236. Butterflies on History’s Collage (ft. Malcolm Harris)
This Machine Kills
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The Shockley Sr.
William Shockley Jr. grows up in Palo Alto, which at that time is the center of the IQ movement, the eugenics practice in the United States. He goes on to study at MIT and he becomes a great engineer, co-invents the at Bell Labs, the point contact transistor. But also during World War II serves as the sort of jack of all trades genius analyst for the Defense Department going around the war theater solving tricky math type problems. His first generation of silicon semiconductors all go into the Minuteman 1 nuclear missile, which then fulfills Shockley's prophecy about the economics of atomic bombing.
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