The Man Behind the Microchip

by Leslie Berlin

  The transistor was invented at Bell Labs, in Murray Hill, New Jersey, in 1947. Bell Labs was the research arm of AT&T and the nation’s premier electronics research laboratory. Its scientists, several of whom would go on to win the Nobel Prize, were probably the best electronics researchers in the world.

  Bell Labs was normally a somewhat staid place, but when the transistor’s inventors Walter Brattain and John Bardeen first demonstrated their device to the lab’s senior management at the end of 1947, the researchers were almost giddy. One history of the event explains, “They hooked up a microphone to one end of their invention and a loudspeaker to the other. One by one, the men picked up the microphone and whispered ‘hello’; the loudspeaker at the other end of the circuit shouted ‘HELLO!’” William Shockley, a physicist who supervised Brattain and Bardeen and whom Bell Labs quickly named a co-inventor of the transistor, later used the occasion to recall another auspicious moment in Bell Labs history: “Hearing speech amplified by the transistor,” he said, “was in the tradition of Alexander Graham Bell’s famous, ‘Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.’”56

  Six months after this dramatic demonstration, Bell Labs announced the transistor’s invention not in the pages of a technical journal, but at a press conference in downtown Manhattan, not far from where Noyce was then calculating annuities at the Equitable.

  Noyce, however, did not learn about the transistor’s invention while he was in New York. With automatic transmissions, frozen foods, the electric clothes dryer, and the Polaroid camera just coming on the market, Americans had little interest in the esoteric transistor, which had no obvious consumer application. In most American homes, vacuum-tube-powered radios encased in wooden cabinets occupied places of honor. The New York Times, the only paper in which Noyce might have read of the transistor’s invention, buried the story on page 46, allotting it four paragraphs at the end of a “News of the Radio” column headlined with the promise, “New Shows on CBS Will Replace ‘Radio Theatre’ During the Summer.”57

  Military researchers, who had witnessed a demonstration of the device a week before the public press conference, had a very different reaction. A military press release declared that the device “could take a great load off the ground soldier’s back.” The statement was literal. Historians estimate that the heavy batteries used to power the vacuum tubes in standard-issue “walkie-talkie” radio telephone sets accounted for almost 40 percent of a set’s weight. After considering and rejecting a plan to classify the transistor, representatives from the armed services were the first to request samples from Bell Labs.58

  Among those next requesting “a couple of transistors” was Grant Gale, who had read and understood the significance of the short Times story, which he immediately posted on the bulletin board outside the physics classroom at Grinnell. Gale felt almost personally connected to the transistor. One of the inventors, John Bardeen, had attended the University of Wisconsin with Gale and grown up with Gale’s wife. The head of research at Bell Labs, Oliver Buckley, was a Grinnell graduate and the father of two current students. Buckley regularly sent Gale castoff equipment and spare copies of technical reports from Bell Labs, and it was to him that Gale mailed his request for transistors.59

  Buckley did not have any devices to spare, but he did send Gale copies of several technical monographs that Bell Labs had written on the transistor. These monographs formed the basis of Noyce’s initial exposure to the device. No textbooks addressed transistors, and (although prevailing mythology claims otherwise) Bell Labs did not ship Gale a transistor until after Noyce graduated. Together Gale and Noyce, who was far more interested in the transistor than any other student, pored over the Bell Labs monographs: “The Transistor and Related Experiments,” “Positive Holes and the Transistor,” “Physical Principles Involved in Transistor Action,” “Some Contributions to Transistor Electronics.”60

  Through these monographs, Noyce learned that the secret to the transistor lay in the unusual properties of elements called semiconductors. The conductivity of semiconductors falls in between that of metals (which conduct electricity freely) and insulators (which do not conduct electricity at all). Moreover, a semiconductor’s conductivity can be changed. Apply a certain stimulus to a semiconductor—light, voltage, or temperature—and it becomes a conductor. Change the stimulus, and the semiconductor can be made into an insulator. In electrical terms, it is equivalent to turning copper into glass instantaneously.61

  Semiconductors can be doped or modified to come in two varieties. N-type semiconductors have an electron (negative charge) that is only loosely bound to its atom and is thus free to move around, thereby conducting electricity. P-type semiconductors have the positive virtual-equivalent of the electron, called a hole, that is only loosely bound to its atom and thus free to move around. If P- and N-type semiconductors make contact—at a point called a junction—something remarkable happens: a few electrons flow from the N-type area, across the junction, and into the P-type area. A voltage applied to the junction will accelerate the trickle of electrons into a rush. But reverse the voltage and essentially no electrons at all can flow across the junction. Bell Labs hoped to use these properties of semiconductors to create a device that would serve as an electrical switch.

  At Bell Labs, Walter Brattain and John Bardeen built their transistor from a strip of an N-type semiconductor called germanium. They suspended a plastic triangle, point-down, above the germanium strip. A thin gold contact ran down each side of the triangle, with less than two-thousandths of an inch between the contacts at the point. The scientists carefully positioned the triangle so that the gold contacts just touched the surface of the germanium. Then they introduced a tiny current into the germanium via a thin wire. If they “wriggled [the wire] just right,” the device could amplify current 100-fold.62

  It is impressive that Noyce, at 21, was able to understand the Bell Labs transistor monographs describing these events. The reports had been written by PhD scientists for senior electronics researchers, not for undergraduates. Yet Gale insists that when it came to transistors, “it would be a gross overstatement to suggest that I taught Bob much…. We learned about them together.”63

  The information that Noyce absorbed about the transistor in his last months at Grinnell inspired him. When he was accepted at MIT with a partial scholarship, he told Gale that he hoped to focus his studies on the movement of electrons through solids.64

  Noyce graduated from Grinnell College with a double major in math and physics and a Phi Beta Kappa key. He also received a signal honor from his classmates: the Brown Derby Prize, which recognized “the senior man who earned the best grades with the least amount of work”—or as Noyce preferred to explain to his parents, the recipient was the “man who gets the best returns on the time spent studying.”65

  2

  Rapid Robert

  The decision to attend MIT was an enormous gamble for Noyce. He could not afford it. The $400-per-semester scholarship he received from the Physics Department was enough to cover tuition, but provided nothing toward the remaining $735 the university estimated would be needed for books and room and board. Noyce’s parents were unable to be of much assistance, and Bob did not want to ask his maternal grandmother, who had loaned him money in college, for more. He needed to earn as much as he could in the summer before leaving for graduate school. This meant living with his parents in Sandwich and working long, sweaty days at a construction site, where he was badly burned on his back and hands after carrying wood that had been treated with the volatile preservative creosote. Even before this injury, Noyce had always hated this sort of labor. Most of his high school and college classmates worked every summer baling hay or detasseling corn, but Noyce and a close friend had spent the summers after their first and second years of college tending bar and waiting tables at the Century Country Club north of New York City. There Noyce had been shocked and more than a little impressed to learn that his customers regularly paid $25 for a dinner and $2,000 to rent a
tiny home on the water.1

  The contrast between those country club summers and the blazing toil of the summer of 1949 left Noyce cursing a world in which a Phi Beta Kappa physics major could earn more with his muscles than with his mind. It also led him to a decision. He would not do this again. He would so impress the Physics Department powers-that-be that within a year they would give him the graduate-school equivalent of a free ride: a research fellowship that not only covered tuition but also paid $122.50 every month.2

  WHEN NOYCE parked his beat-up Ford in Cambridge in September 1949, he encountered a world dramatically different from Grinnell College. Where Grinnell had been a self-contained red-brick universe safely tucked in the middle of cornfields, in the middle of a state, in the middle of the country, MIT was an urban campus—three miles from downtown Boston, a short train ride to New York—run by men eager to extend its reach beyond the traditional limits of the academy. MIT professors helped develop the radar technology that saved American planes, and they helped build the atomic bomb that devastated Japan. MIT faculty served on presidential commissions and in the boardrooms of the nation’s most powerful corporations.

  The “military-industrial complex” would not be named until a dozen years after Noyce entered graduate school, but it was well under construction at MIT in the fall of 1949. During the Second World War, MIT received $117 million in federal research contracts from the Office of Scientific Research and Development—by far the most money awarded to any American university during the war. A few weeks after Noyce started classes, the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb, and the monumental threat this implied would help ensure a steady flow of federal defense dollars to MIT researchers throughout the Cold War.

  The MIT physics building sat near the middle of campus. In its basement were multiple subterranean corridors, some of which branched off into dimly lit classrooms, all part of the vast network of tunnels that linked MIT buildings to each other. This underground universe was a place apart, filled with miles of exposed overhead pipes, thousands of tools to build all sorts of scientific equipment, giant machines that occupied entire rooms, and clusters of young men working together over tables covered with instruments. This part of the Physics Department, in other words, resembled the world’s greatest basement workshop—and what, Noyce might have asked himself, could be better than that?3

  The Physics Department had undergone dramatic changes during the past two decades. Before 1930, the department had focused on teaching physics to engineers. Then in 1930, MIT’s president Karl Compton recruited a young professor named John Clarke Slater to build a research program in physics that would rival any in the world. Slater was an impressive man: a leading proponent of quantum theory, a top student of a Nobel Prize winner, a pioneer in the electromagnetic theory behind radar, and a prolific author who churned out dozens of articles while also writing a textbook or other weighty tome roughly every three years. (Such accomplishments led to his election to the National Academy of Sciences at the age of 31.) His youthful, almost prissy, appearance—his face full-cheeked, his brown hair thick and parted carefully at the side—led more than one person to mistake him for an undergraduate, but no one made that mistake more than once. Slater had a glare that could petrify and an overall presence that one student called “remote and austere, with all the warmth of an emotional iceberg.”4

  Armed with a generous grant from the MIT president, Slater spent the decades of the 1930s and 1940s tightening graduation standards, raising faculty salaries, and loosening departmental controls over faculty research. The wartime combination of increased federal funds and a pool of top-notch European physicists eager to emigrate worked to Slater’s advantage. By the time Noyce came to campus, some of the best-known physicists in the world—nuclear physicists Herman Feshbach and Victor Weisskopf, microwave physicist Nathaniel Frank, acoustics and operations research pioneer Philip Morse—were members of the faculty. The department was also home to the most famous graduate student in America, Murray Gell-Mann, who had arrived a year before Noyce. A prodigy who taught himself calculus at age seven and began studying physics at Yale just a few weeks shy of his fifteenth birthday, Gell-Mann would emerge with his PhD in quantum theory after only two years in the program. He was one of two students in graduate school with Noyce who would one day win the Nobel Prize for Physics.

  It was an intimidating place by any standard, and presumably even more so for a student from a two-man Physics Department led by someone who did not even have a PhD. “I had come from a protected home and sort of sailed through college, never worrying too much about getting the work done,” recalled one of the few students in Noyce’s cohort who arrived with a similar background. “Then I got to MIT and bam! I was with the best of the bunch, 800 miles from home…. It was incredibly difficult.” Grant Gale certainly worried whether he had adequately prepared Noyce for the academic rigors of the nation’s premier scientific university. He wrote to the head of the department, asking for periodic updates on MIT’s “reaction to Mr. Noyce and to the training which he has had.”5

  If Noyce, who soon learned that most of his classmates came to MIT with teaching fellowships in hand, had begun to wonder whether he belonged in Cambridge, his first months on campus could not have helped matters. Most students lived in the Graduate House at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and the Charles River—a five-minute walk from the physics building and the center of graduate student social life—but the monthly $78 room-and-board fee was too dear for Noyce, who instead shared an apartment in a slightly seedy part of Cambridge with a friend from his semester as an actuary. A month into the school year, Noyce took the first set of required exams, which were designed to assess a student’s knowledge of physics and determine in which subjects, if any, he needed to do remedial coursework. He did so badly on the first test that he refused to tell his parents his grade and even asked his current girlfriend to stay away for the weekend, presumably because he needed to study.6

  At the end of the exam period, Philip Morse, who oversaw registration in the department, marked Noyce’s background “deficient” in several areas and required him to take the two-semester undergraduate introduction to theoretical physics as well as advanced undergraduate courses in electronics and experimental physics. “My only observation for comfort,” Noyce told his parents, “is that everyone I talked to did at least as badly as I did.”7

  This was not exactly true. Noyce entered MIT at a distinct educational, as well as financial, disadvantage relative to many of his classmates. Consider, for example, Alfred “Bud” Wheelon, who was just 19 years old when he came to MIT with a freshly minted engineering degree from Stanford. Wheelon’s mentor in California had been Frederick Terman, Stanford’s ambitious dean of engineering who had himself earned his PhD at MIT under Vannevar Bush (the founding director of President Roosevelt’s Office of Scientific Research and Development). When Terman decided that Stanford could not provide Wheelon a sufficiently challenging graduate education, he made a few calls. “This guy is great,” Terman told his colleagues at MIT. “Fix him up.” MIT enticed Wheelon with a teaching assistantship. When it came time for the entrance exams, he passed every one easily.8

  Noyce admitted to his parents that “life looks unpleasant in spots,” but he tried to put the best spin possible on the challenges he faced. He was glad he did not have a research fellowship, he said. It would just slow him down. His goal, Noyce reminded them and himself, was to get through this stage of his life as quickly as possible—a philosophy that had served as his guiding force since childhood.9

  The bravado he displayed in letters to his parents was harder to maintain in person. He sought comfort in his hometown friends. The Strong brothers, neighbors from Grinnell who had helped with the glider, were both in Cambridge, one studying architecture, the other in law school at Harvard. His brother Gaylord was in New Haven, and Noyce spent several days with him and his new wife Dotey. The visit was filled with good home-cooked dinners and interesting
conversation. When he returned to Cambridge, his own life struck him as so bleak that for one of the few times in his life, Bob Noyce openly questioned what he was doing: “The whole of [the visit to Gaylord] served to point out to me how misdirected I am. These people have some worthwhile goals in life. It doesn’t seem to me that I have. I keep hoping that I will get wrapped up enough in physics to forget this. Anyway, my materialistic interests flew out the window until I got back here and started to wonder how I was to stay alive.”10

  AT MIT, few of Noyce’s classmates sensed his despair. He had fallen in with what his mother undoubtedly would have called “a nice group of boys.” George Clark, a Harvard graduate from a well-to-do Chicago family, was studying cosmic rays and would spend his career at MIT teaching physics. Another friend was Henry Stroke, a Jewish refugee from Hungary who, as a teenager, had escaped first to Paris and then to Spain before being brought to New Jersey by the Quakers in 1943. Stroke, too, would become a professor. Maurice Newstein, who seemed to know Noyce better than anyone else at MIT, was a sharp-tongued young man from New Jersey who had grown up too poor to own a bicycle and who was financing his education through the GI Bill. Newstein would spend years in industry before joining the academy himself.

  The four friends focused on surviving their first year classes. Noyce took five, not including the undergraduate courses he was required to attend as a “listener.” Like everyone else in the department, he took Philip Morse’s Theoretical Physics course, which included problems so elaborate that the students claimed—only half jokingly—that they ought to receive an automatic master’s degree for each one answered correctly. Noyce’s Thermodynamics and Statistics course was hardly any better: the class average on the first exam was 29 out of 100, and the textbook, written by professors Slater and Frank, was bitterly known as “Slaughter and Flunk” by the students making their way through it. Noyce also took a Modern Algebra course in the math department.11