Jack Kilby

His father ran a small electric company out of Great Bend, Kansas, wiring farms across the western half of the state. While Kilby was in high school an ice storm took down most of the poles carrying both the power lines and the telephone lines, and the company fell back on amateur radio operators to reach customers who had lost everything else. That is the moment Kilby always named for the interest in electronics. He served in the Army as an electronics technician during the war, took a bachelor's in electrical engineering at Illinois in 1947, joined the Centralab division of Globe Union in Milwaukee, and picked up a master's at Milwaukee State Teachers College in 1950 while holding the job. He married Barbara Annegers in 1948.

Texas Instruments hired him in mid-1958. New employees had no claim on the company's summer shutdown, so he stayed in an empty building and worked the problem the industry called the tyranny of numbers: a useful circuit needed more components than anyone could reliably solder together, and every added connection was another place to fail. His answer was to stop connecting. Make the resistors and capacitors out of the same block of semiconductor as the transistors, and the wiring problem goes away. On September 12, 1958, he put a sliver of germanium in front of Mark Shepherd and the rest of TI management, threw a switch, and an oscilloscope drew a continuous sine wave. The patent was filed on February 6, 1959. He later co-invented the handheld calculator and the thermal printer and held patents on seven more things.

Robert Noyce built a better version at Fairchild a few months later, using Jean Hoerni's planar process, which is what actually made mass production work. The two of them have shared the credit ever since, a settlement of convenience as much as a finding of fact. Texas Instruments sued Fairchild and, by taking Noyce's name off the patent it was attacking, effectively appointed him sole author of everything Fairchild had done. Hoerni, Jay Last and Kurt Lehovec had claims of their own and worked for small companies that could not fight. In April 1966 Lehovec proved that Kilby's patent never mentioned isolating the components. TI lost interest in the war, and by that summer the two firms were cross-licensing. Contemporaries who examined Kilby's germanium prototype did not think it was a real integrated circuit.

The money arrived late and from an unexpected direction. Japanese manufacturers built chips for nearly 30 years without paying, and only in 1989 did a Japanese court recognize the Kilby patent, after which Texas Instruments collected 520 million dollars in license fees in 1993 alone, mostly from Japan. The Nobel came in 2000, shared with Zhores Alferov and Herbert Kroemer, who had worked on semiconductor heterostructures. Noyce had died in 1990 and the prize is not awarded posthumously, so the two-inventor story ended with one name on the medal. Kilby died of cancer in Dallas on June 20, 2005. His statue stands on the University of Texas at Dallas campus.

Jack Kilby's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The first integrated circuit invention
  Demonstrated on a piece of germanium on September 12, 1958 1958
• Miniaturized electronic circuits (U.S. Patent 3,138,743) patent
  Filed February 6, 1959 and granted June 23, 1964 1959
• Handheld electronic calculator invention
  Co-invented at Texas Instruments with Jerry Merryman and James Van Tassel —
• Thermal printer invention
  He held the patent —
• Silicon solar power research other
  What he worked on after taking leave from TI to invent independently 1970

• 1947 aged ~24 Takes an electrical engineering degree at Illinois after Army service
• 1948 aged ~25 Marries Barbara Annegers They had two daughters, Ann and Janet.
• 1950 aged ~27 Earns a master's at night while working at Centralab in Milwaukee
• September 12, 1958 aged 34 Shows TI management a working integrated circuit A sliver of germanium, a switch, and a continuous sine wave on an oscilloscope.
• February 6, 1959 aged 35 Files the patent for miniaturized electronic circuits
• 1966 aged ~43 Texas Instruments and Fairchild agree to cross-license The patent war ended after Kurt Lehovec won his own priority case that April.
• 1969 aged ~46 Receives the National Medal of Science from Richard Nixon
• 2000 aged ~77 Shares the Nobel Prize in Physics With Zhores Alferov and Herbert Kroemer. Robert Noyce had been dead ten years.
• June 20, 2005 aged 81 Dies of cancer in Dallas at 81

• Robert Noyce 1927–1990
  Co-inventor of the integrated circuit and co-founder of Intel, earning him the title Mayor of Silicon Valley. co-inventor and rival claimant
• Gordon Moore 1929–2023
  Co-founder of Intel whose observation became Moore's Law, driving decades of semiconductor progress. spoke for Fairchild in the priority fight
• William Shockley 1910–1989
  Co-inventor of the transistor at Bell Labs, earning the Nobel Prize and launching the semiconductor age. trained the men who beat him to production
• Andrew Grove 1936–2016
  Led Intel through its shift to microprocessors and shaped American technology management practice. built the industry on the chip
• Bill Gates b. 1955
  Co-founder of Microsoft who, through the Gates Foundation, has donated billions to global health and education. downstream beneficiary