On September 12, 1958 there was the first test of an integrated circuit and it is difficult to imagine a more relevant event than that in an Innovation Almanac. Suffice it to say that it earned its inventor the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000.
He was called Jack Kilby and was a legendary figure. If at some point computers stopped being as big as rooms and heavy as ships, it’s because Jack Kilby’s invention allowed us to move from thermionic tubes to integrated circuits. The turning point did not happen by chance, it was ten years ago we wondered how to miniaturize the circuits; but it also happened because Jack Kilby had just been hired at Texas Instruments and while everyone was on vacation he was left alone to experiment.
It he told himself in the speech with which he accepted the Nobel: “They left me alone with my thoughts and my imagination”. Kilby started from the intuition of an English physicist, Geoff Dummer, who first suggested that all the components of a circuit could be made of a single block of material. A semiconductor, at first germanium, but then it was realized that silicon worked much better. In 1956 Dummer’s attempt to build an integrated circuit failed, “but the way was right, ”Kilby will say; “My contribution was to take this idea back and make it happen”. Without going into too many details, on July 24, 1958 Kilby jotted down in a notebook the idea that all the elements of a circuit could fit on a single chip, and called this hypothesis “The Monolithic Idea”.
When he returns from vacation, he shows the notes to his superior who “was enthusiastic but skeptical.” A first test, with separate elements, was carried out on 28 August. On September 12, the first of the 3 oscillators was ready, and when the power was turned on, it “fluctuated 1.3 megahertz”. It was a triumph, confirmed a few months later by a similar experiment conducted by Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor. It was a triumph, but at first there was “tremendous skepticism” in the scientific community. The turning point was in the early 1960s, when NASA decided to adopt the integrated circuit for the Apollo mission. Kilby has since spent his life inventing other things, amassing a substantial number of patents. Among the many, we owe the portable calculator to him that was once a coveted and commonly used object, before it became a smartphone app. But even that is basically a consequence of that successful experiment of September 12, 1958.
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