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.TITLE The man behind the microchip
.AUTHOR Leslie Berlin
.SUMMARY As Stanford historian Leslie Berlin tells it, she once set out to write a history of Silicon Valley. Soon, she realized that one name kept coming up: Robert Noyce. Figuring that it’d be a good idea to read a biography, she discovered there wasn’t one available. After years of work, she’s completed that biography and has written an original article for Computing Unplugged about the "man behind the microchip".
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.H1 About this article
.IMAGEPAIR A RIGHT
Over the years, we at ZATZ have had the opportunity to publish articles by some well known authors and true experts in the field. Leslie Berlin is a visiting scholar in the history of technology at Stanford. Leslie tells us, "I knew I wanted to write about the history of Silicon Valley and began reading everything I could on the subject. Soon, I noticed that one name — Bob Noyce — kept coming up. I decided that the best way to get a handle on the origins of the high-tech revolution would be to read a biography of this Noyce fellow. But when I looked for the biography, there was none. So I set out to write one."
Almost ten years later, the biography is here. Leslie draws on more than 100 interviews and dozens of never-before-seen documents to bring Noyce’s story to life. We’re thrilled that Leslie has agreed to write an original article for Computing Unplugged explaining why Robert Noyce is such a key figure in technology.
And now, Leslie Berlin’s article…
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Chances are, you’ve never heard of Robert Noyce. Yet his legacy is embedded deep in the DNA of modern high technology.
Your cell phone, your iPod, your PDA, your computer — not to mention your car, your appliances, the ATM at your bank, hearing aids, and pacemakers — all of these are controlled by ultra-complex descendants of a device Noyce conceived almost half-a-century ago and called a "semiconductor device and lead structure." Today we call it a microchip. Jack Kilby, whose near simultaneous scheme for a similar device led to his being named Noyce’s co-inventor of the chip, went on to win a Nobel Prize in 2000. Noyce didn’t, but only because of his untimely death in 1990 at the age of 62. [Jack St. Clair Kilby passed away June 20, 2005.]
.CALLOUT Discovery, excitement, changing lives — and yes, the chance to make a fortune — this is the stuff of science and engineering.
The invention of the microchip was a signal event in Robert Noyce’s life. It was not the only one. Less than two years before, Noyce had led a team of scientists in founding one of the first venture-capital-backed, research-intensive, wildly successful high-tech companies in Silicon Valley: Fairchild Semiconductor. And in 1968, he and Gordon Moore launched Intel, where Noyce was a critical force behind the company’s development of the microprocessor.
.BREAK_EMAIL But even that was not all. To learn about Noyce’s adventuring life, tap here for the rest of the story.
But even that was not all. Noyce spent the last fifteen years of his life mentoring a generation of young high-technology entrepreneurs, among them Steve Jobs. It was largely Noyce’s vision that led to the first scanner technology for computers. And Noyce did all of this while hurling himself through a life of near-constant adventure. He proudly wore a ski jacket emblazoned with a patch that read "No Guts, No Glory" — a fitting motto for a man who hired helicopters to drop him on mountaintops so he could ski his way down, a man who piloted his jets through baby thunderhead clouds simply for the thrill.
For all his daring inside and outside the lab, Noyce, the son of an Iowa minister, was personally unassuming. Warren Buffett, who served on a college board with Noyce for several years, says, "Everybody liked Bob. He was an extraordinarily smart guy who didn’t need to let you know he was that smart. He could be your neighbor, but with lots of machinery in his head." Noyce, who was known to introduce himself as a physicist in social situations even when he was Chairman of the Board of Intel, would have been pleased with Buffett’s just-folks description of him.
But the exceptional aspects of Noyce’s story are too important, especially now, to keep quiet. At a time when the United States ranks seventeenth worldwide in the percentage of it’s college graduates receiving science and engineering degrees, we need people like Noyce to remind us that a career in science in engineering does not mean trading in your snowboard for a pocket protector. Discovery, excitement, changing lives — and yes, the chance to make a fortune — this is the stuff of science and engineering. Or as Noyce put it, "Technology is … the looking glass through which we can pass to advance the collective knowledge of mankind and create a better world."
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.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley, visit http://www.themanbehindthemicrochip.com.
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.BIO Leslie Berlin, a visiting scholar in the history of technology at Stanford, is the author of the first biography of Noyce, The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley (Oxford University Press, 2005). She can be reached via the website for the book, http://www.themanbehindthemicrochip.com.
