When Jack St. Clair Kilby, a 34-year-old electrical engineer from Grand Bend, Kans., began working at a fledgling Dallas company called Texas Instruments in May 1958, he didn't yet qualify for the annual two-week summer vacation. So, come July, he had the lab pretty much to himself to try out something that had long been bugging him. Why, he wondered, couldn't all those tiny components--transistors, resistors, capacitors--in TI's electronic gadgetry be created out of a single block of material instead of separately wired parts? By September, he was ready to show his skeptical bosses just such an integrated circuit, or microchip....
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