Jack Kilby, American Hero

In the summer of 1958, Jack Kilby had no vacation. The thirty-five year old engineer had only recently been hired by Texas Instruments, a small semiconductor company in Dallas that no one outside the industry had even heard of.

It was July, and as many manufacturers do at some point in the year, TI shut down for two weeks. Jack, new to the job with no accumulated vacation time, looked around for something to work on that would impress his new boss, as well as help him avoid having to work on the dreary project he anticipated. A few weeks later, he invented something he called an Integrated Circuit.

By 1958, the imaginations of electrical engineers had outrun their ability to realize their visions due to a phenomenon called 'the tyranny of large numbers.' With vacuum tubes giving way to the recently invented solid-state transistor (in 1947, commercially available in 1952), many were trying to discover ways to shrink components and place them into a tightly contained package.

In order to create a complex electrical circuit, a number of individual components — resistors, capacitors, transistors — needed to be joined together, usually with wires and soldering iron. The size and heat-generating properties of these relatively bulky components limited how many could be put into a space of a given volume. To add to the difficulty, to realize the applications they had in mind would require connecting thousands of such components by hand.

No one had yet found a way to solve the problem when Jack hit on his 'monolithic idea': create all the components out of a single chunk of semiconductor material (germanium) — half the size of a paper clip.

By carefully controlling the properties of various parts of the chip, he could make components such as a resistor (which, by design, conducts little electricity), a transistor (which outputs a varying amount of electricity depending on how much is input), and a capacitor (a conducting device which stores up electrical charge) — components generally requiring very different materials — all out of a single material.

To appreciate the accomplishment, imagine that you wanted to make a human being composed of water, proteins, enzymes, etc. — all having vastly different potentials and functions — out of one kind of material, say syrup.

These early circuits had only tens of components (by contrast, a Pentium 4 chip has 169 million transistors) and there wasn't immediate acceptance for the device. As Kilby later wrote, "[The IC] provided much of the entertainment at major technical meetings over the next few years."

To speed acceptance, Patrick E. Haggerty, former TI chairman, challenged Kilby to design a calculator as powerful as the large, electro-mechanical desktop models of the day, but small enough to fit in a coat pocket. The result was the electronic hand-held calculator, of which Kilby is a co-inventor. [Interesting historical aside: Commercially available in 1966, even as late as 1973, these devices cost $300-400, and many performed only the four basic arithmetic functions.]

Jack Kilby is a true American hero. According to all reports, including his own, he delighted in solving problems. He had no interest in power other than the electrical variety. He derived joy from creating novel solutions to thorny problems and, like every good engineer, kept cost firmly in mind.

Why did he do it? In a company interview, when asked he replied as follows:

TI: So, it was born out of an interest in helping people?

Kilby: My own interest developed because I thought it was a fascinating subject and something I wanted to pursue.

History does not record whether Jack's boss was impressed, but in the years since, most of the world has been. Jack Kilby was the recipient of the National Medal of Science, inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics — for creating a device that is at the base of almost every technology developed in the last fifty years.

And how did Jack Kilby himself feel about his invention and what it brought about?

In his Nobel Prize lecture, he quoted Nobel laureate Charles Townes, the inventor of the laser: “It's like the beaver told the rabbit as they stared at the Hoover Dam. ‘No, I didn't build it myself. But it's based on an idea of mine!'”

Jack Kilby died June 20, 2005 at the age of eighty-one, but his idea helped spawn an electronic component market which generates over one trillion dollars annually.


Jeffrey Perren is a professional writer with a background in Physics and Philosophy. His latest novel, The Endangered Specie (in progress), is the story of a bridge engineer whose work is opposed by a group of radical environmentalists.