Chicken or egg

On 24 February, Adolf Goetzberger, former director of the Fraunhofer Institute ISE in Freiburg and photovoltaics pioneer, passed away. I happened to meet him in 2015 in Freiburg on the occasion of me receiving the J.J. Ebers Award from the IEEE Electron Devices Society in 2014, as the second German ever – Goetzberger was the first. He was honored for seminal contributions while working at Shockley Labs in Palo Alto and thereafter at Bell Labs in Murray Hill.

Goetzberger was among the second wave of employees at William Shockley’s firm, which is considered to have sprouted Silicon Valley after the “traitorous eight” had left the company in 1957 to found Fairchild Semiconductor. This was right after Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain had received the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for their demonstration of the first transistor in 1947/1948. Those years are currently being revisited as we celebrate the 75th anniversary of this major milestone of the industrial age.