by T. R. Reid
For all that, however, Jack Kilby in person seems the very antithesis of high tech. Calm and quiet, plain-spoken and plainly dressed (his standard uniform in the lab is an open-necked sports shirt and knockabout cotton trousers), Kilby is the kind of person you might expect to find rocking peacefully on the porch of some country store, his large feet propped up on the railing. He is an imposing figure, not fat but big in every other sense: six feet six inches tall, wide shoulders, massive hands, a large, round, ruddy face framed by a few wayward tufts of gray hair poking up from the temples, and an enormous smile that suggests, accurately, a friendly, casual, unruffled personality. An introvert, he spends a good deal of time alone with his thoughts, working through ideas; he has always done his most creative work on his own. In conversation, he is not quick. Ask him a question—about semiconductors, politics, the best route to the airport—and he will take a long puff on a Carlton, think for a moment in absolute silence, take another puff, and then answer, softly, slowly. The answers are invariably thoughtful and delivered in fully structured sentences that flow perfectly from beginning to end without digression or detour.
Despite his pioneering work in the most modern of technologies, the inventor has an old-fashioned streak. He won’t wear a digital watch; characteristically, he has given considerable thought to the difference between digital and analog (i.e., with hands) timepieces and concluded that the older kind better conveys the seamless passage of time. He was one of the last people in the high-tech community in Dallas to get a personal computer, and has never dreamed of doing anything more complicated with the machine than trying, not always successfully, to attach a document to an e-mail. When Kilby was called upon in December 2000 to give the Nobel lecture in physics, functionaries from the Royal Swedish Academy contacted him in advance to find out which software program he would be using to prepare the presentations for his talk. Software? Presentations? “Gosh, I guess I’ll just have a couple of slides,” Jack said. Although he is probably the single person most responsible for the demise of the slide rule, he still keeps his favorite Keuffel & Esser Log-Log Decitrig handy in the center drawer of his desk, and in some ways he prefers it to the handheld calculators that rendered it obsolete. “It’s an elegant tool,” he says affectionately. His hobby is photography (black-and-white, of course), for which he has contentedly used the same trusty Hasselblad for thirty years. He tends to keep his cars well past the 100,000-mile mark. “As long as it runs, what the heck,” he explains.
In an industry and a company (he has worked at Texas Instruments on and off for almost half a century) where “tough” and “aggressive” are terms of high praise, the quiet but friendly inventor is famous as a nice guy. As he treks through the meandering hallways of Texas Instruments’ Dallas headquarters—walking with the wary, stooped gait of a man who has bumped his head too often on low ceilings—he greets everybody by name, from top management to messenger boys. Everyone at the company seems to have a story or three about some act of kindness on Kilby’s part. To that collection I can add another. When I first called Kilby, out of the blue, to ask if I might spend some time with him, he readily agreed, and then added—it was a first in my journalistic career—that he would pick me up at the airport and shuttle me around because “taxis can be hard as hell to get around here.”
Because of the more-or-less parallel development of quantum theory and semiconductor technology, Kilby’s work has regularly taken him near or right up to the leading edge of physics. It is a bewilderingly complex field; to understand the flow of charge in a chip, for example, one has to calculate the eigenvalues of the z-component of the angular momentum operator. But Kilby is not a scientist. He is quite firm on the point, insisting, in soft but definite tones, that he is an engineer. “There’s a pretty key difference,” he says. “A scientist is motivated by knowledge; he basically wants to explain something. An engineer’s drive is to solve problems, to make something work. . . . That is basically what I have always wanted to do, to solve technical problems. It is quite satisfying, extremely satisfying, to go through the process and find a solution that works.”
Kilby has done a great deal of thinking about that process, and, true to form, he has worked out a careful theory of the art of solving a problem, technical or otherwise. Somewhat simplified, the method involves two levels of concentrated thought.
At first, the problem solver has to look things over with a wide-angle lens, hunting down every fact that might conceivably be related to some kind of solution. This involves extensive reading, including all the obvious technical literature but also a broad range of other publications—books, broadsides, newspapers, magazines, speeches, catalogues, whatever happens into view. Kilby himself reads, not skims but reads, two or three newspapers every day and a dozen magazines or so each week. In addition he devours books; his office looks like a publisher’s warehouse where the books have staged a coup. For years, Kilby took the time to read every new patent issued by the U.S. government. Some of the inventions were arguably related to his work: “anode stud coatings for electrolytic cells”; “electric current regulator.” Others seemed rather far removed: “gas-fired ceramic radiant poultry brooder”; “dentifrice encapsulation”; “guitar amplifying system”; “self-packaged glider toy”; “golf putting aid”; “3- or 4-product surface-wave acousto-optic time-integrating correlator.” “That’s all right,” Kilby says. “You read everything—that’s part of the job. You accumulate all this trivia, and you hope that someday maybe a millionth of it will be useful.” For recreation, Kilby says, “I read trash.”
The next step in Kilby’s system requires switching to an extremely narrow focus, thinking strictly about the problem and tuning out the rest of the world. This requires, first of all, an accurate definition of the problem. “The definition of the problem becomes a major part of the innovation,” Kilby has written. “A lot of solutions fail,” he says, “because they’re solving the wrong problem, and nobody realizes that until the patent is filed and they’ve built the thing.” It is also necessary to develop a clear understanding of the natural constraints surrounding the problem; the heart of the inventor’s job is finding a way to slip past the roadblocks erected by nature. “Although invention is considered a creative process,” Kilby said once in a lecture on the subject, “it differs appreciably from creativity in the arts. The painter starts with a blank canvas, the author or poet with a blank sheet of paper. They choose an image . . . and they are free to use any techniques they have to achieve it. Technical creativity is more constrained. The laws of nature, the properties of materials . . . provide very real constraints.”
In this concentrated, single-minded focus on the question at hand, the problem solver must also tune out all the obvious solutions. This is a key principle, important to emphasize because it is somewhat counterintuitive. The mind tends to jump to the answer that is immediately evident. In fact, this answer is probably wrong. If the problem is of any importance, all the obvious solutions have been tried already. The word “nonobvious” appears in few dictionaries, but it is an important part of Kilby’s personal lexicon, a concept he returns to again and again when he gets talking about the business of solving problems. Some of history’s most important innovations, he says, were so nonobvious as to violate the scientific rules of the day. “You only arrived at the invention when somebody developed a method that everyone else had already decided was obviously wrong.”
At this point, if the problem solver’s preparation has been broad enough, and he has defined the right problem, and he observes the physical limits, and he’s creative, and he’s lucky, he might hit on a nonobvious solution that works. But that is not enough, at least not for an engineering problem. The essence of engineering, Kilby says, is cost consciousness. “You could design a nuclear-powered baby bottle warmer,” he says, “and it might work, but it’s not an engineering solution. It won’t make sense in terms of cost. The way my dad always liked to put it was that an engineer could find a way to d
o for one dollar what everybody else could do for two.”
Kilby’s dad was an electrical engineer who worked at electric power companies around the Midwest and eventually rose to the presidency of the Kansas Power Company, a medium-size utility that had small generating plants scattered around the western part of the state and headquarters in Great Bend, a neat, bustling town at the point where the Arkansas River bends south toward the Mississippi. Jack was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1923, but spent most of his childhood in Great Bend. He attended the public schools there, and in the summers he and his father would traverse the plains in a big 1935 Buick, stopping at each of the power company’s remote facilities. They would crawl through the works of the generating stations, trying to find out what had gone wrong with a faulty armature or testing the efficiency of a new-model transformer.
When the blizzard of ’37 swept through Kansas, blocking roads and felling telephone lines everywhere, the senior Kilby borrowed a neighbor’s ham radio to keep track of his customers and his far-flung operations. Naturally, the curious son had to see how this gadget worked. Twisting the dials, turning the big antenna this way and that, squeezing the earphones tight against his head so that he could make out the weak, fluctuating signals racing through the Kansas night, Jack was quickly hooked on radio. Partly it was the sheer fascination of the tool itself, and curiosity about why it worked. But the teenager could also appreciate how the power of human ingenuity had improved daily life for ordinary people. “It was during an ice storm in my teens,” he recalled some sixty years later, “that I first saw how radio and, by extension, electronics, could really impact people’s lives by keeping them informed and connected, and giving them hope.” A brand-new government agency, the Federal Communications Commission, began requiring licenses for radio operators. Jack studied for weeks, took the exam, and came home from school one day to find an official letter assigning him his own set of call letters: W9GTY. He built a ham set, improved it, scavenged some parts, improved it again. By the time he got to Great Bend High School it was clear that he would make his career in electrical engineering, and he set his sights on the engineer’s mecca, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. On a June day in 1941 he boarded the New England States, the crack train connecting the midwestern plains with the great centers of learning and commerce on the East Coast, and rode to Cambridge. He spent a month there training to take the entrance exam for MIT.
At this point, our inventor’s story takes a downward turn. Jack failed the test. He was turned down by MIT. Decades later, having launched the Second Industrial Revolution, received more than fifty patents, and won all the leading engineering awards, Kilby still felt the sting of flunking that exam. He could remember his score on the test—he got 497, three points short of passing. Of course, it all worked out for the best in the long run, as Jack pointed out on the day he won the Nobel Prize. But at the time that rejection letter from MIT was devastating. Moreover, it created a practical crisis. Jack had not bothered to apply to any other college. After some scrambling he was admitted to his parents’ alma mater, the University of Illinois. He had been there less than four months when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Freshman Kilby became Corporal Kilby, assigned to a radio repair shop at an Army outpost on a tea plantation in northeastern India.
Everybody learns something in the Army. The eighteen-year-old corporal learned that creative engineering can solve problems that have been officially declared insoluble. His unit was one of the first endeavors of the United States in guerrilla warfare. Small teams of soldiers would be airlifted “over the hump”—that is, across the Himalayas—into Burma to put together indigenous resistance movements to harass the Japanese. The Americans kept in touch with their base using radios they carried on their backs. The best “portable” radios ever made were provided, but they weighed 60 pounds and broke down regularly under the stress of jungle operations. The Army responded to all complaints by saying that its transmitters, the state of the art in radio, could not be improved. An engineer, of course, knows that there is no machine anywhere that cannot be improved. The engineers in Kilby’s unit set up a lab in a dusty pup tent. They sent Corporal Kilby down to Calcutta to buy old radio parts on the black market. Over time, they began turning out ad hoc transmitters that were both lighter and more power-efficient than the official issue.
After the war, Kilby went back to Illinois, eager to learn about radar and other wartime advances in electronics. On the whole, he was disappointed. The one thing he can recall now about his electronics classes was that none of the experiments turned out the way the instructors said they would. Further, the smattering of physics classes offered to engineering students didn’t cover the crucial twentieth-century developments revealing the nature of subatomic architectures. There were courses at Illinois on quantum physics and semiconductor phenomena, but they were restricted to scientists; “they weren’t going to expose that funny stuff to simpleminded engineers,” Jack says. Kilby graduated in 1947 with a traditional engineering education and decent but not outstanding grades. He went to work in Milwaukee at Centralab, for the excellent reason that it was the only firm in his field that offered him a job.
As such things often do, the job turned out to be a perfect spot for the neophyte engineer. Centralab, a division of Globe-Union Corporation, was then producing electric parts for hearing-aid, radio, and television circuits. It was an intensely competitive business, where a cost differential of one dollar per thousand parts—a tenth of a penny per part—could win or lose huge contracts. “It was sort of a crash course in sensitivity to cost,” Kilby recalled later. By the late 1940s, radio engineers had already determined the optimum material for each kind of electric component; resistors were made of carbon, capacitors of metal and porcelain, connecting wires of silver or copper. Rather than try to squeeze out a few additional hundredths of a cent per part by improving materials, Centralab was working on the notion that more could be saved by production efficiencies—by placing all the parts of a circuit on a single ceramic base in one manufacturing operation. The firm had only mixed success, but the conceptual seed—that the components of a circuit need not be manufactured separately—was to stay with Kilby and bear important fruit.
In his early years at Centralab, Kilby began to develop his problem-solving methodology. To acquire the wide-angle picture of the problems he had to solve at work, he was determined to learn everything he could about his field. He took graduate courses at night, plowed through the technical literature, attended any lecture that might be interesting. One night at Marquette University he heard a physicist—it was John Bardeen—describe a new invention that achieved amplification and rapid on-off switching without a vacuum tube. Amazing! The very existence of such a device seemed to challenge all the rules of electric circuits that Jack had learned in school. Kilby set out to read everything he could find about this new solid-state device. Then as now, Kilby’s reading went far beyond electronics. At one point he happened upon a dental supply catalogue; one page, so unpleasant he can still remember it, described a new technique that used small sand-blasters to scour away tooth decay.
Centralab was small and informal enough to let the most junior man in the lab take on important jobs. Kilby was immediately put to work solving real engineering problems, and as he got the hang of it, he acquired a priceless asset for anyone engaged in creative work: confidence. Over time, Jack came to realize that if he approached a problem correctly, worked at it long enough, and refused to let initial failures get him down, he could find a solution. One of his first real successes, in fact, solved one of the major problems with Centralab’s single-step circuit-building process— the reliability of the resistors. The process involved making resistors by printing small patches of carbon on the ceramic base. The machinery was imprecise, so no two carbon patches were the same size. That meant no two resistors performed exactly the same, which made it impossible to build a reliable circuit. Kilby was given the job of finding a way to ma
ke all the resistors the same size. It had to be done quickly, the boss said, and whatever solution Jack came up with had to be (a) cheap and (b) simple. Starting off with his wide-angle review of the problem, Kilby pondered everything that might be relevant. Something came to mind, something he had read someplace. Those tiny dental sand-blasters—did anybody use them? As it happened, the technique had never caught on with dentists because their patients found it repulsive. But Kilby managed to track down some of those precise devices; sure enough, they were perfect for carving away excess carbon and making all the printed resistors the same size. It was a nonobvious approach that finally made it possible for Centralab’s single-step process to produce reliable circuits.
When Bell Labs announced in 1952 that it would issue licenses for production of its newly patented transistor, Centralab put up the $25,000 license fee and dispatched Kilby to Bell’s ten-day crash course in the new technology. There he got a detailed look at the fantastic new world that would be possible now that circuits would be free of the limitations imposed by vacuum tubes. He came back to Milwaukee full of ideas, ideas that led to important advances in the manufacture and packaging of transistorized equipment. Gradually, however, he came to realize that the new electronic world had a limit of its own.