Palo Alto. Shockley set about recruiting his first four PhD physicists: William W. Happ who had previously worked on semiconductor devices at Raytheon, George Smoot Horsley and Leopoldo B. Valdes from Bell Labs, and Richard Victor Jones, a recent Berkeley graduate. The Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory opened for business in a small commercial lot in nearby Mountain View in 1956. Initially he tried to hire more of his former workers from Bell Labs, but they were reticent to leave the east coast, then the center of most high-tech research. Instead, he assembled a team of young scientists and engineers, some from other parts of Bell Laboratories, and set about designing a new type of crystal-growth system that could produce single-crystal silicon boules, at that time a difficult prospect given silicon's high melting point. Shockley diodes While work on the transistors continued, Shockley hit upon the idea of using a four-layer device (transistors are three) that would have the novel quality of locking into the "on" or "off" state with no further control inputs. Similar circuits required several transistors, typically three, so for large switching networks the new diodes would greatly reduce complexity. The four-layer diode is now called the Shockley diode. Shockley became convinced that the new device would be just as important as the transistor, and kept the entire project secret, even within the company. This led to increasingly paranoid behavior; in one famed incident he was convinced that a secretary's cut finger was a plot to injure him and ordered lie detector tests on everyone in the company. This was combined with Shockley's vacillating management of the projects; sometimes he felt that getting the basic transistors into immediate production was paramount, and would de-emphasize the Shockley diode project in order to make the "perfect" production system. This upset many of the employees, and mini-rebellions became commonplace. Traitorous eight Eventually a group of the youngest employees – Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts – went over Shockley's head to Arnold Beckman, demanding that Shockley be replaced. Beckman initially appeared to agree with their demands, but over time made a series of decisions that supported Shockley. Fed up, the group broke ranks and sought support from Fairchild Camera and Instrument, an Eastern U.S. company with considerable military contracts. In 1957, Fairchild Semiconductor was started with plans for making silicon transistors.