by Tom Wolfe
There was only so much that Ralph Noyce, the preacher with the preacher’s son, could do. Grant Gale, on the other hand, was the calm, well-respected third party. He had two difficult tasks: to keep Bob out of jail and out of court and to keep the college administration from expelling him. There was never any hope at all of a mere slap on the wrist. The compromise Grant Gale helped work out—a one-semester suspension—was the best deal Bob could have hoped for realistically.
The Night of the Luau Pig was quite a little scandal on the Grinnell Richter scale. So Gale was all the more impressed by the way Bob Noyce took it. The local death-ray glowers never broke his confidence. All the Noyce boys had a profound and, to tell the truth, baffling confidence. Bob had a certain way of listening and staring. He would lower his head slightly and look up with a gaze that seemed to be about one hundred amperes. While he looked at you he never blinked and never swallowed. He absorbed everything you said and then answered very levelly in a soft baritone voice and often with a smile that showed off his terrific set of teeth. The stare, the voice, the smile—it was all a bit like the movie persona of the most famous of all Grinnell College’s alumni, Gary Cooper. With his strong face, his athlete’s build, and the Gary Cooper manner, Bob Noyce projected what psychologists call the halo effect. People with the halo effect seem to know exactly what they’re doing and, moreover, make you want to admire them for it. They make you see the halos over their heads.
Years later people would naturally wonder where Bob Noyce got his confidence. Many came to the conclusion it was as much from his mother, Harriet Norton Noyce, as from his father. She was a latter-day version of the sort of strong-willed, intelligent, New England-style woman who had made such a difference during Iowa’s pioneer days a hundred years before. His mother and father, with the help of Rowland Cross, who taught mathematics at Grinnell, arranged for Bob to take a job in the actuarial department of Equitable Life in New York City for the summer. He stayed on at the job during the fall semester, then came back to Grinnell at Christmas and rejoined the senior class in January as the second semester began. Gale was impressed by the aplomb with which the prodigal returned. In his first three years Bob had accumulated so many extra credits, it would take him only this final semester to graduate. He resumed college life, including the extracurricular activities, without skipping a beat. But more than that, Gale was gratified by the way Bob became involved with the new experimental device that was absorbing so much of Gale’s own time: the transistor.
Bob was not the only physics major interested in the transistor, but he was the one who seemed most curious about where this novel mechanism might lead. He went off to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, in the fall to begin his graduate work. When he brought up the subject of the transistor at MIT, even to faculty members, people just looked at him. Even those who had heard of it regarded it merely as a novelty fabricated by the telephone company. There was no course work involving transistors or the theory of solid-state electronics. His dissertation was a “Photoelectric Study of Surface States on Insulators,” which was at best merely background for solid-state electronics. In this area MIT was far behind Grinnell College. For a good four years Grant Gale remained one of the few people Bob Noyce could compare notes with in this new field.
Well, it had been a close one! What if Grant Gale hadn’t gone to school with John Bardeen, and what if Oliver Buckley hadn’t been a Grinnell alumnus? And what if Gale hadn’t bothered to get in touch with the two of them after he read the little squib about the transistor in the newspaper? What if he hadn’t gone to bat for Bob Noyce after the Night of the Luau Pig and the boy had been thrown out of college and that had been that? After all, if Bob hadn’t been able to finish at Grinnell, he probably never would have been introduced to the transistor. He certainly wouldn’t have come across it at MIT in 1948. Given what Bob Noyce did over the next twenty years, one couldn’t help but wonder about the fortuitous chain of events.
Fortuitous … well! How Josiah Grinnell, up on the plains of Heaven, must have laughed over that!
Grant Gale was the first important physicist in Bob Noyce’s career. The second was William Shockley. After their ambitions had collided one last time, and they had parted company, Noyce had concluded that he and Shockley were two very different people. But in many ways they were alike.
For a start, they both had an amateur’s hambone love of being onstage. At MIT Noyce had sung in choral groups. Early in the summer of 1953, after he had received his Ph.D., he went over to Tufts College to sing and act in a program of musicals presented by the college. The costume director was a girl named Elizabeth Bottomley, from Barrington, Rhode Island, who had just graduated from Tufts, majoring in English. They both enjoyed dramatics. Singing, acting, and skiing had become the pastimes Noyce enjoyed most. He had become almost as expert at skiing as he had been at diving. Noyce and Betty, as he called her, were married that fall.
In 1953 the MIT faculty was just beginning to understand the implications of the transistor. But electronics firms were already eager to have graduate electrical engineers who could do research and development in the new field. Noyce was offered jobs by Bell Laboratories, IBM, RCA, and Philco. He went to work for Philco, in Philadelphia, because Philco was starting from near zero in semiconductor research and chances for rapid advancement seemed good. But Noyce was well aware that the most important work was still being done at Bell Laboratories, thanks in no small part to William Shockley.
Shockley had devised the first theoretical framework for research into solid-state semiconductors as far back as 1939 and was in charge of the Bell Labs team that included John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. Shockley had also originated the “junction transistor,” which turned the transistor from an exotic laboratory instrument into a workable item. By 1955 Shockley had left Bell and returned to Palo Alto, California, where he had grown up near Stanford University, to form his own company, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, with start-up money provided by Arnold Beckman of Beckman Instruments. Shockley opened up shop in a glorified shed on South San Antonio Road in Mountain View, which was just south of Palo Alto. The building was made of concrete blocks with the rafters showing. Aside from clerical and maintenance personnel, practically all the employees were electrical engineers with doctorates. In a field this experimental there was nobody else worth hiring. Shockley began talking about “my Ph.D. production line.”
Meanwhile, Noyce was not finding Philco the golden opportunity he thought it would be. Philco wanted good enough transistors to stay in the game with GE and RCA, but it was not interested in putting money into the sort of avant-garde research Noyce had in mind. In 1956 he resigned from Philco and moved from Pennsylvania to California to join Shockley. The way he went about it was a classic example of the Noyce brand of confidence. By now he and his wife, Betty, had two children: Bill, who was two, and Penny, who was six months old. After a couple of telephone conversations with Shockley, Noyce put himself and Betty on a night flight from Philadelphia to San Francisco. They arrived in Palo Alto at 6 a.m. By noon Noyce had signed a contract to buy a house. That afternoon he went to Mountain View to see Shockley and ask for a job, projected the halo, and got it.
The first months on Shockley’s Ph.D. production line were exhilarating. It wasn’t really a production line at all. Everything at this stage was research. Every day a dozen young Ph.D.s came to the shed at eight in the morning and began heating germanium and silicon, another common element, in kilns to temperatures ranging from 1,472 to 2,552 degrees Fahrenheit. They wore white lab coats, goggles, and work gloves. When they opened the kiln doors, weird streaks of orange and white light went across their faces, and they put in the germanium or the silicon, along with specks of aluminum, phosphorus, boron, and arsenic. Contaminating the germanium or silicon with the aluminum, phosphorus, boron, and arsenic was called doping. Then they lowered a small mechanical column into the goo so that crystals formed on the bottom of the column, and they p
ulled the crystal out and tried to get a grip on it with tweezers, and put it under microscopes and cut it with diamond cutters, among other things, into minute slices, wafers, chips—there were no names in electronics for these tiny forms. The kilns cooked and bubbled away, the doors opened, the pale apricot light streaked over the goggles, the tweezers and diamond cutters flashed, the white coats flapped, the Ph.D.s squinted through their microscopes, and Shockley moved between the tables conducting the arcane symphony.
In pensive moments Shockley looked very much the scholar, with his roundish face, his roundish eyeglasses, and his receding hairline—but Shockley was not a man locked in the pensive mode. He was an enthusiast, a raconteur, and a showman. At the outset his very personality was enough to keep everyone swept up in the great adventure. When he lectured, as he often did at colleges and before professional groups, he would walk up to the lectern and thank the master of ceremonies and say that the only more flattering introduction he had ever received was one he gave himself one night when the emcee didn’t show up, whereupon—bango!—a bouquet of red roses would pop up in his hand. Or he would walk up to the lectern and say that tonight he was getting into a hot subject, whereupon he would open a book and—whumpf!—a puff of smoke would rise up out of the pages.
Shockley was famous for his homely but shrewd examples. One day a student confessed to being puzzled by the concept of amplification, which was one of the prime functions of the transistor. Shockley told him, “If you take a bale of hay and tie it to the tail of a mule and then strike a match and set the bale of hay on fire, and if you then compare the energy expended shortly thereafter by the mule with the energy expended by yourself in the striking of the match, you will understand the concept of amplification.”
On November 1, 1956, Shockley arrived at the shed on South San Antonio Road beaming. Early that morning he had received a telephone call informing him that he had won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of the transistor; or, rather, that he was co-winner, along with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. Shockley closed up shop and took everybody to a restaurant called Dinah’s Shack over on El Camino Real, the road to San Francisco that had become Palo Alto’s commercial strip. He treated his Ph.D. production line and all the other employees to a champagne breakfast. It seemed that Shockley’s father was a mining engineer who spent years out on remote Durango terrains, in Nevada, Manchuria—all over the world. Shockley’s mother was like Noyce’s. She was an intelligent woman with a commanding will. The Shockleys were Unitarians, the Unitarian Church being an offshoot of the Congregational. Shockley Sr. was twenty years older than Shockley’s mother and died when Shockley was seventeen. Shockley’s mother was determined that her son would someday “set the world on fire,” as she once put it. And now he had done it. Shockley lifted a glass of champagne in Dinah’s Shack, and it was as if it were a toast back across a lot of hard-wrought Durango grit Octagon Soap sagebrush Dissenting Protestant years to his father’s memory and his mother’s determination.
That had been a great day at Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. There weren’t many more. Shockley was magnetic, he was a genius, and he was a great research director—the best, in fact. His forte was breaking a problem down to first principles. With a few words and a few lines on a piece of paper he aimed any experiment in the right direction. When it came to comprehending the young engineers on his Ph.D. production line, however, he was not so terrific.
It never seemed to occur to Shockley that his twelve highly educated elves just might happen to view themselves the same way he had always viewed himself: which is to say, as young geniuses capable of the sort of inventions Nobel Prizes were given for. One day Noyce came to Shockley with some new results he had found in the laboratory. Shockley picked up the telephone and called some former colleagues at Bell Labs to see if they sounded right. Shockley never even realized that Noyce had gone away from his desk seething. Then there was the business of the new management techniques. Now that he was an entrepreneur, Shockley came up with some new ways to run a company. Each one seemed to irritate the elves more than the one before. For a start, Shockley published their salaries. He posted them on a bulletin board. That way there would be no secrets. Then he started having the employees rate one another on a regular basis. These were so-called peer ratings, a device sometimes used in the military and seldom appreciated even there. Everybody regarded peer ratings as nothing more than popularity contests. But the real turning point was the lie detector. Shockley was convinced that someone in the shed was sabotaging the project. The work was running into inexplicable delays, but the money was running out on schedule. So he insisted that each employee roll up his sleeve and bare his chest and let the electrodes be attached and submit to a polygraph examination. No saboteur was ever found.
There were also some technical differences of opinion. Shockley was interested in developing a so-called four-layer diode. Noyce and two of his fellow elves, Gordon Moore and Jean Hoerni, favored transistors. But at bottom it was dissatisfaction with the boss and the lure of entrepreneurship that led to what happened next.
In the summer of 1957 Moore, Hoerni, and five other engineers—but not Noyce—got together and arrived at what became one of the primary business concepts of the young semiconductor industry. In this business, it dawned on them, capital assets in the traditional sense of plant, equipment, and raw materials counted for next to nothing. The only plant you needed was a shed big enough for the worktables. The only equipment you needed was some kilns, goggles, microscopes, tweezers, and diamond cutters. The materials, silicon and germanium, came from dirt and coal. Brainpower was the entire franchise. If the seven of them thought they could do the job better than Shockley, there was nothing to keep them from starting their own company. On that day was born the concept that would make the semiconductor business as wild as show business: defection capital.
The seven defectors went to the Wall Street firm of Hayden Stone in search of start-up money. It was at this point that they realized they had to have someone to serve as administrator. So they turned to Noyce, who was still with Shockley. None of them, including Noyce, had any administrative experience, but they all thought of Noyce as soon as the question came up. They didn’t know exactly what they were looking for … but Noyce was the one with the halo. He agreed to join them. He would continue to wear a white lab coat and goggles and do research. But he would also be the coordinator. Of the eight of them, he would be the one man who kept track, on a regular basis, of all sides of the operation. He was twenty-nine years old.
Arthur Rock of Hayden Stone approached twenty-two firms before he finally hooked the defectors up with the Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation of New York. Fairchild was owned by Sherman Fairchild, a bachelor bon vivant who lived in a futuristic town house on East Sixty-fifth Street in Manhattan. The house was in two sections connected by ramps. The ramps were fifty feet long in some cases, enclosed in glass so that you could go up and down the ramps in all weather and gaze upon the marble courtyard below. The place looked like something from out of the Crystal Palace of Ming in Flash Gordon. The ramps were for his Aunt May, who lived with him and was confined to a wheelchair and had even more Fairchild money than he did. The chief executive officer of Fairchild was John Carter, who had just come from the Corning Glass Company. He had been the youngest vice-president in the history of that old-line, family-owned firm. He was thirty-six. Fairchild Camera and Instrument gave the defectors the money to start up the new company, Fairchild Semiconductor, with the understanding that Fairchild Camera and Instrument would have the right to buy Fairchild Semiconductor for $3 million at any time within the next eight years.
Shockley took the defections very hard. He seemed as much hurt as angered, and he was certainly angry enough. A friend of Shockley’s said to Noyce’s wife, Betty, “You must have known about this for quite some time. How on earth could you not tell me?” That was a baffling remark, unless one regarded Shockley as the father of the transis
tor and the defectors as the children he had taken beneath his mantle of greatness.
If so, one had a point. Years later, if anyone had drawn up a family tree for the semiconductor industry, practically every important branch would have led straight from Shockley’s shed on South San Antonio Road. On the other hand, Noyce had been introduced to the transistor not by Shockley but by John Bardeen, via Grant Gale, and not in California but back in his own hometown, Grinnell, Iowa.
For that matter, Josiah Grinnell had been a defector in his day, too, and there was no record that he had ever lost a night’s sleep over it.
Noyce, Gordon Moore, Jean Hoerni, and the other five defectors set up Fairchild Semiconductor in a two-story warehouse building some speculator had built out of tilt-up concrete slabs on Charleston Avenue in Mountain View, about twelve blocks from Shockley’s operation. Mountain View was in the northern end of the Santa Clara Valley. In the business world the valley was known mainly for its apricot, pear, and plum orchards. From the work bays of the light-industry sheds that the speculators were beginning to build in the valley you could look out and see the raggedy little apricot trees they had never bothered to bulldoze after they bought the land from the farmers. A few well-known electronics firms were already in the valley: General Electric and IBM, as well as a company that had started up locally, Hewlett-Packard. Stanford University was encouraging engineering concerns to locate near Palo Alto and use the university’s research facilities. The man who ran the program was a friend of Shockley’s, Frederick E. Terman, whose father had originated the first scientific measurement of human intelligence, the Stanford-Binet IQ test.
