Jack Kilby invented the microchip because he was too new for a vacation
In the summer of 1958, Texas Instruments emptied out for holidays, but new hire Jack Kilby had not earned any time off yet. Alone in the lab, he worked out how to build a whole circuit from a single piece of semiconductor, an idea that later earned him a Nobel Prize.
Kilby was born on 8 November 1923 in Jefferson City, Missouri, and was raised in Great Bend, Kansas, where his father's modest power company served rural western Kansas. When a massive ice storm flattened telephone and power lines during his high school years, the company relied on amateur radio operators to reach cut-off customers, and the episode hooked him on electronics. After serving as an army electronics technician in World War II, he earned an electrical engineering degree from the University of Illinois in 1947, then a master's in Milwaukee in 1950 while working for the electronics maker Centralab.
Circuit designers of the 1950s faced what they called the tyranny of numbers: ever more components had to be wired together by hand. Kilby concluded that making all the parts together in one block of semiconductor would solve it. On 12 September 1958 he showed managers a sliver of germanium hooked to an oscilloscope; he flipped a switch and a steady sine wave appeared. His patent for miniaturized electronic circuits, filed on 6 February 1959, put transistors, diodes, resistors and capacitors on a single substrate. Robert Noyce at Fairchild independently built a similar circuit months later, and the two are credited as co-inventors.
Kilby went on to lead teams that built the first military system and the first computer using integrated circuits, and with Jerry Merryman and James Van Tassel he invented the handheld calculator. He also held patents on the thermal printer. In 1970 he left to work independently, exploring silicon for solar power, and taught at Texas A&M from 1978 to 1984.
He shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics and died in Dallas on 20 June 2005 at 81. TI's research lab for chip design bears his name, as does a computer centre at Edinburgh Napier University.
Source: Jack Kilby
