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Jack St. Clair Kilby (November 8, 1923-June 20, 2005) was an American electrical engineer who took part (along with Robert Noyce of Fairchild) in the realization of the first integrated circuit while working at Texas Instruments (TI) in 1958.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on December 10, 2000.
Kilby was also the co-inventor of the handheld calculator and the thermal printer, for which he had the patents. He also had patents for seven other inventions.
Jack Kilby was born in 1923 in Jefferson City, Missouri to Hubert and Vina Freitag Kilby. Both parents had Bachelor of Science degrees from the University of Illinois. His father was a manager at a local utility company.
Kilby grew up and attended school in Great Bend, Kansas, graduating from the Great Bend High School. Road signs at the entrances to the town commemorate his time there, and the Commons Area at Great Bend High School has been named The Jack Kilby Commons Area.
Kilby received his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was an honorary member of Acacia fraternity.
In 1947, he received a degree in electrical engineering. He earned his Master of Science in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1950, while working at Centralab, a division of Globe-Union corporation in Milwaukee.
In mid-1958, Kilby, a newly employed engineer at Texas Instruments (TI), did not yet have the right to a summer vacation. He spent the summer working on the problem in circuit design that was commonly called the tyranny of numbers, and he finally came to the conclusion that the manufacturing of circuit components en masse in a single piece of semiconductor material could provide a solution. On September 12, he presented his findings to company's management, which included Mark Shepherd.
He showed them a piece of germanium with an oscilloscope attached, pressed a switch, and the oscilloscope showed a continuous sine wave, proving that his integrated circuit worked, and thus that he had solved the problem.
U.S. Patent 3,138,743 for Miniaturized Electronic Circuits, the first integrated circuit, was filed on February 6, 1959. Along with Robert Noyce (who independently made a similar circuit a few months later), Kilby is generally credited as co-inventor of the integrated circuit.
Jack Kilby went on to pioneer military, industrial, and commercial applications of microchip technology. He headed teams that created the first military system and the first computer incorporating integrated circuits. He invented the handheld calculator, along with Jerry Merryman and James Van Tassel. He was also responsible for the thermal printer that was used in early portable data terminals.
In 1970, he took a leave of absence from TI to work as an independent inventor. He explored, among other subjects, the use of silicon technology for generating electrical power from sunlight.
From 1978 to 1984 he held the position of Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering at Texas A&M University.
In 1983, Kilby retired from Texas Instruments.
He died in June 20, 2005 at the age of 81, in Dallas, Texas.
More information: Educational Games-Nobel Prize
for electronics as we knew it then,
but that was a much simpler business
and electronics was mostly radio
and television and the first computers.
Jack Kilby
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