Jack Kilby started at Texas Instruments in May 1958 with no vacation days banked. When the plant shut down in July, everyone else went home. Kilby stayed and worked alone in the lab.
He had asked to be put on microminiaturization, and that summer he conceived and built the device that became the integrated circuit. On September 12, 1958, he demonstrated it. He patented it on February 6, 1959, describing it as “a body of semiconductor material … wherein all the components of the electronic circuit are completely integrated.”
From Kansas ham radio to the lab
Kilby was born November 8, 1923, in Jefferson City, Missouri. The family later moved to Great Bend, Kansas, where his father ran the utility company. An ice storm in 1938 knocked out power, and his father turned to ham radio operators to keep communications open. Kilby went along on the visits, got his own license and built a transmitter.
“The older hams…were very helpful – and tolerant of a young high school student,” he recalled. “It convinced me that I wanted to study electrical engineering.”
He earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Illinois and a master’s at the University of Wisconsin. His first job, in 1947, was at the Centralab Division of Globe Union in Milwaukee.
What the chip led to
The Kansas Historical Society credits the microchip with turning room-sized computers into small personal devices, and with changing business, health care, education, transportation, manufacturing and entertainment.
Kilby kept going. He headed the teams that built the first military system and the first computer to use integrated circuits, and he later co-invented the hand-held calculator and the thermal printer. He held more than 60 U.S. patents. A semiconductor research and development facility carries his name.
From 1978 to 1984 he was a Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering at Texas A&M University. He retired from Texas Instruments in 1983.
On October 11, 2000, the Nobel Prize in Physics went to Kilby, Zhores Alferov and Herbert Kroemer for work laying the foundations of information technology. Kilby was honored for his part in inventing the integrated circuit and for co-inventing the pocket calculator.
He died June 20, 2005, in Dallas. The Texas Instruments president and CEO said of him: “Jack did more than invent the integrated circuit that day…he invented the future.” Kansas named him its Native Sons and Daughters’ Kansan of the Year in 2002 and inducted him into the Kansas Walk of Honor in 2012.
