by T. R. Reid
The combination of Noyce’s vigorous athletic life, his far-flung personal interests, and his management work at Intel would have been sufficient to fill the days of most men. For Noyce, though, his late fifties found him looking beyond the low partition in his cubicle at Intel. Among much else, he started thinking about the future not only of his own company but also of the entire semiconductor industry—and of American industry as a whole. He was among the leaders of a group of Silicon Valley executives who got together to form the Semiconductor Industry Association, and was, of course, a charter member of the board. When journalists came to California to look into the chip business, Noyce’s office became a regular stop. He was, in many ways, the perfect spokesman—a thoughtful, articulate founding father who could discuss both precise technical questions and broad issues of industrial policy.
By 1978, Noyce was spending as much time speaking at conferences, seminars, and congressional hearings as he was at Intel. He stepped aside from day-to-day management—turning the firm over to his old friend and sounding board, Gordon Moore—so that he could devote more time to industry-wide concerns. He was the elder statesman of Silicon Valley, the “scientist-cum-charmer,” as a colleague put it—the official voice of his industry. He became chairman of the Semiconductor Industry Association and the leader of its battle to stave off the challenge from Japan. It was his impatience with the protectionist approach to the Japanese challenge that got him thinking about other ways to revitalize the industry that he had started. That led to the formation of Sematech. Noyce was one of the key voices calling for an industry-wide consortium, and when fourteen major companies agreed to put money into Sematech, Noyce served on the committee set up to find a CEO for the joint operation. The usual headhunter firms were contacted, and several people with stellar résumés were interviewed for the job. At the final meeting of the selection committee, though, the other members staged a mini-revolt. They threw out the list of candidates and turned to the man who had been the obvious choice from the beginning: Bob Noyce.
At Sematech, Noyce turned himself into an expert on the production end of the chip business—the incredibly precise photolithographic machinery that “prints” wires less than a millionth of an inch thick onto razor-thin wafers of silicon. He took excursions into new terrain that might well have been marked “Caution: Experts Only.” Now he was dealing with metallurgy, laser projection, submicron optics, and other complex areas that Noyce had generally left to others at Intel. His goal, ambitious but at least clear, was to see to it that American-made semiconductor fabrication machinery was the most advanced in the world. His bet was that if the United States could regain its lead in the manufacturing end of the microchip trade, it would once again become the world’s leading supplier. Then, proud technologists from Silicon Valley would no longer have to crawl to Congress begging for protection from foreign competition.
The goal was still some ways off when I saw Bob Noyce in the spring of 1990. He was friendly but intense, as usual, smoking like mad and talking at his normal super-fast pace. But he was also confident. “This was a bigger job than even I thought it was going to be,” he said. “But I think we’re going to do it. We’ve identified the right solution, I think, and we definitely have the talent and the will to achieve it. The Japanese are excellent manufacturers and serious competitors. But they have some problems of their own. So I think we’re going to get there.”
When the U.S. semiconductor industry did get there, though, just two years later, Bob Noyce was not around to see it. On a Sunday morning in June 1990, he got up early at the house in Austin and dove into the pool for his daily laps. Almost immediately, his heart stopped. They fished him out of the water and got him to a hospital, but within an hour he was dead. He was a son of the prairie who had gone enormously far in his sixty-two years. But he didn’t get to arrive at his final professional destination.
Among those who mourned the passing of this giant of American engineering was Jack St. Clair Kilby. Jack told the reporters who called that he was filled with admiration for Noyce’s accomplishments, both as an inventor and as the official voice of the industry. Then he sat back in his cluttered office at the northern edge of Dallas, quite happy to be the official voice of no one but himself. He has remained there pretty much ever since, perfectly willing to talk to the occasional reporter or historian who stops in, but for the most part tacitly and creatively engaged in the business he has always liked best: inventing.
For a while, in the years after he finished the Pocketronic calculator, Jack Kilby, too, seemed to be moving more or less inevitably into management. Eager to let him know that his groundbreaking work was appreciated, Texas Instruments rewarded Jack with a steady flow of raises, bonuses, stock options, and promotions. Promotion, for a man whose job was inventing, involved moving up to a management position supervising other inventors; eventually he became the number two man in the hierarchy at TI’s research and development lab, and the top job there was easily within reach. By 1970, when he went to the White House to receive the National Medal of Science, he was TI’s most respected engineer; he seemed assured of more bonuses, more raises, and more promotions as long as he stayed at the company.
And then, in November 1970, he left.
Over the years, Jack had been thinking a great deal about the work he loved most: the demanding, creative, and ultimately rewarding job of inventing. It became more and more apparent to him that real creativity, artistic or technical, demanded real freedom—the kind of freedom that did not mesh with bureaucracies, governmental or corporate. The whole organizational structure of the corporation was beginning to chafe. “There is a basic incompatibility of the inventor and the large corporation,” Jack wrote in a lecture on the subject. “Large companies have well-developed planning mechanisms which need to know at the beginning of a new project how much it will cost, how long it will take, and above all, what it’s going to do. None of these answers may be apparent to the inventor.” If Edison had worked for a big corporation, Kilby went on, there might have been no Edison light bulb, because the company’s goals might not have matched the inventor’s. As he contemplated the work of Edison and Bell and other freelance inventors—men who had defined the problems on their own and worked out their own solutions—Jack began to perceive that the grass might indeed be greener on the freelance side of the fence. He had, as a matter of fact, enjoyed considerable freedom at Texas Instruments, but even there bureaucracy was beginning to infringe. His goal had always been to find “nonobvious” solutions to important problems; but anything nonobvious was anathema to corporate planners and accountants.
From his voluminous reading, Jack had put together a pair of lists comparing major inventions produced by large corporations to those made by individuals. The corporate inventors’ list included, among other things, Scotch tape, television, and nylon— not to mention the integrated circuit. The individual inventor was credited with, among other things, air-conditioning, penicillin, xerography, and the zipper. Looking back on it today, Kilby is at a loss to explain any significant difference between the two lists. At the time, though, as he perused the two lists, they somehow seemed to prove a point. Today he realizes that the point had already been largely settled in his own mind. Freelance was the way to go.
And so he packed up his books, his papers, and his favorite old Log-Log Decitrig slide rule and moved out to a place of his own in a low-rise office building off the LBJ Freeway in North Dallas, about two miles from TI. There he could work at his own pace on problems of his own choosing. “There’s a certain amount of satisfaction,” he said, “in setting your own goals, in being free to do what you decide is important, and not pursue somebody else’s schedule. The freedom, that’s what interests me about this.”
He admitted readily that the choice of freedom was not a particularly wise one in financial terms. “No, it was pretty damn close to stupid. The economic rewards have been pretty marginal.”
The economic rewards for Jack
Kilby have never approached the vast wealth accumulated by Robert Noyce, a fact that Kilby accepted philosophically. “Basically, engineers are hired by companies to do that kind of work,” he said. “I don’t get five percent of the value of everything that is ever sold, or anything of that sort . . . but I was rather well rewarded by TI for my work on the integrated circuit.” His rewards at TI put his yearly salary safely into the six-figure range, an income that permitted Jack and Barbara and their two daughters to live in comfortable upper-middle-class style. It also permitted them to save enough to maintain their way of life during the lean years when Jack first set out on his own. Jack would eventually draw some income for consulting work at Texas Instruments and as a faculty member at Texas A&M’s Institute of Solid-State Electronics, a part-time appointment he held from 1978 to 1984. Over time, as well, considerable money started pouring in from prizes Jack was given for launching the microelectronic revolution; he got $400,000 for winning Japan’s Kyoto Prize in 1993, and just under a half million for the Nobel Prize in 2000. But much of that money he gave away. Being rich never mattered much to Jack Kilby.
As an independent inventor, Jack has received about a dozen patents, and they reflect the considerably wider scope of his ideas since he went out on his own. At his wife’s suggestion, Jack started working on an “electronic intercept” device that keeps your telephone from ringing unless the call is one you want to take. Three years of tinkering resulted in Patent No. 3,955,354, “System for disabling incoming telephone calls.” The gadget works perfectly but so far has been a dud in the market. Then there was Patent No. 4,001,947, “Teaching system,” a small calculatorlike device that talks to a student as it teaches math, spelling, and other subjects. That idea, too, worked fine, but in this case Kilby was scooped by a competing product known as Speak ’n Spell— produced by Texas Instruments. The Kilby “Electronic check writer,” Patent No. 3,920,979, was licensed by a Japanese consumer electronics firm but has yet to earn its first dime, a description that also holds true for Patent No. 3,944,724, “Paging system with selectively actuable pocket printers.”
For the first few years or so of his freelance career, Kilby reveled in his new freedom, moving from one idea to the next as the spirit took him. As always, he remained an engineer, not a scientist. His goal was to solve problems, and he now had the opportunity to choose which problems he would work on. “There are a large number of real needs which the inventor can address,” he said in his lecture on inventing. “The individual is free to choose a need that he thinks he may be able to satisfy . . . . The definition of the problem becomes a major part of the innovation” (Kilby’s emphasis).
For several years, he worked on a problem of major importance: the nation’s energy supply. After the oil shocks of the 1970s, a consensus grew that there was a fundamental need for some other source of power—a source that was available to everyone on earth, a source that was unlimited, a source that didn’t require huge smokestacks emitting greenhouse gases. In fact, this power source already existed—the sun. The problem was how to turn sunshine into electricity. It was a good problem for Jack, because, like the tyranny of numbers, it is one that apparently can be solved with semiconductors, particularly silicon. The basic idea here, known as the photovoltaic effect, was one of the earliest discoveries of semiconductor physics. Physicists have known for more than a century that if you shine light on a strip of semiconductor material, such as silicon, electrons will start to move from one end of the strip to the other. The flow of electrons, as J. J. Thomson explained, is an electric current. Jack defined the problem as building a solar cell of semiconductor material that would fit in an average house and generate enough power to meet the daily needs of that house. It was not an easy problem. “I can’t say exactly that nothing came of that work,” Jack said. “But not a hell of a lot came of it.”
Gradually, Kilby found himself drawn back toward the corporate world. He felt a loyalty to Texas Instruments, and when TI asked him to consult on this problem or that one, Jack was happy to oblige. He joined the board of directors of two smaller semiconductor companies, and consulted on projects at various other firms and research centers. And he kept tinkering away at his inventions.
For a man whose notion of heaven is to seize an interesting problem and solve it, Jack Kilby’s lot has been a happy one. Today, in his late seventies, he leads a quiet, thoughtful, and satisfying life. His wife died in the early 1980s, shortly after the couple’s thirty-third anniversary. But his sister Jane, as talkative as Jack is quiet, lives in Dallas, not far away, and watches after practical matters. She’s the one who can find Jack’s glasses and hearing aid when they disappear. He sees his two daughters, Ann and Janet, and five granddaughters often. One of the great pleasures of his life has been taking his family with him around the world to award ceremonies. “You should have seen the look in the principal’s eye,” said Ann Kilby’s daughter, Katrina, “when I told her I was going to take a week off school because my granddad won the Nobel Prize.”
Most Fridays, Jack digs out his old TI employee badge and heads over to the R&D lab at Texas Instruments—now located in a sparkling new facility known as Kilby Center—to hang out with his fellow engineers. Texas Instruments’ press releases refer to this as a “regular consultative role.” Jack described it a little differently: “I kinda wander around and talk to people.”
And he still spends a lot of time thinking. “Jack is a thinker,” said his fellow retiree Willis Adcock, the sprightly engineer who brought Kilby to Dallas a quarter century ago to tackle the tyranny of numbers. “I would say Jack’s got a good creative sense, he’s got that, but the other thing that I liked when I hired him is that he is a persister. He just thinks a problem all the way through, works it through, and he doesn’t stop until he’s got it worked out. And you know, you can see the results.”
You can see the results anywhere, because the Kilby-Noyce microchip has become an ever-present reality, and necessity, of modern life. Just as it proved impractical back in 1931 to turn off all the world’s light bulbs for two minutes as a memorial to Thomas Edison, it would be unthinkable for anybody now to suggest shutting down all the world’s integrated circuits in tribute to its inventors. For one thing, you couldn’t find them all. Microchips by the billions are at work in homes, cars, pockets, artificial organs, offices, hospitals, and factories around the world. The monolithic idea has spawned thousands of companies and tens of thousands of new products.
It has also spawned a veritable flood of awards, plaques, prizes, and citations for Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce.
The professional and technical awards became so common, in fact, that by the twenty-fifth anniversary of their invention, neither Noyce nor Kilby paid much attention when word of a new one came in the mail. One day in 1982, though, Jack Kilby received an honor that really mattered to him, because it was proof he had succeeded at his chosen trade. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, an august group of just five dozen people at the time—among them Edison, Bell, Ford, Shockley, and the Wright brothers.
On a sunny winter Sunday, a group of people gathered in the lobby of the Patent Office, just across the Potomac from the Washington Monument, for the Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Of the five inventors honored that year, only two—Kilby and Max Tishler, who started the vitamin industry in 1941 by synthesizing vitamin B2—were still alive. Both were present. When the secretary of commerce called out Tishler’s name, the aging chemist stood up and gave a long speech about how he got his idea and what it had meant. Then it was Jack Kilby’s turn. He stood up for the briefest moment, looked around shyly at the audience, and quietly said, “Thank you.”
A scattering of newspapers around the country ran a brief story on that ceremony and on Jack Kilby’s role as the patriarch of digital circuitry. A year later, when Robert Noyce was inducted into the same Hall of Fame for his part in the creation of the chip, a few papers again devoted a few inches of space to the subject. Thereafter, N
oyce used to show up in newspapers or business magazines in his role as the spokesman for Silicon Valley. But neither Noyce nor Kilby ever received enough attention in the press to make their names familiar to any more than a minute fraction of their countrymen. Indeed, nearly half a century after they came up with an idea that launched the microelectronics revolution, both Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby remain cloaked in obscurity.
It’s a sign of the times. A few generations ago, men of this ilk— men like Edison and Bell, Ford and Goodyear, whose inventions touched every life and spawned giant industries—were accorded enormous prominence. Although such things were not surveyed as carefully then as they are now, it seems fairly safe to assert that Thomas Edison was the best-known man in the country, and probably on earth, within ten years after he perfected the light bulb. (The best-known person on earth in 1890 was almost certainly Queen Victoria, whose portrait hung on walls throughout the world’s vastest empire; but Edison was the best-known man.) The Wizard of Menlo Park, the “Napoleon of Science,” he still ranked as the “Most Admired American” in a New York Times survey taken in 1922, when he was seventy-five years old and long finished with productive work. Alexander Graham Bell was a household name on the basis of his invention long before the nationwide Bell System was in place. Henry Ford and his Tin Lizzie became the stuff of myth, instantly recognized around the world as the symbols of the automobile age.
The chip has changed the world as decisively as did the telephone and the automobile. And unlike many modern inventions, we know exactly who gave it to us. But in the microelectronic age, Jack Kilby and Bob Noyce symbolize, if anything, only the modern lack of interest in the humans behind the machines. Barely one American in ten thousand could name the two countrymen who invented the integrated circuit and launched the digital revolution. They are not the stuff of which heroes are made in contemporary American society.