The Innovators

by Walter Isaacson

  The Regency radio, the size of a pack of index cards, used four transistors and sold for $49.95. It was initially marketed partly as a security item, now that the Russians had the atom bomb. “In event of an enemy attack, your Regency TR-1 will become one of your most valued possessions,” the first owner’s manual declared. But it quickly became an object of consumer desire and teenage obsession. Its plastic case came, iPod-like, in four colors: black, ivory, Mandarin Red, and Cloud Gray. Within a year, 100,000 had been sold, making it one of the most popular new products in history.40

  Suddenly everyone in America knew what a transistor was. IBM’s chief Thomas Watson Jr. bought a hundred Regency radios and gave them to his top executives, telling them to get to work using transistors in computers.41

  More fundamentally, the transistor radio became the first major example of a defining theme of the digital age: technology making devices personal. The radio was no longer a living-room appliance to be shared; it was a personal device that allowed you to listen to your own music where and when you wanted—even if it was music that your parents wanted to ban.

  Indeed, there was a symbiotic relationship between the advent of the transistor radio and the rise of rock and roll. Elvis Presley’s first commercial recording, “That’s All Right,” came out at the same time as the Regency radio. The rebellious new music made every kid want a radio. And the fact that the radios could be taken to the beach or the basement, away from the disapproving ears and dial-controlling fingers of parents, allowed the music to flourish. “The only regret I have about the transistor is its use for rock and roll,” its coinventor Walter Brattain often lamented, presumably half in jest. Roger McGuinn, who became the lead singer of the Byrds, got a transistor radio for his thirteenth birthday, in 1955. “I heard Elvis,” he recalled. “It was a game changer for me.”42

  The seeds were planted for a shift in perception of electronic technology, especially among the young. It would no longer be the province only of big corporations and the military. It could also empower individuality, personal freedom, creativity, and even a bit of a rebellious spirit.

  SETTING THE WORLD ON FIRE

  One problem with successful teams, particularly intense ones, is that sometimes they break up. It takes a special type of leader—inspiring yet also nurturing, competitive yet collaborative—to hold such teams together. Shockley was not such a leader. Just the opposite. As he had shown when he went off on his own to devise the junction transistor, he could be competitive and secretive with his own coworkers. Another skill of great team leaders is the ability to instill a nonhierarchical esprit de corps. Shockley was bad at that as well. He was autocratic, often snuffing out spirit by quashing initiative. The great triumph of Brattain and Bardeen had come when Shockley was offering up a few suggestions but not micromanaging or bossing them. After that he became more overbearing.

  During weekend golf games, Bardeen and Brattain would share their dismay about Shockley. At one point Brattain decided that Mervin Kelly, the president of Bell Labs, needed to be clued in. “Do you want to call him, or do you want me to?” he asked Bardeen. The task fell, not surprisingly, to the more voluble Brattain.

  He and Kelly met one afternoon in the wood-paneled study of Kelly’s home in the nearby suburb of Short Hills. Brattain laid out their grievances, describing how ham-fisted Shockley was as a manager and colleague. Kelly batted away the complaints. “So finally, without thinking of its impact, I inadvertently said to him that John Bardeen and I knew when Shockley invented the PNP [junction] transistor,” Brattain recalled. In other words, he had let slip a veiled threat that some of the concepts in the patent application for the junction transistor, which listed Shockley as the inventor, had actually arisen from the work that Brattain and Bardeen had done. “Kelly realized that neither Bardeen nor I, if we ever went on the stand in a patent fight, would lie about what we knew. This changed his whole attitude. And after that, my position in the Laboratories was a little bit more satisfactory.”43 Bardeen and Brattain no longer had to report to Shockley.

  The new arrangement turned out not to be enough to satisfy Bardeen, who turned his focus away from semiconductors and began working on superconductivity theory. He took a job at the University of Illinois. “My difficulties stem from the invention of the transistor,” he wrote in a resignation letter to Kelly. “Before that there was an excellent research atmosphere here. . . . After the invention Shockley at first refused to allow anyone else in the group to work on the problem. In short, he used the group largely to exploit his own ideas.”44

  Bardeen’s resignation and Brattain’s complaints did not help Shockley’s standing at Bell Labs. His prickly personality meant that he was passed over for promotions. He appealed to Kelly and even the president of AT&T, but to no avail. “The hell with that,” he told a colleague. “I’ll go set up my own business, I’ll make a million dollars that way. And by the way, I’ll do it out in California.” When he heard of Shockley’s plans, Kelly did not try to dissuade him. Quite the contrary: “I told him that if he thinks he can earn a million dollars, go ahead!” Kelly even called Laurence Rockefeller to recommend that he help finance Shockley’s proposed venture.45

  As he grappled with his situation in 1954, Shockley went through a midlife crisis. After helping his wife fight ovarian cancer, he left her while she was in remission and found himself a girlfriend, whom he would later marry. He took a leave from Bell Labs. And this being a classic midlife crisis, he even bought a sports car, a green Jaguar XK120 two-seat convertible.

  Shockley spent a semester as a visiting professor at Caltech and took a gig consulting with the Army’s Weapons Systems Evaluation Group in Washington, but much of the time he traveled the country trying to figure out his new venture, visiting technology companies, and meeting with successful entrepreneurs such as William Hewlett and Edwin Land. “Think I shall try to raise some capital and start on my own,” he wrote his girlfriend. “After all, it is obvious I am smarter, more energetic, and understand folks better than most of these other folks.” His journals for 1954 show him struggling to make sense of his quest. “Lack of appreciation by bosses, means what?” he wrote at one point. As happens in many biographies, there was also the theme of living up to a late father. Contemplating his plan to create a company that would make transistors ubiquitous, he wrote, “Idea of setting world on fire, father proud.”46

  Setting the world on fire. Despite the fact that he would never turn out to be successful in business, Shockley would accomplish that. The company that he was about to found would transform a valley known for its apricot orchards into one famed for turning silicon into gold.

  SHOCKLEY SEMICONDUCTOR

  At the February 1955 annual gala of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, two pioneers of electronics were honored: Lee de Forest, who had invented the vacuum tube, and Shockley, an inventor of its replacement. Shockley sat with a distinguished industrialist, Arnold Beckman, the chamber’s vice chairman. Like Shockley, Beckman had worked for Bell Labs, where he developed techniques for making vacuum tubes. As a professor at Caltech he had invented a variety of measuring instruments, including one that measured the acidity of lemons, and he used his invention as the foundation for building a large manufacturing company.

  That August, Shockley invited Beckman to serve on the board of his proposed transistor company. “I asked him a little bit more about who else was going to be on the board,” Beckman recalled, “and it turned out that he was going to have a board composed of almost everyone who was in the instrument business, all of whom would be his competitors.” Beckman realized how “unbelievably naïve” Shockley was, so in order to help him devise a more sensible approach, he invited him to spend a week in Newport Beach, where Beckman kept his sailboat.47

  Shockley’s plan was to make transistors by using gas diffusion to dope silicon with impurities. By adjusting the time, pressure, and temperature, he could precisely control the process, thus allowing different varieties of transis
tors to be mass-manufactured. Impressed by the idea, Beckman convinced Shockley not to launch his own company and instead to lead a new division of Beckman Instruments, which Beckman would fund.

  Beckman wanted it located in the Los Angeles area, where most of his other divisions were. But Shockley insisted that it be located in Palo Alto, where he had been raised, so that he could be near his aging mother. They doted on each other intensely, which some found weird but which had the historic significance of helping to create Silicon Valley.

  Palo Alto was still, as it had been in Shockley’s childhood, a small college town surrounded by orchards. But during the 1950s its population would double, to fifty-two thousand, and twelve new elementary schools would be built. The influx was partly due to the boom in the cold war defense industry. Canisters of film dropped from America’s U-2 spy planes were sent to the NASA Ames Research Center in nearby Sunnyvale. Defense contractors took root in the surrounding areas, such as the Lockheed Missiles and Space Division, which built submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and Westinghouse, which produced tubes and transformers for the missile systems. Neighborhoods of tract houses sprang up to accommodate young engineers and Stanford junior professors. “You had all these military companies on the cutting edge,” recalled Steve Jobs, who was born in 1955 and grew up in the area. “It was mysterious and high-tech and made living there very exciting.”48

  Sprouting alongside the defense contractors were companies that made electrical measuring instruments and other technological devices. The sector’s roots stretched back to 1938, when the electronics entrepreneur Dave Packard and his new wife moved into a home in Palo Alto that had a shed where his friend Bill Hewlett was soon ensconced. The house also had a garage—an appendage that would prove both useful and iconic in the valley—in which they tinkered around until they had their first product, an audio oscillator. By the 1950s Hewlett-Packard had become the pace horse for the region’s tech startups.49

  Fortunately there was a place for entrepreneurs who had outgrown their garages. Fred Terman, a doctoral student of Vannevar Bush’s at MIT who became Stanford University’s dean of engineering, created an industrial park in 1953 on seven hundred acres of undeveloped university property, where tech companies could lease land inexpensively and build new offices. It helped transform the area. Hewlett and Packard had been Terman’s students, and he had persuaded them to stay in Palo Alto when they founded their company rather than move east, as most of Stanford’s top graduates had been doing. They became one of the first tenants in the Stanford Research Park. Throughout the 1950s Terman, who went on to become Stanford’s provost, grew the industrial park by encouraging its occupants to have a symbiotic relationship with Stanford; employees and executives could study or teach part-time at the university, and its professors were given leeway to advise new businesses. Stanford’s office park would end up nurturing hundreds of companies, from Varian to Facebook.

  When Terman learned that Shockley was thinking of locating his new enterprise in Palo Alto, he wrote a courtship letter that described all the incentives that proximity to Stanford would offer. “I believe that its location here would be mutually advantageous,” he concluded. Shockley agreed. While its new Palo Alto headquarters was being constructed, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, a division of Beckman Instruments, set up temporarily in a Quonset shed that had served as a storage space for apricots. Silicon had come to the valley.

  ROBERT NOYCE AND GORDON MOORE

  Shockley tried to recruit some of the researchers he had worked with at Bell Labs, but they knew him too well. So he set about compiling a list of the best semiconductor engineers in the country and calling them cold. The most notable of them all, destined to be a momentous choice, was Robert Noyce, a charismatic Iowa golden boy with a doctorate from MIT, who was at the time a twenty-eight-year-old research manager at Philco in Philadelphia. In January 1956 Noyce picked up the phone and heard the words “Shockley here.” He knew immediately who it was. “It was like picking up the phone and talking to God,” Noyce declared.50 He later joked, “When he came out here to organize Shockley Labs, he whistled and I came.”51

  Noyce, the third of four sons of a Congregationalist minister, grew up in a series of tiny Iowa farm towns—Burlington, Atlantic, Decorah, Webster City—where his father found himself called. Both of Noyce’s grandfathers were also ministers of the Congregationalist Church, a Nonconformist Protestant movement that was a product of the Puritan Reformation. Even though he didn’t inherit their religious faith, Noyce did absorb their denomination’s aversion to hierarchy, centralized authority, and autocratic leadership.52

  When Noyce was twelve, his family finally settled down in Grinnell (population 5,200 at the time), about fifty miles east of Des Moines, where his father got an administrative job with the Church. The centerpiece of the town was Grinnell College, founded in 1846 by a group of Congregationalists from New England. Noyce, with an infectious grin and a taut graceful body, flourished in the town’s high school as a scholar, athlete, and heartthrob. “The quick lopsided smile, the good manners and fine family, the wavy hair high on his forehead, the dash of rapscallion—it made for an appealing combination,” wrote his biographer Leslie Berlin. Said his high school girlfriend, “He was probably the most physically graceful man I’ve ever met.”53

  Robert Noyce (1927–90) at Fairchild in 1960.

  Gordon Moore (1929– ) at Intel in 1970.

  Gordon Moore (far left), Robert Noyce (front center), and the other “traitorous eight” who in 1957 left Shockley to form Fairchild Semiconductor.

  Years later the literary journalist Tom Wolfe wrote a glimmering profile of Noyce for Esquire, in which he came close to canonizing him:

  Bob had a certain way of listening and staring. He would lower his head slightly and look up with a gaze that seemed to be about one hundred amperes. While he looked at you he never blinked and never swallowed. He absorbed everything you said and then answered very levelly in a soft baritone voice and often with a smile that showed off his terrific set of teeth. The stare, the voice, the smile; it was all a bit like the movie persona of the most famous of all Grinnell College’s alumni, Gary Cooper. With his strong face, his athlete’s build, and the Gary Cooper manner, Bob Noyce projected what psychologists call the halo effect. People with the halo effect seem to know exactly what they’re doing and, moreover, make you want to admire them for it. They make you see the halos over their heads.54

  As a kid, Noyce benefited from a situation that was common back then: “Dad always managed to have some sort of workshop in the basement.” Young Noyce loved to make things, including a vacuum-tube radio, a sled with a propeller, and a headlight to use on his early-morning paper route. Most famously, he built a hang glider that he flew by hitching it to the back of a fast-moving car or by leaping with it off a barn roof. “I grew up in small town America, so we had to be self-sufficient. If something was broke you fix it yourself.”55

  Like his brothers, Noyce was at the top of his class academically. He mowed the lawn of Grant Gale, a beloved professor who taught physics at Grinnell College. With the help of his mother, who knew the Gales from church, he wrangled permission to take Gale’s college course during his senior year of high school. Gale became Noyce’s intellectual mentor, which continued the following year, when he enrolled at Grinnell as an undergraduate.

  There he pursued a double major in math and physics, starring in all endeavors, academic and extracurricular, with a grace worn lightly. He made a point of deriving every formula in physics class from scratch, became the Midwest conference champion diver on the swim team, played oboe in the band, sang in the chorus, designed circuits for the model airplane club, had the lead in a radio soap opera, and helped his math professor teach a calculus class on complex numbers. Most amazingly, he was, despite all this, well liked.

  His scampish affability sometimes got him into trouble. When his dormitory decided to throw a spring luau in his junior year, Noyce and a fri
end volunteered to procure the pig that would be roasted. After a few drinks, they snuck into a farm nearby and, combining strength with agility, kidnapped a twenty-five-pound suckling. After they butchered the squealing pig with knives in an upstairs shower in the dorm, they roasted it. There followed much cheering, applause, eating, and drinking. The next morning brought a moral hangover. Noyce went with his friend to the farmer and confessed, offering to pay for what they had taken. In a storybook he would have been given the George Washington cherry tree award. But in the struggling farm country of Iowa, the larceny he had committed was neither funny nor forgivable. The farm was owned by the dour mayor of the town, and he threatened to press charges. Eventually Professor Gale helped broker a compromise: Noyce would pay for the pig and be suspended for one semester, but not expelled. Noyce took it in stride.56

  When Noyce returned in February 1949, Gale did him what may have been an even bigger favor. The professor had been a college friend of John Bardeen, and when he read about the transistor that Bardeen had coinvented at Bell Labs he wrote and asked for a sample. He also contacted the president of Bell Labs, who was a Grinnell alum and the father of two current students. A batch of technical monographs arrived followed by a transistor. “Grant Gale got hold of one of the first point contact transistors that was ever made,” Noyce recalled. “That was during my junior year there. I suppose that was one of the things that influenced me to get involved in transistors.” In a later interview, Noyce described his excitement more vividly: “The concept hit me like the atom bomb. It was simply astonishing. Just the whole concept, that you could get amplification without a vacuum. It was one of those ideas that just jolts you out of the rut, gets you thinking in a different way.” 57