Today in 1948, William Shockley filed the original patent for his grown-junction transistor, the first bipolar-junction transistor.
In 1956, Shockley received the Nobel Prize in Physics, together with two other transistor inventors at Bell Labs, John Bardeen and William Brattain. The same year, Shockley moved to Mountain View, California, to be close to his elderly mother, establishing Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. It was the first company working on silicon semiconductor devices in what came to be known as Silicon Valley.