Papers, 1897-1922

Scope and content:

Series includes a bound volume of roughly 100 carbon copies of correspondence dating from 1905 to 1922, written by W. H. Shockley from places such as Paris, France; London, England; St. Petersburg, Ivdell, and Bogoslovsk, Russia; Palo Alto, California, and Reno, Nevada. The majority of the correspondence relates to Shockley's work as a mining engineer, but there are also several personal letters to his wife and friends, correspondence relating to personal finances, short drafts of articles on mining in Russia, and notes from a correspondence course on the "Training of Children." The volume also contains several diary entries from 1922 and notes on the Kluchi mines in Russia. Four letters are in German.

Also in the series is a set of three very small watercolor portraits of unidentified women, perhaps painted by Shockley's wife, May Bradford Shockley, who was an accomplished artist in addition to being a mining surveyor, an unusual career for a woman at the time.

A manuscript notebook from Shockley's travels in India is housed in this series but more fully described in the India Photographs Series.

Other Shockley family papers, including material relating to May Shockley and the Shockley's son, William B. Shockley, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1956 for his work on transistors, can be found at Stanford University's Special Collections Library in California. Photographs of W.H. Shockley and his Nevada family home can be found in the Walter F. Shockley Collection at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

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