiconductor-related companies and professionals were based on the East Coast, so Shockley posted ads in The New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune. Early respondents included Sheldon Roberts of Dow Chemical, Robert Noyce of Philco, and Jay Last, a former intern of Beckman Instruments. The newspaper campaign brought some three hundred responses, and fifteen people, including Gordon Moore and David Allison, Shockley himself recruited at a meeting of the American Physical Society. Selection continued throughout 1956. Shockley was a proponent of social technologies (which later led him to eugenics) and asked each candidate to pass a psychological test, followed by an interview. Blank, Last, Moore, Noyce, and Roberts started working in April–May, and Kleiner, Grinich, and Hoerni came during the summer. By September 1956, the lab had 32 employees, including Shockley. Each successful candidate had to negotiate his salary with Shockley. Kleiner, Noyce, and Roberts settled for $1,000 per month; the less-experienced Last got $675. Hoerni did not bother about his payment. Shockley set his own salary at $2,500 and made all salaries accessible to all employees.
The members of the future traitorous eight were aged between 26 (Last) and 33 (Kleiner), and six of them held PhDs. Hoerni was an experienced scientist and gifted manager, and, according to Bo Lojek, matched Shockley in intellect. Only Noyce was involved in semiconductor research, and only Grinich had experience in electronics.
Research strategy Throughout 1956, most members of the lab were assembling and tuning the equipment, and "pure scientists" Hoerni and Noyce carried out individual applied research. Shockley refused to hire technical staff, believing that his scientists should be able to handle all technological processes. After resettlement, he focused on fine-tuning Shockley diodes for mass production, and five employees, led by Noyce, continued the work on a field effect transistor for Beckman Instruments. Shockley refused to work on bipolar transistors, which later was proven a strategic mistake because the work on Shockley diodes took so much effort that the produced devices were commercial failures. According to Noyce and Moore, as well as David Brock and Joel Shurkin, the shift from bipolar transistors to Shockley diodes was unexpected. Shockley initially planned to work on the mass production of diffusion bipolar transistors, but then set up a "secret project" on Shockley diodes, and in 1957 stopped all works on bipolar transistors. The reasons for this turn are unknown. According to Beckman's biographer, Shockley regarded his diode as an interesting scientific problem and chose it neglecting Beckman's commercial interests. Bo Lojek, based on the archives of Shockley, believes that Shockley Labs never worked on bipolar transistors; that Shockley diodes were Shockley and Beckman's original target, for which Beckman Instruments received military R&D contracts; and that Shockley diodes could have found widespread use in telephony if Shockley had improved their reliability.
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