Broken Genius: the rise and fall of William Shockley, creator of the electronic age Joel N Shurkin Palgrave Macmillan, 298pp, £19.99 ISBN 1403988153

William Shockley left two extraordinary legacies to posterity. One is the transistor, which is to the electronic world what cells are to the living one. The other is an archive based on the principle that nothing may be thrown away and everything must be filed. In the course of his investigations - which involved the cracking of two safes - Joel Shurkin found a note to General Foods about a Jello recipe, a wooden splinter that had destroyed one of the boy Shockley's dimples, and a suicide note. He did not, however, find any redeeming features. We can now be confident that William Shockley really was as detestable as he always appeared.

Shockley snatched opprobrium from the jaws of glory. In 1956 he shared the Nobel Prize for Physics for his role in the development of the transistor; in subsequent decades he became notorious for promoting the idea that black people were innately less intelligent than whites. He attempted to capitalise on his scientific success by launching an electronics company, but alienated his senior staff to the extent that they mutinied, dispersing to find fortunes under other banners. Although he thus has a claim to be the founder of Silicon Valley, it's a legacy that mocks him.

As far as this biography (Shockley's first) can establish, the only person who sees him as a great man is his second wife, who also seems to have been the only person with whom he formed a truly successful relationship. Shurkin devotes himself to narrative and is sparing with analysis, doubtless mindful of the feelings of the Shockley family, whose commitment to archiving prompts him to describe them as "in some ways both a biographer's delight and worst nightmare". But he doesn't spare details such as how Shockley devoted himself to helping find a cure for his first wife's cancer, and then informed her the marriage was over while she was still recovering; nor does he refrain from suggesting that Shockley's medical efforts were probably motivated more by their intellectual challenge than by concern for his spouse.

Perhaps they were also impelled by his drive to analyse and order all processes that came to his attention. One of the most interesting of the episodes in this book is the account of what Shockley did in the war, an intervention in the careers of many scientists that showed what they could achieve when applying themselves to unfamiliar problems in extraordinary circumstances. Shockley proved to be a modern manager ahead of his time, specialising in improving the efficiency of combat operations through performance review and cost-benefit analysis, which found the bombing of Germany to be "profitable".

Management was never enough for him, though. He always needed to be in control. A photograph issued by his postwar employer, Bell Telephone Laboratories, shows him as he wished to be seen, regally seated at a workbench with a colleague standing each side of him. But these colleagues, Walter Brattain and John Bardeen, had been the first to make a working transistor. Shockley manoeuvred to get a share of both the glory and the proceeds. Spurred by the disagreeable sensation of having been beaten to the breakthrough, he developed a more practical version of the device, starting it on the course of miniaturisation through which it has attained ubiquity.

Throughout his life, his nemesis was other people. In his latter years, his relations with them were epitomised by his use of a machine that not only recorded phone calls but destabilised the conversations by emitting a beep every ten seconds. In his wartime suicide note, filed away after he survived a round of Russian roulette, he had referred to his feeling that "people were not a very admirable form of life". He relied on his brilliance to convince himself of his superiority, and was upset by anything he perceived as a threat to his position. A job interviewee recalled how Shockley became enraged when he was given the right answer to a simple trick question.

The apparent non sequitur of Shockley's turn towards hereditarian psychology may make sense in this light. It was not enough for him to believe that his intelligence set him above those around him: his need for order drove him to insist that his position be generalised, with society as a whole ordered according to intelligence.

Today, hereditarian claims have secured a much firmer purchase in science - and in popular accounts such as Shurkin's - than they had by the time of Shockley's death in 1989. That is not part of Shockley's legacy. The hereditarian psychologist Arthur Jensen declared himself "amazed that someone as bright as he could have contributed so little over so long a span of time". Shockley's principal contribution was to his anti-hereditarian opponents, who could not have found a more repellent personification of the ideas they detested if they had cast the part themselves.

Marek Kohn's "A Reason for Everything: natural selection and the English imagination" is published by Faber & Faber

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