Gates, Schmates: Robert Noyce invented the integrated circuit. Then he invented the culture of Silicon Valley

Washington Monthly, June, 2005 by Robert Burnett

The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley By Leslie Berlin Oxford University Press, $30.00

When Time magazine published its list of the 100 most important people of the 20th century, it predictably inspired parlor games of second-guessing. To nay engineer's mind, the "Scientists and Thinkers" category might have included the inventor of the integrated circuit, which created the largest American industry of today and paved the way to the computer revolution. Perhaps there should have been a place within the section "Builders and Titans" for the man who founded both Intel and Fairchild Semiconductor, two of the most influential businesses of the information age. And among the "Leaders and Revolutionaries," they could have included the man most responsible for the creation of Silicon Valley's world-changing community of entrepreneurs and scientists. These omissions would be debatable, rather than inexcusable, were it not for the fact that they were all the same man: Robert Noyce.

Time is not alone in its oversight. Today, Noyce is not considered in the pantheon of household-name technologists such as Gates, Moore, or Jobs. That may be due to the fact that he died in 1990, on the very edge of the decade in which engineers became famous due to their power to make others rich. But in many ways, Noyce and his contributions to the technological, business, and cultural development of Silicon Valley did more to pave the way to this transformation than any other. Noyce, however, has finally received his due credit thanks to a comprehensive and admiring biography by Leslie Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley. Hopefully it can restore to proper renown a man once called the Thomas Edison and the Henry Ford of Silicon Valley.

Berlin does a fine job uncovering the details of Noyce's childhood and tracing his intellectual development. From an early age, he was distinguished by his ability to translate innovation into reality. He grew up in Iowa, an adventurous kid enamored with elaborate technical projects; when others were building model airplanes, he was constructing a glider that carried him aloft from a neighbor's barn. Explaining to Tom Wolfe in a savvy profile for Esquire why he and other guys from small towns became successful engineers in the '50s and '60s, Noyce suggested that necessity forced them to become technicians, tinkers, engineers, and inventors. "In a small town," he told Wolfe, "when something breaks down, you don't wait around for a new part, because it's not coming. You make it yourself." Although certainly competent as a theoretician, Noyce was at heart an experimenter, obsessed with the desire to test his ideas in practice.

After receiving his Ph.D. from MIT, Noyce worked briefly in Philadelphia before accepting an offer to work for electronics pioneer William Shockley in Mountain View, Calif., and soon became the leader of a group building a silicon version of the transistor Shockley had helped invent. Though brilliant, the tyrannical and paranoid Shockley was a notoriously difficult person to work for. Noyce's time with Shockley ended with a failed corporate coup, and his entire group (nicknamed "The Traitorous Eight") left to start Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation. Although Noyce became the general manager, for the first few years, he continued to play a major technical role, engineering breakthroughs in manufacturing and patenting the integrated circuit.

Fairchild Semiconductor was the cornerstone company in the development of Silicon Valley and for years served as an incubator for talented engineers and managers who eventually left to start their own companies, such as Applied Materials, Signetics, and LSI Logic. But because Fairchild Semiconductor was a subsidiary of Fairchild Camera and Instrument, an East-Coast company mired in traditional corporate culture, the semiconductor division was never able to operate as Noyce envisioned it. Finally abandoning his quest to reform the mother company, Noyce resigned in June 1968 to start Intel with his long-time partner Gordon Moore.

Noyce's charisma made him an inspiring leader, but he fell short on the day-to-day responsibilities of managing a growing company. Fairchild and Inters former chief counsel explained to Berlin that "Noyce's idea of planning was to yell, 'Let's take the hill!" Moved by his passionate call to arms, his troops would begin running behind him with a shared sense of direction and purpose but unsure of their individual responsibilities. Noyce quickly ran up against the limits of that kind of management and resigned as president in 1975, handing over the reins to Moore. Noyce continued to be a presence at Intel until his death, but he became more engaged in mentoring and providing seed capital to promising entrepreneurs. One of his most devoted acolytes was none other than Steve Jobs, who relied on Noyce's advice in the formative days of Apple Computer. Thus, Bob Noyce played a major part in each stage of the innovations that resulted in personal computers.