some history

FTFA:

Noyce said, "The work had been done elsewhere [by Leo Esaki] and was published shortly thereafter." He had mentioned it in the first place only because he thought the way his boss had handled Noyce's tunnel diode efforts in 1956 "may be instructive in how not to motivate people."

Noyce's boss at that time was William B. Shockley, the brilliant, mercurial, ambitious, autocratic, and eccentric physicist. [. . .] Shockley had started Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1955 with the self-proclaimed goal of making a million dollars and seeing his name in The Wall Street Journal. [. . .] The lab was not equipped to do anything profitable with Noyce's thoughts, and besides, Shockley was a fiercely competitive man who resented his employees' pursuing ideas that he had not personally placed on their research agendas. . . But there was one important difference between Noyce's and Esaki's work. Noyce only predicted the drop in current (the evidence of tunneling) would occur. Esaki, who actually built a device to demonstrate his ideas, showed that it would.

Nice! Thanks for that. Ed