by T. R. Reid
But the attention would not last much longer than a Kansas ice storm. By the time the newly honored laureate arrived home from Stockholm, he could stroll through Dallas–Fort Worth Airport without the turn of a single head. Jeff Crilley, a reporter for KDFW-TV, the local Fox affiliate, found a clever way to report on the Dallas engineer who invented the chip. He took a microphone to downtown Dallas and approached passers-by on the street. “Do you have a calculator?” he would ask. “Do you have a cell phone? Do you have a computer at home?” Almost everybody did. “And do you know who Jack Kilby is?” Nobody did. A similar experiment in Washington, D.C., produced the same blank looks. Even in Great Bend, Kansas, of all places, the Nobel Prize came and went with minimal impact on local knowledge about the homegrown Edison. “If I went around town and said the name ‘Jack Kilby,’ ” sighed Jennifer Schartz, editor of the Great Bend Tribune, “well, a few people would say, ‘Oh, something to do with computers?’ ”
And there was the central irony. Our media-soaked society, with its insatiable appetite for important, or at least interesting, personalities, has somehow managed to overlook a pair of genuine national heroes—two Americans who had a good idea that has improved the daily lot of the world.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This book began, some two decades ago, with a disappearing typewriter.
On November 3, 1980—the day before Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States—I returned to my desk at The Washington Post after a year of constant travel covering the presidential campaign. To my distress, my cherished old typewriter had disappeared.
In its place, the Post had installed a computer terminal; from now on, I was to write my stories on that. At first, I resented this impostor, as most new computer users did in those early days of the digital revolution. Quite soon, though, I came to realize that this hulking presence on my desk was faster, quieter, easier to use, and far more efficient than the typewriter it had replaced. Within two weeks, I was a devout convert to the new technology.
One day I got mad at something and took a swat at the machine. Red lights blinked; beepers beeped; the screen went dark. In those pioneering days, any company brave enough to install a bunch of computers had to keep a corps of technicians on hand to watch over the machines (and their users). So a technician quickly came over to my broken terminal and opened the cabinet. “We’ll have to replace a chip,” she said. She pulled out a small black rectangle, maybe half an inch long, with a row of copper legs along each side—a plastic beetle—and dropped it into my palm. “This chip is the heart of the whole thing,” she said.
Up to that moment, I had known in some abstract sense that the information age was based on a tiny “microchip,” although I had no idea what this term might mean. Suddenly that abstract awareness was translated into a tangible reality in the palm of my hand. I was determined to find out more about this chip and how it worked. Right then and there I dashed out to Reiter’s technical bookstore on Pennsylvania Avenue to find a book on silicon chips. The salesman gave me the standard text—Microelectronics, by Professor Jacob Millman of Columbia University. This was a legendary book in its field, having nurtured a generation of electrical engineers. For the non-engineer, though, it was tough going; the first paragraph of the first chapter dealt with the impact of a nonuniform concentration gradient on the transport of charges in a crystal. But Professor Millman also recognized the great story that underlay his topic, so he prefaced his text with “A Brief History of Electronics.” There I found the following: “In 1958 Kilby conceived the Monolithic Idea, that is, the concept of building an entire circuit out of germanium or silicon. . . . About this same time, Noyce . . . also had the monolithic-circuit idea.”
This hit me like a bolt of lightning. For the first time I realized the obvious: This miraculous chip was a man-made miracle. All the marvels of the computer age, all the “electronic brains” and “artificial intelligence,” were simply products of the most powerful intelligence of all—the human brain. Beyond that, I was quite taken with the concept that an idea could have a name—“the monolithic idea”—and that two living Americans had conceived an idea that would change the world.
I resolved to meet the men responsible for the invention and find out how they had done it. This book is the result. The first edition came out just as a new consumer product, the personal computer, was bringing the information age into millions of homes and offices for the first time. Back then, it seemed to me just a strange quirk that my fellow Americans were not yet aware of the two countrymen who had launched this new era. It seemed perfectly obvious—to me, at least—that Noyce and Kilby would soon be household names along with Edison, Bell, and Ford. That didn’t happen. This second edition of the book, with the story considerably expanded and carried forward to a new century, is another effort to suggest that these two men are modern heroes who should be admired and emulated around the world.
Many people have helped me with this book, and my gratitude is enormous. My deepest thanks go to Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce, who were generous with their time and unfailingly patient with my dumb questions. Their colleagues Willis Adcock, Melvin Sharp, Mac Mims, Jerry Merryman, Norman Neureiter, Dick Perdue, Gordon Moore, Jean Hoerni, and Roger Borovoy went out of their way to help me, as did the librarians at both Texas Instruments and Intel Corp. Howard Warshaw of Atari Corporation took me on a guided tour through the inside of a chip. Homer Reid of Bell Labs steered me expertly through the intricacies of quantum theory and digital circuit design. Georgine Neureiter, Tom and Janet Cameron, Jane Kilby, and Ann Kilby have all offered invaluable aid, for no reason that I can think of other than sheer kindness.
I have relied on two great national collections of knowledge. The Science Reading Room at the Library of Congress is an American treasure; the knowledgeable staff there were the main-stays of my research. The Science Collection of the British Library generously made its copious materials available. The libraries of Princeton, Georgetown, and Stanford Universities also permitted me to use their resources. I owe thanks to the public libraries of Denver, Colorado, Washington, D.C., and the Borough of Westminster in London—and particularly to the P. S. Miller branch of the Douglas County Library in the foothills town of Castle Rock, Colorado. The Cleveland Institute of Electronics allowed me the use of educational materials. Professor Elizabeth Tuttle of the Physics and Engineering Department at the University of Denver and Jeff Singh of the Mathematics Department there provided valuable help.
Maralee Schwartz, one of the world’s great researchers and editors, demonstrated time and again that no fact was too obscure for her to find. I once asked her to track down the speed at which an eyelid blinks; she was back in the wink of an eye with a detailed report. In London, I was lucky to benefit from the awesome reportorial talent of Adi Bloom. Many U.S. government officials, including John McPhee of the Commerce Department, Isaac Fleischmann of the Patent Office, and Dr. Uta C. Merzbach of the Smithsonian Institution, were helpful along the way.
Several of my colleagues in Washington assisted with this book. The charming bon vivant Ben Bradlee and the cheery iconoclast Bill Greider both recognized early on that this was an important piece of contemporary history and that I ought to pursue it. Nick Lemann, Joel Garreau, and Margaret Shapiro provided thoughtful and useful advice. I am indebted to Mary McGrory, Patrick Gross, Haynes Johnson, and Admiral H. G. Rickover for recognizing from the beginning that this effort would turn into something worthwhile. I’m grateful to Bob Shrum and Dr. William Leahy for solid advice at the end. I’ve had the good fortune to work with two wonderful editors on one book: Alice Mayhew and Ann Godoff. They figured out where the book should be heading and helped get me there. Henry Ferris and Kate Niedzwiecki offered smart and patient editorial guidance. Christopher McLehose of Collins, Ltd., provided wry advice. My agents, first Rhoda Weyr and now Gail Ross, were there for me to lean on whenever I needed them.
In its first realization, this book was written on a Heathkit H-89 com
puter based on an early microprocessor known as the Z-80. In those ancient times before Windows, the H-89 used a now-defunct operating system called CP/M and a now-defunct word processing program called Peachtext, both of which worked pretty well. I wrote this new edition on a Hewlett-Packard Pavilion PC built around Intel’s Pentium III processor.
My education in electronics and my first year of research on this book were supported by the Alicia Patterson Foundation. I owe particular thanks to Alice Arlen, Joe Albright, Helen Coulson, and Cathy Trost at the foundation. The Washington Post Company and its estimable chief, Don Graham, gave me the time and space to write the book not once but twice during my Post career.
Last but foremost, Margaret Mary McMahon, McMahon Thomas Homer Reid, O’Gorman Catherine Penelope Reid, and Erin Andromache Wilhelmina Reid put up with me and the manuscript in cheery fashion, a task far more formidable than writing any book.
A NOTE ABOUT SOURCES
Readers who plan to dig deeper into any of the events or characters of this story have a treat in store. There are some wonderful books and Web sites about the physics and the engineering behind the digital revolution. However, if you stop by a bookstore, library, or search engine and just start browsing, you’ll find there’s much more in print or on screen than anyone could read. Accordingly, I have compiled the following road map to steer you toward some of the better sources I ran across while writing this one.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences loosed a flood of information about “Physics and Information Technology” into the bit stream when it announced Jack Kilby’s Nobel Prize. This can be found at www.nobel.se/physics/laureates/2000/illpres/kilby/html. A related source is an excellent Web site called The Nobel Prize Internet Archive, at www.almaz.com/nobel/nobel.html.
The best nontechnical book I found on the general history of semiconductor electronics (although it is somewhat skimpy on the invention and development of the chip) is Revolution in Miniature, by Ernest Braun and Stuart MacDonald (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983). S. Handel, The Electronic Revolution (Baltimore: Penguin, 1979), is an easy and interesting discussion of electronics history from Benjamin Franklin to the invention of the transistor. The basic text on the tyranny of numbers was written by the man who coined that term, Jack A. Morton, Organizing for Innovation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971). There are also two big, expensive coffee-table books on the history of electronics: The Editors of Electronics, An Age of Innovation: The World of Electronics, 1930–2000 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), which looks at the story through American eyes; and Elizabeth Antébi, The Electronic Epoch (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1982), which provides a European view of the same period.
Somewhat more technical, but still accessible to the lay reader, is Scientific American, Microelectronics (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1977), which includes an overview of this technical revolution written by Robert Noyce. During the bicentennial year, several of the technical journals of the IEEE (the acronym is pronounced “I triple E” and stands for the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers) gave a great deal of attention to technical history. The July 1976 edition of IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, available at most large public or research libraries, contains first-person accounts of important inventions by many preeminent engineers, including William Shockley (on the transistor) and Jack Kilby (on the chip).
Several reference works focus on the matters covered in this book. I grew to rely on the Van Nostrand Encyclopedia of Computer Science (1976) and the fifteen-volume McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology (1982). G.W.A. Dummer, Electronic Inventions and Discoveries (New York: Pergamon, 1983), is a listing of important developments. For information on individual scientists and engineers, Isaac Asimov, Asimov’s Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1982), is a delightful quick resource. The multivolume Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York: Scribner, 1970), edited by Professor Charles C. Gillispie, is a classic piece of scholarship that provides clear and comprehensive biographies of hundreds of scientists and engineers.
Two fairly recent biographies of Thomas A. Edison, Matthew Josephson, Edison (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), and Robert Conot, A Streak of Luck (New York: Seaview, 1979), are well done and rich with detail. The best source on Francis Upton’s relationship with the Wizard of Menlo Park is Upton’s own history, Edison’s Electric Light Bulb (1881). For a pleasant history of physics in England in J. J. Thomson’s time, there is J. G. Crowther, The Cavendish Laboratory 1874–1974 (New York: Science History Publications, 1974). J.J.’s son, the Nobel laureate Sir George P. Thomson, wrote a fascinating memoir of his father, J. J. Thomson and the Cavendish Laboratory in His Day (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965). The most delightful source of information on J. J. Thomson, though, is his modest, intriguing 1936 autobiography, Recollections and Reflections, which has been reprinted by Arno Press (New York, 1975).
John A. Fleming wrote a memoir of his own, Fifty Years of Electricity (New York: Wireless Press, 1921), and there is also a short remembrance by his devoted lab assistant, J. T. McGregor-Morris, The Inventor of the Valve (London: The Television Society, 1954). Georgette Carneal’s A Conqueror of Space (New York: H. Liveright, 1930) was an authorized biography of Lee De Forest. Twenty years later, though, the inventor produced the autobiography with the immodest title mentioned in Chapter 2: Lee De Forest, Father of Radio (Chicago: Wilcox & Follett, 1950). C. P. Snow’s The Physicists (Boston: Little, Brown, 1981) contains a warm portrait of Niels Bohr.
William Shockley’s definitive Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors, with Applications to Transistor Electronics (New York: Van Nostrand, 1950) is the basic text on semiconductor physics and on Shockley’s way of thinking; for the first hundred pages or so, it is accessible to any diligent reader. The invention of the transistor has been related by the inventors in a series of journal articles and in the lectures they delivered upon receiving the Nobel Prize; many can be found on the Nobel Foundation’s Web site, www.nobel.se. A National Geographic book, Those Inventive Americans (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1971), provides a popularized look at the transistor and its fathers; a somewhat more technical presentation is offered in George L. Trigg, Landmark Experiments in 20th-Century Physics (New York: Crane, Russak, 1975).
Except for this book, there is very little between covers about Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce. Tom Wolfe wrote a terrific article about Noyce, “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce,” for Esquire magazine in December 1983, and it appears in his collection Hooking Up (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000). The German Hans Queisser takes a curiously Eurocentric view of the story in The Conquest of the Microchip (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). Most of the other recent books dealing with the history of the chip appear to have borrowed shamelessly from this one; some mention this book as a source, some do not. Texas Instruments, with justified pride, maintains a good Jack Kilby archive on its Web site at www.ti.com/corp/docs/kilbyctr/jackstclair.shtml.
A reader who would like to delve deeper into patent law can obtain a number of interesting and instructive pamphlets from the Patent Office Web site, www.uspto.gov. For more detailed historical and legal information, the best one-volume source I have found is Peter D. Rosenberg, Patent Law Fundamentals (New York: Clark Boardman, 1975).
The binary system and other mathematical principles underlying digital computer operations are discussed in the four-volume The World of Mathematics by James R. Newman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956); volume 3 of this excellent set also includes a useful section on Boolean logic. The reader who is interested in math, though, will derive the most pleasure from the witty, insightful, and generally marvelous books of Eric Bell: two that pertain directly to material covered in this book are Mathematics, Queen and Servant of Science (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951) and Men of Mathematics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1937); the latter includes a fine portrait of George Boole. There is also interesting Booleana in Mary Ev
erest Boole, A Boolean Anthology (Association of Teachers of Mathematics, 1972). Dover Press deserves our gratitude for keeping in print a paperback version of George Boole’s masterpiece, The Laws of Thought (New York: Dover Publications, 1951). There is as yet no biography of Claude Shannon, but a reader might be interested in the book that launched the burgeoning field of information theory—that is, Claude E. Shannon, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1949).
Computer history is just now emerging as an academic discipline of its own, and there will no doubt be some fine books written on the work of von Neumann, Turing, and other computer pioneers. There is a good general history in Joseph C. Giarratano, Foundations of Computer Technology (Indianapolis: Howard W. Sams, 1982). An important contribution to this literature is Herman Goldstine’s The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), which is strangely organized but has the immediacy that could be conveyed only by one who was present at the creation of the modem electronic computer. Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), and Steve J. Heims, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980), are the first complete biographies. Von Neumann’s seminal paper “Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument” is reprinted in John Diebold, ed., The World of the Computer (New York: Random House, 1973).