Because Shockley's aging mother lived in Palo Alto, Shockley wanted to establish the laboratory in nearby Mountain View, California. Frederick Terman, provost at Stanford University, offered the firm space in Stanford's new industrial park. The firm launched in February 1956, the same year that Shockley received the Nobel Prize in Physics along with John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect". Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory was the first establishment working on silicon semiconductor devices in what came to be known as Silicon Valley.