Semiconductor History | 391 San Antonio Road — The Apricot Shed Where Silicon Came West

Arnold Beckman and William Shockley announced their new company at a San Francisco luncheon in February 1956, in front of scientists, educators and the press.

The building Shockley then moved into was a Quonset-roofed shed on San Antonio Road in Mountain View that had been used for packing apricots, by the Computer History Museum's account of the site.

Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory was a division of Beckman Instruments, and its purpose was silicon at a moment when the industry ran on germanium and sat in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Texas.

He tried to hire his old Bell Labs colleagues first. None of them came, so he recruited young men instead, chemists and physicists in their twenties with no semiconductor track record and no reason to say no.

That recruiting is the reason this address matters, and it is close to the only thing here that went right.

Shockley won the Nobel Prize in November of the same year. He also ran the laboratory by lie-detector test and posted salaries on the wall, and he chased a four-layer diode that the market did not want.

On 18 September 1957 eight of the men he had recruited resigned together, and the trade press eventually gave them a nickname they never chose.

The nickname stuck harder than the facts. Its origin has never been pinned to a contemporary source, so it belongs in quotation marks as the label it became, not as anything anyone is known to have said in 1957.

Beckman sold the operation to Clevite in 1960 and the laboratory never turned a profit. Shockley went to Stanford to teach.

The shed outlived the company by decades as a stereo shop and then a produce market, and it was demolished in 2015.

What stands here now is a new office building that opened in 2018, with the address in large numerals on the glass.

The commemoration is on the pavement in front of it and is free to see at any hour: outsized sculptures of a transistor and two four-layer diodes standing on posts, a circuit diagram laid into the paving, and an IEEE Milestone plaque on the wall facing San Antonio Road.

Photo: Dicklyon, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (the new building at 391 San Antonio Road, December 2017).

Photo: Dicklyon, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (pavement sculpture of a Shockley four-layer diode).