The American Celebrity Who's Name You've Never Heard
by Mitch Stone, the Accidental Expert
A major American celebrity died a couple of months ago. But his passing didn’t make the cover of Vanity Fair. The announcement wasn’t found in the pages of People Magazine. And yet, whether we know it or not, he was far more important to our daily lives than Brad or Brittney.
If you’re having a tough time imagining who this mystery man might be, allow me to supply a name: Jack Kilby. He was possibly the most important American whose name you’ve probably never heard.
So who was this guy? Kilby, who died in June at the age of 81, was co-inventor of possibly the most significant innovation of the 20th century: the semiconductor, better known to us as the integrated circuit. It’s nothing less than the smarts built into nearly every electronic device we own.
A Kansas native, Kilby grew up tinkering with radios. After serving in the Army during World War II, he enrolled at the University Illinois — at nearly the very moment Bell Labs was inventing the transistor. A breakthrough in its own right, the transistor replaced cumbersome and unreliable vacuum tubes, enabling the miniaturization of electronics like never before.
The introduction of the transistor set the stage for Jack Kilby’s intellectual quantum leap. While working for Texas Instruments, Kilby figured out how to pack hundreds of transistors onto a tiny wafer of the chemical element germanium. His invention was unveiled on September 12, 1958.
A few months later, Robert Noyce, working independently on the same problem at Fairchild Semiconductor, introduced a variation of the integrated circuit on a chip of silicon. Never one to crave the spotlight, Jack Kilby was perfectly comfortable sharing the credit for the invention with Noyce, who went on to cofound Intel.
In the years that followed, the hundreds of transistors crammed into those first integrated circuits grew into thousands, and then millions. The chips found their way into electronic devices of all kinds. The semiconductor became the microprocessor, and the computer age was born.
Jack Kilby admitted to being pleased by the revolution he set in motion. But the constitutionally modest engineer never sought any credit for it.
Still, he couldn’t help but being showered with honors from his peers. The ultimate accolade was the Nobel Prize in physics, awarded in 2000, in part for his work on semiconductors.
Kilby was never entirely convinced that he deserved the award. As the legend goes, his first act after learning of the prize was to make himself a pot of coffee. If it was an unusually understated reaction, it was also quintessential Jack Kilby.
When his home town in Kansas proposed renaming the local high school after him, Kilby politely demurred. He couldn’t think of himself as being so important. In his own mind, Jack Kilby was never more than an engineer, a problem-solver. His genius was tempered by rare and genuine humility.
It’s not the kind of attitude that gets a person much attention in the popular press. But in recognition of Jack Kilby’s immeasurable contribution to the betterment our lives, perhaps we should raise a cup of coffee to his memory, just the same.
1 Aug 2005 |
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