Jack Kilby

Jack Kilby invented the integrated circuit, the object on which essentially all modern electronics rests. Born in Jefferson City, Missouri in 1923 and raised in Great Bend, Kansas, he became interested in electronics as a teenager when an ice storm cut power across the state and his father, who ran an electric company, used amateur radio to reach customers. He was rejected by MIT, took a degree at Illinois after wartime service in a radio repair unit in Burma, and worked for a decade at Centralab in Milwaukee on hearing-aid components. He joined Texas Instruments in Dallas in May 1958. As a new employee he had no holiday entitlement, and the plant emptied for a two-week summer shutdown, leaving him alone in the laboratory. The problem of the moment was the tyranny of numbers: circuits needed thousands of components individually wired by hand, and complexity was limited by the connections rather than the parts. Kilby's insight was that resistors and capacitors could be made from semiconductor material too, so an entire circuit could be fabricated in a single piece of it. On 12 September 1958 he demonstrated a working oscillator built on a sliver of germanium. Robert Noyce at Fairchild arrived at the same idea independently months later, using silicon and planar interconnection, which was the more manufacturable design. A patent dispute ran for a decade and the two are jointly credited. Kilby also led the team that built the first handheld electronic calculator in 1967, to prove the chip had consumer uses, and invented the thermal printer. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000, and died in 2005.

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