In September 1955, a physicist who had spent nearly two decades at Bell Labs left to start a company of his own, and the deciding factor in where to put it was his ailing mother, who lived in Palo Alto. His backer, a chemist and instrument maker best known for inventing the pH meter, would have preferred a site near his own headquarters in Fullerton.
The lab’s first home fit the setting better than anyone planned. It was a shed in Mountain View that had previously been used to pack apricots for shipping. At the time, the valley’s economy still ran on orchards. Locals called it the Valley of Heart’s Delight, and apricots, prunes, and cherries covered far more acreage than anything electronic.
The physicist recruited a team he called the finest group of scientists ever assembled in one place, then spent the next two years driving most of them away. That December, months before his staff started leaving, he shared a Nobel Prize in Physics for work completed a decade earlier, at the same lab he had just quit.
The following September, eight of his researchers walked out and founded a company a few miles away that would go on to seed dozens of others. Their old boss never forgave them for it, and coined a lasting nickname for the group.
Name the company born out of the apricot shed and the nickname.
CLUES
His backer, chemist and instrument maker Arnold Beckman, would have preferred a site near his own headquarters in Fullerton, but the founder got his got his way.
TIL: Shockley - The man who flunked the test for gifted children