by Tom Wolfe
Some of them, such as Noyce and Shockley, had gone East to graduate school at MIT, since it was the most prestigious engineering school in the United States. But MIT had proved to be a backwater … the sticks … when it came to the most advanced form of engineering, solid-state electronics. Grinnell College, with its one thousand students, had been years ahead of MIT. The picture had been the same on the other great frontier of technology in the second half of the twentieth century, namely, the space program. The engineers who fulfilled one of man’s most ancient dreams, that of traveling to the moon, came from the same background, the small towns of the Midwest and the West. After the triumph of Apollo 11, when Neil Armstrong and “Buzz” Aldrin became the first mortals to walk on the moon, NASA’s administrator, Tom Paine, happened to remark in conversation, “This was the triumph of the squares.” A reporter overheard him—and did the press ever have a time with that! But Paine had come up with a penetrating insight. As it says in the Book of Matthew, the last shall be first. It was engineers from the supposedly backward and narrow-minded boondocks who had provided not only the genius but also the passion and the daring that won the space race and carried out John F. Kennedy’s exhortation, back in 1961, to put a man on the moon “before this decade is out.” The passion and the daring of these engineers was as remarkable as their talent. Time after time they had to shake off the meddling hands of timid souls from back East. The contribution of MIT to Project Mercury was minus one. The minus one was Jerome Wiesner of the MIT electronic research lab, who was brought in by Kennedy as a special adviser to straighten out the space program when it seemed to be faltering early in 1961. Wiesner kept flinching when he saw what NASA’s boondockers were preparing to do. He tried to persuade Kennedy to forfeit the manned space race to the Soviets and concentrate instead on unmanned scientific missions. The boondockers of Project Mercury, starting with the project’s director, Bob Gilruth, an aeronautical engineer from Nashwauk, Minnesota, dodged Wiesner for months, like moonshiners evading a roadblock, until they got astronaut Alan Shepard launched on the first Mercury mission. Who had time to waste on players as behind the times as Jerome Wiesner and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology … out here on technology’s leading edge?
Just why was it that small-town boys from the Middle West dominated the engineering frontiers? Noyce concluded it was because in a small town you became a technician, a tinker, an engineer, and an inventor, by necessity.
“In a small town,” Noyce liked to say, “when something breaks down, you don’t wait around for a new part, because it’s not coming. You make it yourself.”
Yet in Grinnell necessity had been the least of the mothers of invention. There had been something else about Grinnell, something people Noyce’s age could feel but couldn’t name. It had to do with the fact that Grinnell had once been a religious community; not merely a town with a church but a town that was inseparable from the church. In Josiah Grinnell’s day most of the townspeople were devout Congregationalists, and the rest were smart enough to act as if they were. Anyone in Grinnell who aspired to the status of feedstore clerk or better joined the First Congregational Church. By the end of the Second World War educated people in Grinnell, and in all the Grinnells of the Middle West, had begun to drop this side of their history into a lake of amnesia. They gave in to the modern urge to be urbane. They themselves began to enjoy sniggering over Grant Wood’s American Gothic and Sherwood Anderson’s and Sinclair Lewis’s prose portraits of the Middle West. Once the amnesia set in, all they remembered from the old days was the austere moral codes, which in some cases still hung on. Josiah Grinnell’s real estate covenants prohibiting drinking, for example … Just imagine! How absurd it was to see these unburied bones of something that had once been strong and alive.
That something was Dissenting Protestantism itself. Oh, it had once been quite strong and very much alive! The passion—the exhilaration! —of those early days was what no one could any longer recall. To be a believing Protestant in a town such as Grinnell in the middle of the nineteenth century was to experience a spiritual ecstasy greater than any that the readers of Main Street or the viewers of American Gothic were likely to know in their lifetimes. Josiah Grinnell had gone to Iowa in 1854 to create nothing less than a City of Light. He was a New Englander who had given up on the East. He had founded the first Congregational church in Washington, D.C., and then defected from it when the congregation, mostly Southerners, objected to his antislavery views. He went to New York and met the famous editor of the New York Herald, Horace Greeley. It was while talking to Josiah Grinnell, who was then thirty-two and wondering what to do with his life, that Greeley uttered the words for which he would be remembered forever after: “Go west, young man, go west.” So Grinnell went to Iowa, and he and three friends bought up five thousand acres of land in order to start up a Congregational community the way he thought it should be done. A City of Light! The first thing he organized was the congregation. The second was the college. Oxford and Cambridge had started banning Dissenting Protestants in the seventeenth century; Dissenters founded their own schools and colleges. Grinnell became a champion of “free schools,” and it was largely thanks to him that Iowa had one of the first and best public school systems in the West. To this day Iowa has the highest literacy rate of any state. In the 1940s a bright youngster whose parents were not rich—such as Bob Noyce or his brother Donald—was far more likely to receive a superior education in Iowa than in Massachusetts.
And if he was extremely bright, if he seemed to have the quality known as genius, he was infinitely more likely to go into engineering in Iowa, or Illinois or Wisconsin, than anywhere in the East. Back East engineering was an unfashionable field. The East looked to Europe in matters of intellectual fashion, and in Europe the ancient aristocratic bias against manual labor lived on. Engineering was looked upon as nothing more than manual labor raised to the level of a science. There was “pure” science and there was engineering, which was merely practical. Back East engineers ranked, socially, below lawyers, doctors, Army colonels, Navy captains, English, history, biology, chemistry, and physics professors; and business executives. This piece of European snobbery had never reached Grinnell, Iowa, however.
Neither had the corollary piece of snobbery that said a scientist was lowering himself by going into commerce. Dissenting Protestants looked upon themselves as secular saints, men and women of God who did God’s work not as penurious monks and nuns but as successful workers in the everyday world. To be rich and successful was even better, and just as righteous. One of Josiah Grinnell’s main projects was to bring the Rock Island Railroad into Iowa. Many in his congregation became successful farmers of the gloriously fertile soil around Grinnell. But there was no sense of rich and poor. All the congregation opened up the virgin land in a common struggle out on the frontier. They had given up the comforts of the East … in order to create a City of Light in the name of the Lord. Every sacrifice, every privation, every denial of the pleasures of the flesh, brought them closer to that state of bliss in which the light of God shines forth from the apex of the soul. What were the momentary comforts and aristocratic poses of the East … compared to this? Where would the fleshpots back East be on that day when the heavens opened up and a light fell’round about them and a voice from on high said: “Why mockest thou me?” The light! The light! Who, if he had ever known that glorious light, if he had ever let his soul burst forth into that light, could ever mock these, my very seed, with a Main Street or an American Gothic! There, in Grinnell, reigned the passion that enabled men and women to settle the West in the nineteenth century against the most astonishing odds and in the face of overbearing hardships.
By the standards of St. Francis of Assisi or St. Jerome, who possessed nothing beyond the cloak of righteousness, Josiah Grinnell was a very secular saint indeed. He died a rich man. And Robert Noyce’s life was a great deal more secular than Josiah Grinnell’s. In a single decade, 1973—1983, Intel’s sales grew from $64
million a year to almost one billion. Noyce’s own holdings were worth an estimated four billion dollars. Noyce had wandered away from the church itself. He smoked. He smoked a lot. He took a drink when he felt like it. He had gotten a divorce. Nevertheless, when Noyce went west, he brought Grinnell with him … unaccountably sewn into the lining of his coat!
In the last stage of his career Josiah Grinnell had turned from the building of his community to broader matters affecting Iowa and the Middle West. In 1863 he became one of midland Iowa’s representatives in Congress. Likewise, in 1974 Noyce turned over the actual running of Intel to Gordon Moore and Andrew Grove and kicked himself upstairs to become chairman of the board. His major role became that of spokesman for the Silicon Valley and the electronic frontier itself. He became chairman of the Semiconductor Industry Association. He led the industry’s campaign to deal with the mounting competition from Japan. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in a White House ceremony in 1980. He was appointed to the University of California Board of Regents and inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1988 he moved to Austin, Texas, to assume a national role, just the way Josiah Grinnell had gone to Washington. He headed up Sematech, a consortium of fourteen semiconductor manufacturers who would work with the federal government to create an overwhelming and impregnable might for the United States in the age of computers—and put the Japanese in their place. Only Noyce had the stature—and the Gary Cooper gaze of command—to make so many VIPs fall in line at Sematech. He was hardly a famous man in the usual sense, however. He was practically unknown to the general public. But among those who followed the semiconductor industry he was a legend. He was certainly famous back East on Wall Street. When a reporter asked James Magid of the underwriting firm of L. F. Rothschild, Unterberg, Towbin about Noyce, he said, “Noyce is a national treasure.”
Oh yes! What a treasure indeed was the moral capital of the nineteenth century! Noyce happened to grow up in a family in which the long-forgotten light of Dissenting Protestantism still burned brightly. The tight!—the light at the apex of every human soul! Ironically, it was that long-forgotten light … from out of the churchy, blue-nosed sticks … that led the world into the twenty-first century, across the electronic grid and into space.
Surely the moral capital of the nineteenth century is by now all but completely spent. Robert Noyce’s was the last generation to have grown up in families where the light of Dissenting Protestantism existed in anything approaching a pure state. Noyce had an ineffable Dissenting Protestant charisma—charisma means literally a gift from God—but, like Josiah Grinnell, he was also mortal, although he didn’t look it. In 1988, when he went to Austin, he was sixty but still had the build of the Grinnell College intercollegiate swimmer he used to be. He had turned his back yards in Los Gatos and Austin into Olympic swimming venues where he worked out regularly. Every hair he ever had in his head was still nailed in, and none dared turn white. He also had tennis courts both places. He also still smoked. A lot. On Saturday evening, June 2, 1990, at home in Austin, he played his usual hard round of tennis. Sunday morning he woke up and dove into the pool for his morning swim. His left main heart artery closed forever, and he died within the hour. There was no funeral, no religious ceremony; his body was cremated. Huge nonreligious “memorial celebrations of his life”—the favorite secular sentimentalism of the day—were held in Austin and in San Jose, California, but they took on an inexplicably religious overtone. As the San Jose “celebration” ended, a pilot with a special FAA dispensation flew Noyce’s own Cessna Citation jet down low over the crowd, a moment that reminded everybody of some heroic military aviator’s funeral. Workmen released thousands of gas-filled red, white, and blue balloons that ascended from this earth to—where?—Heaven? The swarms of people on hand left with the mournful feeling that some sort of profound—dared they utter the word “spiritual”?—force had gone out of the life of the Silicon Valley.
Over the next ten years, as the Valley swelled with new people and new wealth, the name Noyce was quickly forgotten, and people who could expound upon algorithms and on-line trachoma would have drawn a blank on the term Congregationalist. And yet out in the Silicon Valley some sort of light shines still. People who run even the newest companies in the Valley repeat Noycisms with conviction and with relish—and without a clue as to where they came from. The young CEOs all say, “Datadyne is not a corporation, it’s a culture,” or “iLinx is not a corporation, it’s a society,” or “honeybear.com’s assets”—the latest vogue is for down-home nontech names—“honeybear.com’s assets aren’t hardware, they’re the software of the three hundred souls who work here.” They talk about the soul and spiritual vision as if it were the most natural subject in the world for a well-run company to be concerned about.
The day one of the Valley’s new firms, Eagle Computer, Inc., sprang its IPO, investors went for it like the answer to a dream. At the close of trading on the stock market, the company’s forty-year-old CEO, Dennis Barnhart, was suddenly worth 9 million. Four and a half hours later he and a pal took his Ferrari out for a little romp, hung their hides out over the edge, lost control on a curve in Los Gatos, and went through a guardrail, and Barnhart was killed. Naturally, that night people in the business could talk of very little else. One of the best-known CEOS in the Valley said, “It’s the dark side of the Force.” He said it without a trace of irony, and his friends nodded in contemplation. They had no term for it, but they knew exactly what Force he meant.
Digibabble, Fairy Dust, and the Human Anthill
The scene was the Suntory Museum, Osaka, Japan, in an auditorium so postmodern it made your teeth vibrate. In the audience were hundreds of Japanese art students. The occasion was the opening of a show of the work of four of the greatest American illustrators of the twentieth century: Seymour Chwast, Paul Davis, Milton Glaser, and James McMullan, the core of New York’s fabled Pushpin Studio. The show was titled Pushpin and Beyond: The Celebrated Studio That Transformed Graphic Design. Up on the stage, aglow with global fame, the Americans had every reason to feel terrific about themselves.
Seated facing them was an interpreter. The Suntory’s director began his introduction in Japanese, then paused for the interpreter’s English translation:
“Our guests today are a group of American artists from the Manual Age.”
Now the director was speaking again, but his American guests were no longer listening. They were too busy trying to process his opening line. The Manual Age … the Manual Age … The phrase ricocheted about inside their skulls … bounced off their pyramids of Betz, whistled through their corpora callosa, and lodged in the Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas of their brains.
All at once they got it. The hundreds of young Japanese staring at them from the auditorium seats saw them not as visionaries on the cutting edge … but as woolly old mammoths who had somehow wandered into the Suntory Museum from out of the mists of a Pliocene past … a lineup of relics unaccountably still living, still breathing, left over from … the Manual Age!
Marvelous. I wish I had known Japanese and could have talked to all those students as they scrutinized the primeval spectacle before them. They were children of the dawn of—need one spell it out?—the Digital Age. Manual, “freehand” illustrations? How brave of those old men to have persevered, having so little to work with. Here and now in the Digital Age illustrators used—what else?—the digital computer. Creating images from scratch? What a quaint old term, “from scratch,” and what a quaint old notion … In the Digital Age, illustrators “morphed” existing pictures into altered forms on the digital screen. The very concept of postmodernity was based on the universal use of the digital computer … whether one was morphing illustrations or synthesizing music or sending rocket probes into space or achieving, on the Internet, instantaneous communication and information retrieval among people all over the globe. The world had shrunk, shrinkwrapped in an electronic membrane. No person
on earth was more than six mouse clicks away from any other. The Digital Age was fast rendering national boundaries and city limits and other old geographical notions obsolete. Likewise, regional markets, labor pools, and industries. The world was now unified … online. There remained only one “region,” and its name was the Digital Universe.
Out of that fond belief has come the concept of convergence.
Or perhaps I should say out of that faith, since the origin of the concept is religious; Roman Catholic, to be specific. The term itself, “convergence,” as used here in the Digital Age, was coined by a Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Another ardent Roman Catholic, Marshall McLuhan, broadcast the message throughout the intellectual world and gave the Digital Universe its first and most memorable name: “the global village.” Thousands of dot-com dreamers are now busy amplifying the message without the faintest idea where it came from.
Teilhard de Chardin—usually referred to by the first part of his last name, Teilhard, pronounced TAY-yar—was one of those geniuses who, in Nietzsche’s phrase (and as in Nietzsche’s case), were doomed to be understood only after their deaths. Teilhard, died in 1955. It has taken the current Web mania, nearly half a century later, for this romantic figure’s theories to catch fire. Born in 1881, he was the second son among eleven children in the family of one of the richest landowners in France’s Auvergne region. As a young man he experienced three passionate callings: the priesthood, science, and Paris. He was the sort of worldly priest European hostesses at the turn of the century died for: tall, dark, and handsome, and aristocratic on top of that, with beautifully tailored black clerical suits and masculinity to burn. His athletic body and ruddy complexion he came by honestly, from the outdoor life he led as a paleontologist in archaeological digs all over the world. And the way that hard, lean, weathered face of his would break into a confidential smile when he met a pretty woman—by all accounts, every other woman in le monde swore she would be the one to separate this glamorous Jesuit from his vows.