Appreciation

By Chris Taylor

The honor roll of history is full of quiet geniuses whose miraculous inventions are scorned at first sight. JACK KILBY, who died in Dallas last week at the age of 81, was no exception. His is hardly a household name, yet what this soft-spoken, 6-ft. 6-in. Missouri native pioneered--the integrated circuit--led us to the moon landing, personal computers, cell phones and the Internet. In short, the modern world. Back in 1958, computer circuits were expensive, unreliable, horribly slow and unlikely to get much faster given that transistors and other components had to be wired together by hand. Enter Kilby, a newly hired engineer at Texas Instruments, who followed a hunch that you could eliminate some of the wires by sticking transistors onto a sliver of germanium--a close cousin of silicon--and etching circuits onto this crystal "chip," which was about half the size of a paper clip. Many of his peers dismissed such a simple solution as naive, and his microchip "provided much of the entertainment at major technical meetings over the next few years," Kilby later wrote. But Kilby ended up with the last laugh, not to mention a Nobel Prize in 2000. Bragging wasn't his style, though, and he often credited Intel's Robert Noyce as the co-inventor of the integrated circuit, despite the fact that Noyce's silicon device came six months after Kilby filed his patent. (Another Kilby co-invention: the pocket calculator.) He was a consummate engineer who cared more about solving problems than getting rich or famous. For that, the information age will forever be in his debt. --By Chris Taylor