The Man Behind the Microchip

by Leslie Berlin

  MUCH TO HIS RELIEF—“it’s almost become a family tradition now,” he explained—Bob Noyce was named valedictorian of his high school class. The honor surprised several of his friends, who knew Noyce was a good student, but not that good. They knew he took a class at the college, but not that he was the best student in the room; that he shoveled walks, but not that he had developed an elaborate contract system to entice clients. Noyce did not try or need to hide such facts from his friends. They simply never would have expected such things from him, the buddy one of them described as “bright but common.”31

  He spent the summer after graduation taking classes at Miami University of Ohio where Gaylord was undergoing his officer training. Noyce arrived at Miami a bit cocky from his end-of-year accomplishments. He told his math instructor that he was “getting a nice bit of review out of her course, even though [he] didn’t attend classes.”32

  Alone with his brother, Noyce’s world began telescoping far beyond rural Iowa. He saw his first opera, Verdi’s Aida, and was transfixed. He stayed up late talking with Gaylord and his friends about the atomic bomb that had recently devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He hitchhiked 200 miles to Gallipolis, Ohio, to visit Marianne Standing. He listened attentively to Gaylord’s stories about his trip to New York City, and swamped with the admixture of envy and insecurity that was his typical response to any of his brothers’ accomplishments, wrote to his parents: “So Gay has seen the Statue of Liberty, huh! Some day I may get to. I hope. I’d better stop dreaming.”33

  He began swimming for an hour every day and after watching three Miami divers flipping and twisting through the air, he decided he wanted to dive, too. “After landing flat on my back only twice, I perfected the technique,” he reported to his family. “Before I went home, I did both a half and a full gainer off the ten-foot board—Whoopee!”34

  He met with similar academic success. At the end of the summer, the head of the Physics Department made him a job offer: if Noyce would enroll in the fall, the department would place him on the faculty payroll and employ him as a lab assistant, a position traditionally reserved for graduate students. He would be expected to grade papers, teach a few class sessions, and explain experiments to other students—all while he was a freshman. The invitation pierced Noyce’s veneer of academic nonchalance. “My front teeth almost fell out,” he proudly wrote to his parents, sounding like the 17-year-old he was.35

  Noyce was slowly gathering experiences that would anchor his adult approach to life, which was not so much an approach as a headlong rush into any challenge with the unshakable assumption that he would emerge not only successful, but triumphant. If joining a college physics course as a high school senior meant finishing first in the class or getting an offer to teach, if dating meant snagging the most desirable girl in the school for your steady, and learning to dive meant turning full back flips off the platform’s edge within hours of climbing the board for the first time—well, why wouldn’t you come to think you could do almost anything?

  Noyce was tempted by the offer to teach at Miami but worried he might be just “another insignificant student” on the large campus. If, on the other hand, he attended Grinnell College, he would face no possibility of insignificance. He had already won the same prestigious scholarship earlier awarded to his brother Don. The college president, Samuel Stevens, was a family friend who personally congratulated Bob on his acceptance to Grinnell with a note that inadvertently encapsulated the best and worst aspects of life as a Noyce boy: “Your brothers before you have performed in a distinguished manner. You seem to have the ability to perform equally well. We expect great things from you.” At the end of the summer, Noyce decided to return to Grinnell for college.36

  Once on the Grinnell campus, Noyce hurled himself into a frenzy of activity. In addition to a full course load, he stuffed his waking hours with nightly bridge games, chorus practice, yearbook staff meetings, play rehearsals, and attendance at dozens of lectures and musical performances. Noyce starred in a campus radio melodrama that his parents, to their great delight, could pick up on a neighbor’s radio set. He approached dating with the same gusto that characterized everything he did. In his spare time, he plowed through the recently issued Smyth report on the atomic bomb, fascinated by the details of its technical development.37

  The GI Bill and the end of the war meant that the campus now teemed with veterans, but Noyce drew most of his friends from a more traditional group of freshmen—boys and girls just graduated from high school, most from churchgoing Iowa families that could afford to pay what was then one of the highest tuitions in the state. He immediately assumed a leadership role among this group, usually managing to convince even the most studious to take a break for a sandwich or a stroll past the girls’ dorms. “He never pushed himself forward at all,” recalled one of Noyce’s college roommates. “But why not follow him?”38

  Noyce’s father once wrote that in the same way toddlers thrive on juice and milk, Bob thrived on “adrenaline and gasoline.”39

  THE INTENSITY THAT NOYCE BROUGHT to his extracurricular activities extended to the classroom. He challenged himself to derive every formula he used in physics class rather than simply accepting the formulas written on the board as accurate. This was not easy work, even for Noyce, who declared himself “elated” after deriving the formula for determining the viscosity of a liquid. His electronics professor had him write his own exam and requested his help designing the circuits for his airplane models. His calculus professor asked him to teach a class based on the independent investigations Noyce had conducted into De Moivre’s theorem for calculating complex numbers. These academic accomplishments earned Noyce an invitation to join the campus honorary society and inspired a heartfelt note from his father, who wrote, “You won’t know till you have a son in college doing as good and grand work there as you are in Grinnell[,] how much satisfaction we are getting from reports of your good work.”40

  Such praise did not lessen Noyce’s constant comparison of himself to his brothers. When Gaylord was named to Phi Beta Kappa after only five semesters of college, Bob’s congratulations were tempered with doubt. “I’m just sorry that I’ve got such brothers to follow,” he wrote. “When and if I get the same, it will just be another key in the family.” As if to prove his own worth, he proceeded to describe in great detail how Grant Gale had asked him to help build an apparatus to study expansion and compression of metals.41

  Money was always an issue. “$5 in the bank, $4 in my pocket” was the state of his finances soon after his arrival at Grinnell. Noyce worked several jobs—go-fer in the campus post office (until a returning vet asked for the work), lifeguard during Sunday afternoon free swims, assistant in Grant Gale’s lab—but pleas for cash, accompanied by detailed accounts of where his last installment went, dominated many of his letters to his parents. Harriet Noyce, who never forgot that Bob once used his $19 savings to buy a pair of saddle shoes and a sweater rather than a bond during the war, thought him a spendthrift, particularly when it came to clothes and girls. She asked repeatedly about expenditures she found suspicious, including a check to an unnamed woman, whom Noyce, in great frustration, explained was simply the bank clerk who cashed the check, not a cause for worry.42

  In the second semester of his freshman year, Noyce decided he wanted a varsity letter from Grinnell. His small stature and lack of experience would handicap him in most sports, but he thought he had a shot in diving. The Grinnell College pool was primitive, a wood-frame building over a concrete hole and a wooden deck. The roof was so low that divers would have undoubtedly hit their heads on it had a ten-foot by twelve-foot hole not been cut into the area directly over the diving board and the roof raised some eight feet in this one spot. From the outside, this “diving well” looked a bit like a widow’s walk eight feet above the main roofline. Inside, a diver looking up from the board would have had the sense of peering up a short, broad chimney. When the team practiced, people in the pool or on the deck would see th
e diver leave the board, disappear into the chimney (where he would twist, flip, and turn) and then reappear shortly before he hit the water. The diving well was nerve wracking, but it gave an advantage to Grinnell divers. If they could dive up a chimney, everything else was pretty simple.43

  Every night before he fell asleep, Noyce would mentally rehearse each of his dives in slow motion until he could see himself executing them perfectly. He called this habit “envisioning myself at the next level,” and he carried it with him throughout his life. In his mind’s eye, he could always see himself achieving something more.44

  Two years after joining the diving team, Noyce won the 1948 Midwest Conference Diving Championship in Rockford, Illinois, defeating divers from Beloit, Carleton, Knox, and Monmouth colleges. He proceeded undefeated through the next season, when he lost the conference championship by two points. His parents were in the audience for this 1949 championship, and he worried that they were disappointed by his performance.45

  LIKE OTHER UNMARRIED STUDENTS at Grinnell, Noyce had been assigned to a residence hall in which he was to live for all four years of school. The halls functioned much like fraternities, complete with internal house governments and athletic, academic, and social competition with other houses. Every spring and fall, each hall hosted a party. In their zeal to create the most spectacular party—the better the celebration, the larger the pool of potential dates—residents often enhanced the décor with a few bales of hay or a stack of lumber “borrowed” from unsuspecting farmers or townfolk.

  Noyce lived in Clark Hall, which decided upon a Hawaiian luau theme for its spring house party a few weeks before the end of his junior year. Since Noyce knew the town of Grinnell especially well, he was assigned the task of liberating a young pig to be roasted upon a realistic looking spit.46

  Noyce accepted the assignment but most likely gave it little thought. He was contending with the direst news of his young life. His girlfriend was pregnant. He was the father. She was going to have an abortion. Whether Noyce encouraged her to have the operation, whether he offered to marry the young woman, how they paid for the procedure—these are all mysteries. What is known, however, is that Noyce was in an extremely agitated state the night he and a partner in crime downed a few drinks and set off to steal the pig for the luau.47

  They walked across the golf course behind campus, grabbed a suckling pig, and ran with it back to Clark Hall. His housemates decided to butcher the piglet in a third-floor shower. A frantically squealing animal, intoxicated young men with knives—the ruckus was such that students all over campus immediately knew something untoward was happening in Clark Hall. The administration, however, did not hear about it until the next day, when Noyce and his housemate repented and returned to the farm with an offer to pay for the pig, whose absence had not yet been noticed.

  It quickly became apparent that Noyce had not chosen a good farm to target. The farmer was the mayor of Grinnell, a no-nonsense man given to motivating his constituents through mild intimidation. He wanted to press charges. The college’s dean of personnel, a recently retired army colonel, was also inclined towards the harshest punishment possible; a few months later, he would expel another of Gale’s advisees for swearing at his housemother. Since the farm was outside the city limits, the county sheriff was called in.48

  Noyce’s previous exploits—tipping outhouses, lighting illegal fireworks—had been dismissed as boys-will-be-boys tomfoolery. Stealing a pig was a different matter entirely. It crossed the line Noyce had skirted throughout his high school years, for as the letter the dean sent home to Ralph and Harriet Noyce explained, “In the agricultural state of Iowa, stealing a domestic animal is a felony which carries a minimum penalty of a year in prison and a fine of one thousand dollars.” A prize pig could easily sell for $1,000, nearly three times Noyce’s annual college tuition.49

  Grant Gale and Grinnell College president Stevens were in a frenzy. Even without a criminal conviction, expulsion alone would have meant the end of the boys’ education. In 1948 no school would have accepted a student expelled from another, and Gale in particular could not bear the prospect of “losing Bob.” The two college representatives, both longtime residents of Grinnell and friends of the Noyces, brokered a compromise in which the college would compensate the farmer for his pig, and no charges would be pressed. The boys would be allowed to finish the few remaining days of their junior year but were suspended for the first semester of their senior year—exiled not only from the college, but from the town of Grinnell as well.

  After his sentence was handed down, Noyce fled. He hitchhiked to Sandwich, Illinois, where his parents and youngest brother had moved after Reverend Noyce had been asked to leave his job at the Congregational Conference. Bob Noyce returned to his parents a chastened soul, convinced he had brought disgrace on himself and his family. It must have come as a relief to discover that Harriet and Ralph Noyce were angrier at the farmer than at him. Reverend Noyce decried those “who are more concerned with hogs than they are with the problems of adolescence and youth’s efforts to find it[s] place in this terribly uncertain world that we adults are presenting to them.” He wrote an angry letter to the dean of men that pointedly concluded: “the rest of us will have to be the more ready to accept youth’s offer of repentance and desire for forgiveness even if Iowa hog farmers do not see it that way.” Bob urged his father not to mail the letter, which he thought criticized college’s handling of his case, but his father sent it anyway.50

  NOYCE DECIDED to spend his semester’s expulsion working as a clerk in the actuarial department of the Equitable Life Insurance Company in Manhattan, where his math professor helped him secure a position. Noyce could imagine himself as an actuary after college: the days immersed in numbers and the paycheck steady and generous enough to permit some fun in the evenings. To become an actuary, however, he would need to pass the five-part actuarial exam before he returned to Grinnell and his frantic pace of life there. The exam was notoriously difficult and assumed several graduate-level math courses that Noyce had not taken. He nonetheless signed up to take the exam.

  As soon as Noyce left for Manhattan, his mother, whose inchoate fears about Bob had been confirmed by the pig heist, began worrying about him with fresh vigor. She criticized his choice of roommate (whom she knew vaguely and thought drank too much), reminded him to visit his brother Don, who was completing a PhD in chemistry at Columbia, and carefully scrutinized his every letter for any mention of church, which he appeared to have attended with some regularity for several weeks as he was settling in.

  Noyce reported to work in a ten-dollar suit he had bought from a friend and spent hours at his desk, one of scores of young men with a penchant for numbers and a need for cash. “I have been working on settlement option mortality,” he wrote his parents. “From the looks of things, the annuitant table which is being used is now quite outdated….” He soon found the work unceasingly, unbearably dull, the tedium relieved only by the fact that female clerks outnumbered male by a ratio of ten to one. Noyce lived for the nights and weekends, when he spent nearly every cent he earned on plays, films, museum exhibits, and evenings with young women he met at the office. He befriended flat-broke producers, playwrights, and artists—the kind of folks that people in Grinnell might have called unsavory. He was busy but not particularly happy, suffering, he said, from “the loneliness which often overtakes you here in the middle of the largest city on earth.”51

  The suspension gave Noyce time to think about his future. He had taken sufficient extra credits in his first three years that he could return to Grinnell and graduate with his class in the spring of 1949. Noyce tried to join the air force, but when he learned he could not serve as a fighter pilot because he was color blind, he swore to avoid military service all together. He then considered that if he passed the actuarial exam—his math professor had suggested a few textbooks to read in preparation—he might try to find a job in California, where he had always wanted to live. Grant Gale wrote to
suggest he apply to the doctoral program in physics at MIT. Noyce did.

  When he returned to Grinnell in February 1949, Noyce immediately resumed the back-to-back schedule of working, diving, studying, singing, acting, and dating that had filled his earlier college days. A few weeks into the semester, he received a letter notifying him that he had passed the actuarial exam. His family’s relief was almost palpable. “Congratulations high dive brain child!” read a Western Union telegram from a family friend. “Make no small plans.” The Equitable offered him a permanent job at more than $80 per week, a sum tempting enough that Noyce thought it might overcome his dislike of actuarial work.52

  Meanwhile, in his physics class, Grant Gale had begun talking about a device so unusual and potentially revolutionary that Gale’s description of it struck Noyce “like an atom bomb.” Noyce later explained, “I couldn’t grasp how it worked—or why it worked—immediately, but that it worked …” His voice trailed off.53

  It was called a transistor. A mere half-inch long, it could amplify electrical signals, a feat that had previously been accomplished only by much larger, and very fragile, vacuum tubes. These vacuum tubes were everywhere in postwar America, amplifying small currents to pull in radio and television stations, transmit telephone signals, operate hearing aids, and vibrate the cones of loudspeakers to produce sound. Vacuum tubes also enabled Noyce to control his model airplanes.54

  The transistor promised to accomplish the same tasks—but with one essential difference. It amplified signals through a solid crystal of germanium, not through a vacuum. For years, scientists had theorized that it would be possible to amplify current through solids, thereby avoiding the high power consumption and heat generated by vacuum tubes. But no one had been able to do it until the transistor. “It was really a rather astonishing revelation that could get amplification without a vacuum,” Noyce recalled. He decided the transistor was “a phenomenally new and wonderful thing, [a glimpse] as to what might happen in electronics in the future.”55