Engineering Monolith
When integrated circuit pioneer Jack Kilby went to Stockholm to pick up his share of the 2000 Nobel prize in Physics, he began his lecture with a story borrowed from Charles Townes, a fellow Nobel laureate and IEEE Medal of Honor winner. "It's like the beaver told the rabbit as they stared at the Hoover Dam: 'I didn't build it myself. But it's based on an idea of mine'."
It was a glimpse into the mind and the heart of the man whose invention helped lay the foundation for today's US $179 billion chip industry and, as the Nobel Foundation noted, of all of information technology.
The great and the gifted among us are rarely blessed with humility and generosity, too. Kilby was. When he died, he was living in the same modest house he had bought when he first joined Texas Instruments, in 1958. The morning that word came from Stockholm that he'd won the Nobel Prize, Kilby met reporters in front of that home wearing a green bathrobe. Colleagues called the quiet, tall inventor "the gentle giant."
He spent his formative years in Great Bend, Kan., where his father was the president of an electric power company. In fact, one of his formative experiences was working with his father and a group of amateur radio operators to restore power after a storm.
The outline of Kilby's story of invention is well known. How he went to Texas Instruments from a Milwaukee electronics firm because TI was interested in the problem of miniaturizing electronics components and encouraged his own interest. That in the summer of 1958, while the rest of the company was off on its summer break, he developed what came to be known as "The Monolithic Idea"--basically, that if circuit elements such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors could all be made of the same material, they could be included on a single semiconductor chip.
If it worked, Kilby's idea would solve the "tyranny of numbers" problem -- the sheer difficulty of reliably wiring, by hand, the connections among thousands (let alone hundreds of millions) of discrete devices, such a transistors or tubes. By the end of World War II, electronic systems had already become complex --the 1946 ENIAC computer, for example, contained more than 17000 vacuum tubes and was hugely expensive to build and keep running.
Still, TI officials were skeptical about Kilby's IC ideas. They were won over after Kilby built a primitive but functional IC. The IC was simultaneously being pursued by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore and others, and Kilby fondly recalled how they all "provided the technical entertainment at professional meetings" as they debated the merits of different approaches--none of which were inmediately embraced. It took the Apollo moon mission and the Minuteman missile program in the late 1960s to establish IC technology as the technology of choice. During that same time, Kilby, at the behest of TI, developed the first handheld calculator to demonstrate the usefulness of ICs to the average consumer.
And while they all knew that the IC was critical to solving the problems directly in front of them, none realized how widespread the use of ICs would become, stashed now in everything from cellphones to teddy bears.
Many people have stories about Kilby's kindness and generosity. It has often been noted that Kilby went out of his way to include Robert Noyce in his Nobel acceptance speech (Noyce is credited with developing the process for mass-producing ICs).
Will he ever become a folk hero like Thomas Edison or Henry Ford ? Such fame eluded him in his lifetime (and we don't think he cared much about it anyway), although his peers recognized his achievement pretty much instantly, and over the years they awarded him virtually every big and small prize they had to offer. He, Noyce, Moore, and all the rest of the founding fathers and mothers of the endlessly new world of electronics certainly deserve to be a cherished and more widely recognized part of our cultural heritage.
Kilby's Nobel lecture and autobiographical essay are available at
http://nobelprize .org/physics/laureates/2000
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