Robert Noyce (1927-1990)
The year was 1948. His girlfriend was pregnant and his university had expelled him for a semester for stealing a pig -- a felony. To make ends meet, he purchased a $10 suit and accepted a job at an insurance company. From the appearance of things, you wouldn't guess that Intel co-founder Robert Noyce was destined for glory.
Noyce, the son of a preacher, grew up in Grinnell, Iowa. He was a physics major at Grinnell College, and demonstrated while there an almost bewildering degree of confidence. While in college, Noyce's physics professor Grant Gale acquired two of the very first transistors to come out of Bell Labs. Gale demonstrated them to his class and Noyce was instantly hooked. The discipline was new, though, so when Noyce went to MIT in 1948 to study for his Ph.D., he discovered that he knew more about transistors than some of his professors.
After a short stretch building transistors for the electronics firm Philco, Noyce determined that he wanted to work at Shockley Semiconductor. In one day, he flew with his wife and two kids to California, purchased a house, and went to visit Shockley to inquire about a job. As it was, Shockley and Noyce's scientific vision - and egos - collided. Soon seven of the young researchers at Shockley semiconductor collaborated to consider leaving the company but they realized they required a leader. Each believed Noyce, aged 29 but laden with confidence, was the best choice. So Noyce became the eighth in the team that left Shockley in 1957 and launched Fairchild Semiconductor.
Bob Noyce's nickname was the "Mayor of Silicon Valley." He was among the very first scientists to do work in the area -- years prior to the stretch of California having earned the Silicon name -- and he led two of the companies that had the largest impact on the silicon industry: Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel. While at Fairchild, Noyce invented the integrated chip -- a chip of silicon with numerous transistors all etched into it at at one time, a major stepping stone along the way to the microprocessors in today's computers.
At both companies, Noyce introduced a very casual working atmosphere, the sort of atmosphere that's become a cultural stereotype of how California companies operate. This upbeat mind-set, which Noyce helped fashion, filters throughout the industry and has become both a legacy and a driving force of it. As a scientist, he arrived at a way of establishing whether tunneling -- a then-theoretical principle of quantum mechanics -- existed. He never proved the idea but Leo Esaki acted on his own research on the subject and won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics for it.
The technology that Noyce helped develop has played an integral part in all areas of modern computing and engineering, including the High Speed Internet.