May Bradford Shockley

May Bradford Shockley (May 11, 1879 – March 7, 1977) was an American mineral surveyor and painter who became the first woman to hold the post of U.S. Deputy Mineral Surveyor in Nevada. Her artistic inspiration by the Santa Clara Valley ultimately contributed to that region becoming the technological hub known as Silicon Valley.

After studying drawing and mathematics at Stanford University, she joined her father in Tonopah, Nevada, where the two established a mining engineering firm. She received her appointment as a Deputy Mineral Surveyor in 1906, prior to a year of continuing her art education in Paris under the Impressionist painter Richard E. Miller. She returned to Tonopah in 1907, meeting William Hillman Shockley and marrying him the next year.

Her husband was a hobbyist botanist, and she assisted him in collecting plant specimens. They had a son, William Bradford Shockley, while living in London in 1910. The family returned to the United States and settled in Palo Alto, California. While there, May Bradford Shockley's art was acquired by their neighbor and friend Herbert Hoover, who displayed her work at the White House when he was later President of the United States.

Her son would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for co-inventing the transistor. He established Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California, to be near his widowed mother. This decision contributed to the region's development into Silicon Valley.

Early life and education Cora May Wheeler was born in Missouri on May 11, 1879, to a Mr. Wheeler and Sallie Wheeler. After her father abandoned the family, Cora May's mother managed a small boarding house in Sierra County, New Mexico Territory, when she met Seymour Kimball Bradford, a mining surveyor, and the two were engaged in 1884. Bradford and Wheeler married, after which Cora May began going by the name May Bradford. She grew up moving through the mining camps where her father worked in New Mexico, Colorado, and Oregon. There, she trained under the Impressionist painter Richard E. Miller.

The couple moved to Palo Alto, California, where they were neighbors and friends with Herbert and Lou Henry Hoover. While he was president of the United States, Herbert Hoover displayed one of Shockley's paintings in the White House.