The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce

every two years. Robert Noyce, co-inventor of the integrated

On November 17, Brattain and an electrochemist in the solid-state group, Robert Gibney, explored whether applying an electrolyte—a solution that conducts electricity—in a particular manner would help cut through the surface states barrier. It did. Shockley would later identify this development as a breakthrough and the beginning of what he called “

Mervin Kelly, Jim Fisk, William Shockley, Claude Shannon, John Pierce, and William Baker.

“So often,” says Ian Ross, who worked in Jack Morton’s department at Bell Labs doing transistor development in the 1950s, “the original concept of what an innovation will do”—the replacement of the vacuum tube, in this case—“frequently turns out not to be the major impact.”1 The transistor’s greatest value was not as a replacement for the old but a

And yet Kelly would say at one point, “With all the needed emphasis on leadership, organization and teamwork, the individual has remained supreme—of paramount importance. It is in the mind of a single person that creative ideas and concepts are born.”40 There was an essential truth to this, too—John Bardeen suddenly suggesting to the solid-state gr