Talk 218

The LA times decided to list 50 persons who influenced the business world the most in this century. One of the listed was Bill Shockley, who came out of Caltech/MIT and Bell Labs, won the Nobel prize with two of his colleagues at Bell for the invention of the bipolar transistor. He was listed probably not because he was a great businessman, but for his invention that influenced the business world. He later went on to found the Shockley Semiconductor, which did not take off. He also taught at Stanford for awhile. One of his Controversial deeds was his subscription to the theory of genetic superiority of certain ethnic groups.

The junction transistor could not have been invented without the availability of ultrapure electronic grade Germanium as the starting semiconductor.

How did these Bell Labs physicists obtain this ultrapure Ge crystal ? That is because they got Bill Pfann working at Bell Labs at about the right time. Bill Pfann came from a very poor German neighborhood in NY city. Too poor to go to college, he went to work as a lab apprentice at Bell Labs after high school. His first job was to polish metals in the lab. As time went on, he started going to Cooper Union college in NYC on a parttime
basis, majoring in Chemical Engineering. He learned there was a chemical process called Zone Leveling which has to do with the separation of impurities from the matrix material. After graduation and continuing at Bell, he began to think how to purify crystalline materials such as metals and semiconductors. To make a long story short, he invented the Zone Refining technique to purify Ge and then Si to 5- or 6- 9 (99.9999% pure) ultra-purity, containing about 5E13 impurity atoms per cubic center of Si (or something like one foreigner in the entire nation of China, in terms of racial purity). With this ultrapure Ge, Shockley, Brittain, and Bardeen were able to dope the Ge and made that into a first junction transistor in 1947. For this reason there could not have been the invention of transistors without Bill Pfann who started as a lab apprentice at Bell Labs.

In 1968, I started looking for possible employment in preparation for graduation from grad school. In those days, I used to go to the Hearst Gymnasium to play badminton every Friday nights, the so-called co-recreation ( playing with girls). There were some good players around, I was not one of them for sure, but the girls were pretty nice. One night I met this somewhat heavy middle-age man who showed up to play. Never met him
before, but we got into a doubles game together. I don't remember whose side he was on or the winners of the game. After the game, we shook hands, but did not introduce ourselves.

Came Monday morning, I had this interview for a job at Bell Labs, and this heavyset badminton player was the interviewer from Bell Labs. His name was Bill Pfann. I did not know at the time who Bill Pfann was. Well, I ended up working at Bell Labs for about three years. He asked me what I wanted to do, I said something practical. He gave me two possibilities, one closer to what I was trained for, one I had no idea what it was. I leaned towards the second one, big mistake. Well, perhaps not.

I continued to value my friendship and in contact with Bill Pfann after Bell for years until he passed away. Every time I use anything electronic, I know Bill's invention and his soul are in there some place.