The Man Behind the Microchip

by Leslie Berlin

  She prayed that the Bottomleys would not turn up their noses at her work. “It really is easier for ‘big’ folks like them to make the adjustment here than for us to do it there,” she explained to her mother. “I just tried to tell them this was what we could do for the children in lieu of a wedding present.” If Harriet resented the demands Bob had placed on her so suddenly, she never let him know it, though it was during these few days that she swore for the only time anyone could ever remember—a tiny “darn” escaped her lips when the chicken salad threatened not to turn out the way she wanted.47

  Betty Bottomley met her future in-laws in the throes of an asthma attack. Florid and wheezing, she was not the sophisticated Easterner the family had expected from Bob’s description of his fiancée. When she had recovered a bit, she and Bob rode off on Ralph Harold’s bicycle—Betty perched in the handle bars—for blood tests that were quickly handed off to a family friend who knew someone in the public health office in Chicago who would expedite the lab work. Bob, who had been informed that the suit he brought—the only one he owned—was too threadbare for a groom, borrowed a truck to buy a new one. Gaylord and Dotey had arrived a few days earlier for one of their regular visits to his parents; Gay, who, like Bob, had worked at the florist shop in Grinnell, offered to make the bride’s bouquet and groom’s boutonnière.

  Bob and Betty seemed happy together. Bob was proud of his fiancée and treated her with a tenderness his family had never seen, touching her often and gently brushing her hair. But he and Betty could also be flamboyantly combative. They enjoyed verbally jousting with each other in what seemed to some family members to be a flagrant attempt to show off their agile minds.

  After a few days’ observation, Harriet decided Betty was “all right for Bob.” She liked that Betty had not wanted “all the fuss” of a social wedding, and commented approvingly on her “nice poise and gaity [sic].” She reassured herself that “Bob is pretty fine and grown up, and we can trust his decision.” Ralph Noyce said Betty Bottomley would make “a fine and loving daughter-in-law” and spoke of the “joy” he felt in the marriage of these “young people trained, educated, mature, [and] with such brilliant minds and so many interests.” Though one younger family member found Betty surprisingly “cool,” this was chalked up to nerves. She was, after all, meeting her future family only a few days before she committed to spending a lifetime with them.48

  On the morning of the ceremony, Bob wore his new gray suit, and Betty wore a simple blue dress and a triple strand of pearls. Ralph Noyce was visibly moved by the young couple reciting their vows from memory, holding hands and looking seriously into each other’s faces before their 20 guests, almost all of whom were family or intimate friends of Ralph and Harriet. Bob’s only friends to attend were his roommates of four years, George Clark and Maurice Newstein. Betty does not appear to have invited anyone other than her parents and siblings. She, like her husband, knew many people but counted few among them good friends.

  At Harriet’s reception, the Bottomleys declared themselves positively “overwhelmed” that the Noyces and their close friends could create such a lovely gathering with so little notice. Harriet crowed to her mother, “It wouldn’t have happened so soon among their friends … some of whom they admit are definitely snooty.”49

  On the afternoon of August 26, 1953, several hours after the reception ended, Dr. and Mrs. Robert Norton Noyce left for a week’s honeymoon at Harriet’s family cottage on the shores of Crystal Lake near Traverse City, Michigan. From there they would head to Philadelphia, where Bob was slated to begin his job at Philco. “It’s a good enough salary so that he plans to pay off his debts to you,” Harriet wrote to her mother, “and a little to us. They really say lots of nice things about Bob.”50

  BOB AND BETTY NOYCE started their life together in a two-room apartment in Elkins Park, about 20 minutes north of Philco’s Philadelphia headquarters. Theirs was the quintessential 1950s marriage. Every morning at 8:00 Noyce met his carpool—the three other riders were also researchers in the transistor division at Philco—in the corner of the apartment parking lot. While he was at work, Betty spent her days keeping house, cooking, sewing, grocery shopping, and painting for a class she was taking. They would have dinner together when Noyce arrived home around 6:00. In the evenings, Noyce either finished up his Philco work or pieced together his model airplanes while Betty read or occasionally went off “Scrabbling” with a friend who lived in the apartment next door. Sometimes Bob would give her a bridge lesson. They both enjoyed entertaining and often invited friends for an evening. They had lived in Philadelphia for only a month when they learned their first child would arrive in the summer of 1954.

  Work for Noyce was less peaceful but no less pleasant than his time at home. Noyce had joined Philco at an exciting time for its transistor researchers. The four men in Noyce’s carpool represented nearly 15 percent of the company’s transistor research staff. Until quite recently transistors had been a sideline business for Philco, an experiment in backwards integration: transistors were essential components in radios and would clearly play a role in televisions in the future. Even more important, Philco coveted the military market for transistors. The company had worked under Defense Department contract for decades—its combined WWII contracts for fuses, radar equipment, radios, vacuum tubes, and storage batteries amounted to more than $150 million—and when Noyce arrived in 1953, the company was overhauling its military production facilities with the assistance of a $40 million line of V-loan revolving credit guaranteed by the United States Navy.51

  When Philco launched its program to develop a proprietary transistor in 1950, Bill Bradley, the 40-year-old head of research within the applied physics group, was tapped to lead the effort. An advanced formal education in transistors did not exist—witness Noyce’s cobbled-together efforts at MIT—and so Bradley hired an eclectic group of men (and one woman) for the research division: a few Physics PhDs, several electrical engineers, many self-taught engineers and technicians, and a sprinkling of fresh-faced college kids with science degrees. Experience was education’s equal for a company less interested in a theoretically intriguing transistor than in a sellable transistor, a device that would be, in the words of Philco’s vice president of research, a “useful member of society.” Because markets were as important as science at Philco, Noyce’s group conducted research on applications at the same time as the basic scientific investigations.52

  The first important invention to emerge from the transistor group was a germanium device they called the “surface-barrier transistor.” A variation on the point-contact transistor, the Philco device somehow managed to sidestep the Bell Labs patents. Philco announced the invention of the surface-barrier transistor in December 1953, at a special meeting attended by representatives of the Department of Defense and the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE), the premier professional organization for electronics researchers. “The surface-barrier transistor is the most important advance in electronics since discovery of the point-contact transistor,” asserted Philco’s head of Research and Engineering. It operated at higher frequencies and consumed less power than other transistors, which meant it would be more stable than competing devices. The key innovation behind the transistor was a new method of processing germanium that Philco thought “promised transistor mass production” in the very near future. Reliable mass production was the holy grail of the industry in the early 1950s, when devices were still produced in small batches in a slow and painstaking process. The IRE devoted 50 pages in its Proceedings to technical articles by the Philco staff that covered the theory behind the device, the production methods used to produce it, and its market applications.53

  The timing of the announcement and articles, roughly three months after Noyce’s arrival at the company, must have thrilled him. He had wanted to be a large fish in a small pond, and now, just weeks after his arrival, the eyes of the entire transistor world were focused on the tiny Philco pond. And just as he had hoped, No
yce could contribute in significant ways from the beginning. As its name implied, the surface-barrier transistor did its work on the surface of the germanium. It thus correlated well with Noyce’s expertise in surface states, and he had no trouble jumping into the effort midstream.54

  The key Philco production innovation was a method of etching and electroplating germanium by shooting two jets of liquid indium salt at either side of a sliver of the semiconductor. Noyce’s first assignment was to help develop a way to determine when it was time to stop etching and start electroplating. This was not the fundamental physics he had studied at MIT. It was immediately practical and obviously relevant to a specific problem—more engineering than physics in some ways. This was an ideal assignment for someone who valued, above all, doing something useful. Noyce suggested measuring the base width of the transistor by shining a beam of light on it. As the base width of transistor decreased, the intensity of the light would increase. When the light indicated that the base width had been etched to the appropriate thinness, the electroplating process could begin. Philco adopted this approach with some success, and the innovation served as the basis of Noyce’s first patent. Within months, Noyce was coauthoring the basic paper on surface-barrier transistor theory, which, when it was completed in 1955, the company considered too important to publish in the open literature.55

  Noyce’s immediate boss, Carlo Bocciarelli, was a swarthy, rotund, former artist who had no use for traditional ways of doing business. He spoke three languages in addition to his native Italian and knotted a rope through the buttonholes in his pants instead of wearing a belt. Bocciarelli openly ogled the attractive women who worked throughout the company as secretaries and production workers. He particularly admired the bottle blondes, whose bleached hair he called “a promising indication of a willingness to please.” Noyce followed his boss’s example enough to eschew both coat and tie. He also enjoyed the women at Philco and was happy that several of them happened to be named Betty. “When I talked in my sleep [at home],” he explained later, “it was fine.”56

  Noyce liked Bocciarelli, but it was Bill Bradley, the head of the transistor program, whom he considered a professional mentor. Bradley was roughly a dozen years older than Noyce. He held a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, and had spent the Second World War at the MIT Rad Lab before joining Philco. He loved music—particularly medieval singing—and as a boy had started an “association for the advancement of science” consisting entirely of friends who wanted to experiment with chemicals and build firecrackers and rockets. Bradley held several patents in television and transistor production techniques, and he could offer an apparently endless stream of ideas and potential research routes to anyone who would listen. Noyce, who called Bradley a “white noise source” with a buried but valuable “useful signal,” found his mentor’s relentless there-must-be-away attitude extremely encouraging.57

  When he was temporarily given management responsibility for a small group of researchers in the spring of 1954, Noyce adopted Bradley’s approach, always encouraging and explaining, always ready with a new idea to try if the original one threatened to fail. One man who worked for Noyce during this period recalled him as “very easy to talk to, very helpful, and very different from a typical manager.” Noyce only expressed impatience when dealing with people he considered intellectually slow. He did everything he could to avoid them, and when that failed, he would sit so immobilized as they spoke that one could almost see a cartoon thought bubble over his head: “Why am I forced to sit through this?”58

  ABOUT A YEAR AND A HALF into his work, Noyce’s feelings about Philco began to change. The company had trumpeted that its techniques would usher in an era of automated transistor production, but in the year that had passed since that announcement, Philco had been unable to move the transistors out of development and into production at the Landsdale, Pennsylvania, facility that had once made vacuum tubes. Although the company claimed that its patented etching and plating techniques allowed for “the highest mechanical precision yet attained in machining germanium,” the transistors that emerged from the Landsdale facility were leaky and unreliable. Noyce was one of several researchers brought in to try to improve the yield, or percentage of usable transistors to emerge from the production process. He was part of a team that built a device that used a scanning electron beam to monitor voltage differences on the surface of the transistor. The crude technology did pinpoint the location of the problems, but tweaking the production line proved time consuming and expensive. Meanwhile, other problems had emerged, most troubling among them the fact that even when the transistors worked, their delay before starting was too long for military purposes.59

  Adding to Noyce’s frustration with his job was his increasing involvement with Defense Department bureaucracy. Although Philco’s primary backing for its transistor research came from the Bureau of Ships branch of the navy, which wanted the devices for its Sidewinder missile, most of Noyce’s work before 1955 had fallen outside the navy contract and was funded by Philco’s in-house commercial research and development budget. In early 1955, however, Philco decided it could not afford to fund its own research. The company was in trouble. Earnings dropped by two-thirds from 1953 to 1954, when a strike closed down two key plants and the federal government sued Philco, charging antitrust activities in its relationships with distributors. The net effect of this turmoil for Noyce was that the transistor group began working exclusively under government contract. “It seems that Philco is not yet really convinced that research pays for itself in the long run,” Noyce bitterly reported to his family.60

  Noyce could not believe the “bullshit, waste, make-work, and lack of incentive” he faced in his research measuring the channels in P- and N-semiconductors under an air force transistor contract. The nature of his work was uncertain from one funding cycle to the next. He had to complete a time card and to file monthly and quarterly reports on his small research group’s progress. He particularly loathed the reporting requirements and would never write his reports on time, much to the frustration of the nearly half-dozen writers whose sole job at Philco was to oversee reporting compliance in the transistor group. Finally, Joe Chapline, who managed the writers, began preparing his own version of Noyce’s reports, complete with imaginary “good news.” His ultimatum: correct the fictitious reports or sign them. Noyce, of course, corrected them. Chapline had to resort to this ruse for nearly every report Noyce was required to submit, and he had to use it on a few other researchers, as well.61

  Meetings with military planners, purchasing agents, and technical experts filled Noyce’s days. He went to Dayton, Ohio, to consult with military engineers at Wright Field and to Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, to discuss an army contract. The meetings to review “proper procedure” and the reporting requirements, not to mention the strikers yelling outside his window and the indirect insult of effectively being told by his company that his work was not important enough to fund—all of this kept Noyce from “doing good science,” as he liked to say. To make matters worse, he thought he was doing “a lousy job” managing other researchers at Philco. Management, he said, was a chore that “took time away from useful work.”62

  Betty Noyce was also miserable. She and Bob both worried that he might be drafted. She delighted in her son Billy, who was born in July 1954, but she found life as “Mrs. Noyce” stifling. She spent her days at home or at a neighbor’s with the baby. She and Bob still entertained, and they spent long hours making home movies of Billy together, but Betty nonetheless found herself without adult companionship more than she would like. Bob sang in an oratorio choir at a local church one evening per week. He thought nothing of announcing that he would be gone for an entire Saturday—taking the car with him at 4:30 in the morning—to watch a model airplane meet. The meetings with the military and trips to Landsdale meant Bob was often absent, and Betty found herself increasingly resentful of the travel. “Bob has got to go up to Boston on business either this Friday or
Mon. He gave me my choice which day he should go—I don’t know if this is an invitation to come along … or if I was just consulted on when I’d most like to be alone,” she wrote to her family. When Bob took out the suitcase, little Billy would burst into tears. When Noyce was home, he liked to sequester himself in a corner of the living room, where he was trying to build a transistorized organ with the help of a book loaned to him by another Philco employee with a penchant for music. (“What will they think of next?” Betty muttered to herself.)63

  Noyce’s co-workers suspected that his marriage was not happy. “Noyce never talked about his wife,” recalled one. “He never mentioned an anniversary, or her birthday, or what she liked to do.” Concurred another, “The only time I ever saw her was when I came over once to help with a window air conditioning unit. Bob seemed to have kept her in the back.”64

  Through all her troubles, Betty maintained her wit. She signed her letters to Ralph and Harriet (she had assumed the writing duties): “B, B, b, & 1/2 b,” for Bob, Betty, Billy, and the baby due a few months after Billy turned one. She consoled herself with dreams of dramatic change. She wanted to buy a home, a nice old place with a big yard for the children. She imagined a summer cottage on Cape Cod or in New Hampshire, where she could take the children or meet her family when Bob was away. Such reveries were pure fantasy. The roughly $300 the Noyces spent to rent and heat their little apartment each month could only buy a house they did not want: a downtown Philadelphia rowhouse, which Betty declared “revolting,” or a bungalow in Levittown, a “homogenized suburbia” Betty admitted herself “too snobbish” to enjoy, though Bob liked the development quite a bit.65