Name May Shockley | ||
Early life
May Bradford Shockley (1879–1977) was born Cora May Wheeler, 1879 in Moberly, Missouri. Cora’s mother Sally Jane divorced architect Nicholas H. Wheeler and remarried S. K. Bradford, a mining surveyor. Cora was adopted by her stepfather and changed her name to May Bradford. May Bradford Shockley graduated from high school in Missouri and in 1898 she moved to California to attend Stanford University where she studied art under Bolton Brown and then continued in Paris under Richard Miller. She graduated from Stanford University in 1902 with a degree in Art and Mathematics, one of the first women to do so.
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Adulthood
During her time at Stanford, her father moved to Tonopah, Nevada and initiated a partnership with a surveyor to search for gold in Nevada. Shockley graduated from Stanford and began teaching while caring for her ailing mother. In 1904, Shockley’s father found his business burned to the ground and his partner gone from the area. Shockley left her life as an educator to move to Tonopah to help her father. She entered into a partnership with her father and did drafting on the side. She had a natural talent as a surveyor and applied for the Deputy U.S. Mineral Surveyor position. She received the appointment in Nevada, and later in California, at a time when the profession was open only to men.
She become the first woman in the U.S. to be appointed a deputy mineral surveyor (in both Nevada and California) by the U.S, Surveyor General.
In 1906, Shockley and her father closed their partnership and Shockley left for a tour of Europe. While in Europe she met a mining engineer, William H. Shockley. The two were married in London and later moved back to the United States. Their only child, William Bradford Shockley, was born in London on February 13, 1910. He would go on to invent the transistor, win the Nobel Prize in Physics, and found Shockley Semiconductor, one of the original companies that collectively became known as Silicon Valley.
Later in life, May Shockley became a very successful painter, exhibiting her work in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Pasadena, Santa Barbara, New York and Washington. Mrs. Herbert Hoover sponsored her exhibit in the National Arts Club in 1922; her paintings were in the Lincoln bedroom at the White House dining the Hoover administration. She and her husband had befriended the Hoovers while living in Palo Alto as neighbors.
A few years were spent in Hollywood during the 1930s, and shortly after World War Two erupted she returned to Palo Alto where she remained until her death. Shockley was inspired by the Santa Clara Valley and painted many landscapes of that area as well as a few still lifes. An oil painter until the 1940s, she then switched to watercolor. She was a charter member of the Palo Alto Art Club.
Shockley died on March 7, 1977.