Biography|Gordon Moore — 391 San Antonio Road, Where Shockley Hired a Chemist

People treat 391 San Antonio Road as a plaque about Silicon Valley in the abstract.

Gordon Moore walked into the original shed here as an employee.

In 1956 William Shockley, already a Nobel laureate for the transistor, opened Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory at this Mountain View address with backing from Arnold Beckman.

Moore left Johns Hopkins to join the staff.

The Science History Institute records his assignment: the solid-state processes that diffuse tiny impurities, or dopants, into silicon.

Britannica dates the return to California to 1956 and puts the laboratory first in Palo Alto in some summaries; the working address that IEEE later marked is 391 San Antonio Road, Mountain View.

Shockley's management lasted about a year and a half.

Moore and seven colleagues resigned in 1957 after asking the company to hire a professional manager and being refused.

Those eight men formed Fairchild Semiconductor that October.

The original Shockley building later served as a produce market.

It was demolished in the mid-2010s.

What stands now is a later office block that keeps the number 391 and a sidewalk monument of oversized packaged devices — a 2N696 transistor and Shockley diodes — plus two IEEE Milestone plaques.

One plaque names this lot the birthplace of Silicon Valley, 1956.

The other, on the opposite face, names Moore's Law, 1965, even though that article was written at Fairchild, not in this room.

The pin is the monument at the sidewalk, not an occupied private house.

Photo: Dicklyon, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons