Esquire Magazine,, December 1983, pp. 346-374.
America is today in the
midst of a great technological revolution. With the advent of the silicon chip,
information processing, communications, and the national economy have been
strikingly altered. The new technology is changing how we live, how we work, how
we think. The revolution didn't just happen; it was engineered by a small
number of people, principally Middle Americans, whose horizons were as
unlimited as the Iowa sky. collectively, they engineered Tomorrow. Foremost
among them is Robert Noyce.
Tom
Wolfe
The
Tinkerings of Robert Noyce
How
the Sun Rose on the Silicon Valley
First
published in Esquire Magazine, December 1983,
Copyright© by Tom Wolfe.
Reproduced by Permission of International
Creative Management.
For
academic use only.
Source: https://web.stanford.edu/class/e145/2007_fall/materials/noyce.html
In 1948 there were seven
thousand people in Grinnell, Iowa, including more than one who didn't dare take
a drink in his own house without pulling the shades down first. It was against
the law to sell liquor in Grinnell, but it was perfectly legal to drink it at
home. So it wasn't that. It wasn't even that someone
might look in through the window and disapprove. God knew Grinnell had more
than its share of White Ribbon teetotalers, but by 1948 alcohol was hardly the
mark of Cain it had once been. No, those timid souls with their fingers through
the shade loops inside the white frame houses on Main Street and Park Street
were thinking of something else altogether.
They happened to live on
land originally owned by the Congregational minister who had founded the town
in 1854, Josiah Grinnell. Josiah Grinnell had sold off lots with covenants, in
perpetuity, stating that anyone who allowed alcohol to be drunk on his property
forfeited ownership. In perpetuity! In perpetuity was forever,
and 1948 was not even a hundred years later. In 1948 there were people walking
around Grinnell who had known Josiah Grinnell personally. They were getting
old; Grinnell had died in 1891; but they were still walking around. So... why
take a chance!
The plain truth was,
Grinnell had Middle West written all over it. It was squarely in the middle of
Iowa's Midland corn belt, where people on the farms said "crawdad"
instead of crayfish and "barn lot" instead of barnyard. Grinnell had
been one of many Protestant religious communities established in the
mid-nineteenth century after Iowa became a state and settlers from the East
headed for the farmlands. The streets were lined with white clapboard houses
and elm trees, like a New England village. And today, in 1948, the
hard-scrubbed Octagon Soap smell of nineteenth century Protestantism still
permeated the houses and Main Street as well. That was no small part of what
people in the East thought of when they heard the term "Middle West.
" For thirty years writers such as Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and
Carl Van Vechten had been prompting the most
delicious sniggers with their portraits of the churchy, narrow minded Middle
West. The Iowa painter Grant Wood was thinking of farms like the ones around
Grinnell when he did his famous painting American Gothic. Easterners
recognized the grim, juiceless couple in Wood's picture right away. There were
John Calvin's and John Knox's rectitude reigning in the sticks.
In the fall of 1948
Harry Truman picked out Grinnell as one of the stops on his whistle-stop
campaign tour, one of the hamlets where he could reach out to the little
people, the average Americans of the heartland, the people untouched by the
sophisticated opinion-makers of New York and Washington. Speaking from the rear
platform of his railroad car, Truman said he would never forget Grinnell,
because it was Grinnell College, the little Congregational academy over on Park
Street, that had given him his first honorary degree. The President's fond
recollection didn't cut much ice, as it turned out. The town had voted
Republican in every presidential election since the first time Abraham Lincoln
ran, in 1860, and wasn't about to change for Harry Truman.
On the face of it, there
you had Grinnell Iowa, in 1948: a piece of mid-nineteenth century American
history frozen solid in the middle of the twentieth. It was one of the last
towns in America that people back east would have figured to become the
starting point of a bolt into the future that would create the very
substructure, the electronic grid, of life in the year 2000 and beyond.
On the other hand, it
wouldn't have surprised Josiah Grinnell in the slightest.
It was in the summer of
1948 that Grant Gale, a forty-five-year-old physics professor at Grinnell
College, ran across an item in the newspaper concerning a former classmate of
his at the University of Wisconsin named John Bardeen. Bardeen's father had
been dean of medicine at Wisconsin, and Gale's wife Harriet's father had been
dean of the engineering school, and so Bardeen and Harriet had grown up as
fellow faculty brats, as the phrase went. Both Gale and Bardeen had majored in
electrical engineering. Eventually Bardeen had taught physics at the University
of Minnesota and had then left the academic world to work for Bell
Laboratories, the telephone company's main research center, in Murray Hill, New
Jersey. And now, according to the item, Bardeen and another engineer at Bell,
Walter Brattain, had invented a novel little device they called a transistor.
It was only an item,
however: the invention of the transistor in 1948 did not create headlines. The
transistor apparently performed the same function as the vacuum tube, which was
an essential component of telephone relay systems and radios. Like the vacuum
tube, the transistor could isolate a specific electrical signal, such as a
radio wave, and amplify it. But the transistor did not require glass tubing, a
vacuum, a plate, or a cathode. It was nothing more than two
minute gold wires leading to a piece of processed germanium less than a
sixteenth of an inch long. Germanium, an element found in coal, was an
insulator, not a conductor. But if the germanium was contaminated with
impurities, it became a "semiconductor." A vacuum tube was also a
semiconductor; the vacuum itself, like the germanium, was an insulator. But as
every owner of a portable radio knew, vacuum tubes drew a lot of current,
required a warm-up interval before they would work, and then got very hot. A
transistor eliminated all these problems and, on top of that, was about fifty
times smaller than a vacuum tube.
So far, however, it was
impossible to mass-produce transistors, partly because the gold wires had to be
made by hand and attached by hand two thousandths of an inch apart. But that
was the telephone company's problem. Grant Gale wasn't interested in any
present or future applications of the transistor in terms of products. He hoped
the transistor might offer a way to study the flow of electrons through a solid
(the germanium), a subject physicists had speculated
about for decades. He thought it would be terrific to get some transistors for
his physics department at Grinnell. So he wrote to
Bardeen at Bell Laboratories. Just to make sure his request didn't get lost in
the shuffle, he also wrote to the president of Bell Laboratories, Oliver
Buckley. Buckley was from Sloane, Iowa, and happened to be a Grinnell graduate.
So by the fall of 1948 Gale had obtained two of the
first transistors ever made, and he presented the first academic instruction in
solid-state electronics available anywhere in the world, for the benefit of the
eighteen students majoring in physics at Grinnell College.
One of Grant Gale's
senior physics majors was a local boy named Robert Noyce, whom Gale had known
for years. Bob and his brothers, Donald, Gaylord, and Ralph, lived just down
Park Street and used to rake leaves, mow the lawn, baby-sit, and do other
chores for the Gales. Lately Grant Gale had done more than his share of
agonizing over Bob Noyce. Like his brothers, Bob was a bright student, but he
had just been thrown out of school for a semester, and it had taken every bit
of credit Gale had in the local favor bank, not only with other faculty members
but also with the sheriff, to keep the boy from being expelled for good and
stigmatized with a felony conviction.
Bob Noyce's father,
Ralph Sr. was a Congregational minister. Not only that, both of his
grandfathers were Congregational ministers. But that hadn't helped at all. In
an odd way, after the thing happened, the boy's clerical lineage had
boomeranged on him. People were going around saying, "Well, what do you
expect from a preacher's son?" It was as if people in Grinnell
unconsciously agreed with Sherwood Anderson that underneath the righteousness
the midwestern Protestant preachers urged upon them, and which they themselves
professed to uphold, lived demons of weakness, perversion, and hypocrisy that
would break loose sooner or later.
No one denied that the
Noyce boys were polite and proper in all outward appearances. They were all
members of the Boy Scouts. They went to Sunday School and the main Sunday
service at the First Congregational Church and were active in the church youth
groups. They were pumped full of Congregationalism until it was spilling over.
Their father, although a minister, was not the minister of the First
Congregational Church. He was the associate superintendent of the Iowa
Conference of Congregational Churches, whose
headquarters were at the college. The original purpose of the college had been
to provide a good academic Congregational education, and many of the graduates
became teachers. The Conference was a coordinating council rather than a
governing body, since a prime tenet of the Congregational Church embedded in its
name, was that each congregation was autonomous. Congregationalists rejected
the very idea of a church hierarchy. A Congregational minister was not supposed
to be a father or even a shepherd, but, rather, a teacher. Each member of the
congregation was supposed to internalize the moral precepts of the church and
be his own priest dealing directly with God. So the
job of secretary of the Iowa Conference of Congregational Churches was anything
but a position of power. It didn't pay much, either.
The Noyces didn't own
their own house. They lived in a two-story white clapboard house that was owned
by the church at Park Street and Tenth Avenue, at the college.
Not having your own
house didn't carry the social onus in Grinnell that it did in the East. There
was no upper crust in Grinnell. There were no top people who kept the social
score in such matters. Congregationalists rejected the idea of a social
hierarchy as fiercely as they did the idea of a religious hierarchy. The
Congregationalists, like the Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, and United
Brethren, were Dissenting Protestants. They were direct offshoots of the
Separatists, who had split off from the Church of England in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries and settled New England. At bottom, their doctrine of the
autonomous congregation was derived from their hatred of the British system of
class and status, with its endless gradations, topped off by the Court and the
aristocracy. Even as late as 1948 the typical small town of the Middle West,
like Grinnell, had nothing approaching a country club set. There were subtle
differences in status in Grinnell, as in any other place, and it was better to
be rich than poor, but there were only two obvious social ranks: those who were
devout, educated, and hardworking, and those who weren't. Genteel poverty did
not doom one socially in Grinnell. Ostentation did. The Noyce boys worked at
odd jobs to earn their pocket money. That was socially correct as well as
useful. To have devoted the same time to taking tennis lessons or riding
lessons would have been a gaffe in Grinnell.
Donald, the oldest of
the four boys, had done brilliantly at the college and had just received his
Ph.D. in chemistry at Columbia University and was about to join the faculty of
the University of California at Berkeley. Gaylord, the second oldest, was
teaching school in Turkey. Bob, who was a year younger than Gaylord, had done
so well in science at Grinnell High School that Grant Gale had invited him to
take the freshman physics course at the college during his high school senior
year. He became one of Gale's star students and most tireless laboratory
workers from that time on. Despite his apparent passion for the scientific
grind, Bob Noyce turned out to be that much-vaunted creature, the well-rounded
student. He was a trim, muscular boy, five feet eight, with thick dark brown
hair, a strong jawline, and a long, broad nose that gave him a rugged
appearance. He was the star diver on the college swimming team and won the
Midwest Conference championship in 1947. He sang in choral groups, played the
oboe, and was an actor with the college dramatic society. He also acted in a
radio drama workshop at the college, along with his friend Peter Hackes and some others who were interested in broadcasting,
and was the leading man in a soap opera that was broadcast over station WOI in
Ames, Iowa.
Perhaps Bob Noyce was a
bit too well rounded for local tastes. There were people who still remembered
the business with the box kite back in 1941, when he was thirteen. It had been
harmless, but it could have been a disaster. Bob had come across some plans for
the building of a box kite, a kite that could carry a person aloft, in the
magazine Popular Science. So he and
Gaylord made a frame of cross-braced pine and covered it with a bolt of muslin.
They tried to get the thing up by running across a field and towing it with a
rope, but that didn't work terribly well. Then they hauled it up on the roof of
a barn, and Bob sat in the seat and Gaylord ran across the roof, pulling the
kite. and Bob was lucky he didn't break his neck when he and the thing hit the
ground. So then they tied it to the rear bumper of a
neighbor's car. With the neighbor at the wheel, Bob rode the kite and managed
to get about twelve feet off the ground and glide for thirty seconds or so and
come down without wrecking himself or any citizen's house or livestock.
Livestock. . . yes.
Livestock was a major capital asset in Grinnell, and livestock was at the heart
of what happened in 1948. In May a group of Bob
Noyce's friends in one of the dormitory houses at Grinnell decided to have a
luau, and he was in on the planning. The Second World War had popularized the
exotic ways of the South Pacific, so that in 1948 the luau was an
up-to-the-minute social innovation. The centerpiece of a luau was a whole
roasted suckling pig with an apple or a pineapple in its mouth. Bob Noyce,
being strong and quick, was one of the two boys assigned to procure the pig.
That night they sneaked onto a farm just outside of Grinnell and wrestled a
twenty-five-pound suckling out of the pigpen and arrived back at the luau to
great applause. Within a few hours the pig was crackling hot and had an apple
in its mouth and looked good enough for seconds and thirds, which everybody
helped himself to, and there was more applause. The next morning came the moral
hangover. The two boys decided to go see the farmer, confess, and pay for the
pig. They didn't quite understand how a college luau, starring his pig, would
score on the laugh meter with a farmer in midland Iowa. In the state of Iowa,
where the vast majority of people depended upon agriculture for a livelihood
and upon Protestant morality for their standards, not even stealing a
watermelon worth thirty-five cents was likely to be written off as a boyish
prank. Stealing a pig was larceny. The farmer got the sheriff and insisted on
bringing criminal charges. There was only so much that Ralph Noyce, the
preacher with the preacher's son, could do. Grant Gale, on the other hand, was
the calm, well-respected third party. He had two difficult tasks: to keep Bob
out of jail and out of court and to keep the college administration from
expelling him. There was never any hope at all of a mere slap on the wrist. The
compromise Grant Gale helped work out - a one-semester suspension - was the
best deal Bob could have hoped for realistically.
The Night of the Luau
Pig was quite a little scandal on the Grinnell Richter scale. So Gale was all the more impressed by the way Bob Noyce took
it. The local death-ray glowers never broke his confidence. All the Noyce boys
had a profound and, to tell the truth, baffling confidence. Bob had a certain
way of listening and staring. He would lower his head slightly and look up with
a gaze that seemed to be about one hundred amperes. While he looked at you he
never blinked and never swallowed. He absorbed everything you said and then
answered very levelly in a soft baritone voice and often with a smile that
showed off his terrific set of teeth. The stare, the voice, the smile; it was
all a bit like the movie persona of the most famous of all Grinnell College's
alumni, Gary Cooper. With his strong face, his athlete's build, and the Gary
Cooper manner, Bob Noyce projected what psychologists call the halo effect.
People with the halo effect seem to know exactly what they're doing and,
moreover, make you want to admire them for it. They make you see the halos over
their heads.
Years later people would
naturally wonder where Bob Noyce got his confidence. Many came to the conclusion
it was as, much from his mother, Harriett Norton Noyce, as from his father. She
was a latter-day version of the sort of strong-willed, intelligent, New
England-style woman who had made such a difference during Iowa's pioneer days a
hundred years before. His mother and father, with the help of Rowland Cross,
who taught mathematics at Grinnell, arranged for Bob to take a job in the
actuarial department of Equitable Life in New York City for the summer. He
stayed on at the job during the fall semester, then came back to Grinnell at
Christmas and rejoined the senior class in January as the second semester
began. Gale was impressed by the aplomb with which the prodigal returned. In
his first three years Bob had accumulated so many extra credits, it would take him
only this final semester to graduate. He resumed college life, including the
extracurricular activities, without skipping a beat. But more than that, Gale
was gratified by the way Bob became involved with the new experimental device
that was absorbing so much of Gale's own time: the transistor.
Bob was not the only
physics major interested in the transistor, but he was the one who seemed most
curious about where this novel mechanism might lead. He went off to the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, in the fall to begin his
graduate work. When he brought up the subject of the transistor at MIT, even to
faculty members, people just looked at him. Even those who had heard of it
regarded it merely as a novelty fabricated by the telephone company. There was
no course work involving transistors or the theory of solid-state electronics.
His dissertation was a "Photoelectric Study of Surface States on
Insulators," which was at best merely background for solid-state
electronics. In this area MIT was far behind Grinnell College. For a good four
years Grant Gale remained one of the few people Bob Noyce could compare notes
with in this new field.
Well, it had been a
close one! What if Grant Gale hadn't gone to school with John Bardeen, and what
if Oliver Buckley hadn't been a Grinnell alumnus? And what if Gale hadn't
bothered to get in touch with the two of them after he read the little squib
about the transistor in the newspaper? What if he hadn't gone to bat for Bob
Noyce after the Night of the Luau Pig and the boy had been thrown out of
college and that had been that? After all, if Bob hadn't been able to finish at
Grinnell, he probably never would have been introduced to the transistor. He
certainly wouldn't have come across it at MIT in 1948. Given what Bob Noyce did
over the next twenty years, one couldn't help but wonder about the fortuitous
chain of events.
Fortuitous. . . well! How Josiah Grinnell, up on the plains of Heaven, must have
laughed over that!
GRANT GALE WAS the first
important physicist in Bob Noyce's career. The second was William Shockley.
After their ambitions had collided one last time, and they had parted company,
Noyce had concluded that he and Shockley were two very different people. But in
many ways they were alike
For a start, they both
had an amateur's hambone love of being on-stage. At MIT Noyce had sung in
choral groups. Early in the summer of 1953, after he had received his Ph.D., he
went over to Tufts College to sing and act in a program of musicals presented
by the college. The costume director was a girl named Elizabeth Bottomley, from
Barrington, Rhode Island, who had just graduated from Tufts, majoring in
English. They both enjoyed dramatics. Singing, acting, and skiing had become
the pastimes Noyce enjoyed most. He had become almost as expert at skiing as he
had been at diving. Noyce and Betty, as he called her, were married that fall.
In 1953 the MIT faculty
was just beginning to understand the implications of the transistor. But
electronics firms were already eager to have graduate electrical engineers who
could do research and development in the new field. Noyce was offered jobs by
Bell Laboratories, IBM, by RCA, and Philco. He went
to work for Philco, in Philadelphia, because Philco was starting from near zero in semiconductor
research and chances for rapid advancement seemed good. But Noyce was well
aware that the most important work was still being done at Bell Laboratories,
thanks in no small part to William Shockley.
Shockley had devised the
first theoretical framework for research into solid-state semiconductors as far
back as 1939 and was in charge of the Bell Labs team that included John Bardeen
and Walter Brattain. Shockley had also originated the "junction transistor,"
which turned the transistor from an exotic laboratory instrument into a
workable item. By 1955 Shockley had left Bell and returned to Palo Alto,
California, where he had grown up near Stanford University, to form his own
company, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, with start up
money provided by Arnold Beckman of Beckman Instruments. Shockley opened up
shop in a glorified shed on South San Antonio Road in Mountain View, which was
just south of Palo Alto. The building was made of concrete blocks with the
rafters showing. Aside from clerical and maintenance personnel, practically all
the employees were electrical engineers with doctorates. In a field this experimental there was nobody else worth hiring.
Shockley began talking about "my Ph.D. production line. "
Meanwhile, Noyce was not
finding Philco the golden opportunity he thought it
would be. Philco wanted good enough transistors to
stay in the game with GE and RCA, but it was not interested in putting money
into the sort of avant-garde research Noyce had in mind. In 1956
he resigned from Philco and moved from Pennsylvania
to California to join Shockley. The way he went about it was a classic example
of the Noyce brand of confidence. By now he and his wife, Betty, had two
children: Bill, who was two, and Penny, who was six months old. After a couple
of telephone conversations with Shockley, Noyce put himself and Betty on a
night flight from Philadelphia to San Francisco. They arrived in Palo Alto at
six A.M. By noon Noyce had signed a contract to buy a house. That afternoon he
went to Mountain View to see Shockley and ask for a job, projected the halo,
and got it.
The first months on
Shockley's Ph.D. production line were exhilarating. It wasn't really a
production line at all. Everything at this stage was research. Every day a
dozen young Ph.D.'s came to the shed at eight in the morning and began heating
germanium and silicon, another common element, in kilns to temperatures ranging
from 1,472 to 2,552 degrees Fahrenheit. They wore white lab coats, goggles, and
work gloves. When they opened the kiln doors weird streaks of orange and white
light went across their faces, and they put in the germanium or the silicon,
along with specks of aluminum, phosphorus, boron. and arsenic. Contaminating
the germanium or silicon with the aluminum, phosphorus, boron, and arsenic was
called doping. Then they lowered a small mechanical column into the goo so that
crystals formed on the bottom of the column, and they pulled the crystal out
and tried to get a grip on it with tweezers, and put it under microscopes and
cut it with diamond cutters, among other things, into minute slices, wafers,
chips; there were no names in electronics for these tiny forms. The kilns
cooked and bubbled away, the doors opened, the pale apricot light streaked over
the goggles, the tweezers and diamond cutters flashed, the white coats flapped,
the Ph. D.'s squinted through their microscopes, and Shockley moved between the
tables conducting the arcane symphony.
In pensive moments
Shockley looked very much the scholar, with his roundish face, his roundish
eyeglasses, and his receding hairline; but Shockley was not a man locked in the
pensive mode. He was an enthusiast, a raconteur, and a showman. At the outset his very personality was enough to keep everyone
swept up in the great adventure. When he lectured, as he often did at colleges
and before professional groups, he would walk up to the lectern and thank the
master of ceremonies and say that the only more flattering introduction he had
ever received was one he gave himself one night when the emcee didn't show up,
whereupon - bango!- a bouquet of red roses would pop up in
his hand. Or he would walk up to the lectern and say that tonight he was
getting into a hot subject, whereupon he would open up a book and - whump!
-a puff of smoke would rise up out of the pages.
Shockley was famous for
his homely but shrewd examples. One day a student confessed to being puzzled by
the concept of amplification, which was one of the prime functions of the
transistor. Shockley told him: "If you take a bale of hay and tie it to
the tail of a mule and then strike a match and set the bale of hay on fire, and
if you then compare the energy expended shortly thereafter by the mule with the
energy expended by yourself in the striking of the match, you will understand
the concept of amplification."
On November 1,1956,
Shockley arrived at the shed on South San Antonio Road beaming. Early that
morning he had received a telephone call informing him that he had won the
Nobel Prize for physics for the invention of the transistor; or, rather, that
he was co-winner, along with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. Shockley closed
up shop and took everybody to a restaurant called Dinah's Shack over on El
Camino Real, the road to San Francisco that had become Palo Alto's commercial
strip. He treated his Ph. D. production line and all the other employees to a
champagne breakfast. It seemed that Shockley's father was a mining engineer who
spent years out on remote durango terrain, in Nevada,
Manchuria and all over the world. Shockley's mother was like Noyce's. She was
an intelligent woman with a commanding will. The Shockleys
were Unitarians, the Unitarian Church being an offshoot of the Congregational.
Shockley Sr. was twenty years older than Shockley's mother and died when
Shockley was seventeen. Shockley's mother was determined that her son would
someday "set the world on fire," as she once put it. And now he had
done it. Shockley lifted a glass of champagne in Dinah's Shack, and it was as
if it were a toast back across a lot of hardwrought durango grit Octagon Soap sagebrush
Dissenting Protestant years to his father's memory and his mother's
determination.
That had been a great
day at Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. There weren't many more. Shockley was
magnetic, he was a genius, and he was a great research director - the best, in
fact. His forte was breaking a problem down to first principles. With a few
words and a few lines on a piece of paper he aimed any experiment in the right
direction. When it came to comprehending the young engineers on his Ph.D.
production line, however, he was not so terrific.
It never seemed to occur
to Shockley that his twelve highly educated elves just might happen to view
themselves the same way he had always viewed himself: which is to say, as young
geniuses capable of the sort of inventions Nobel Prizes were given for. One day
Noyce came to Shockley with some new results he had found in the laboratory.
Shockley picked up the telephone and called some former colleagues at Bell Labs
to see if they sounded right. Shockley never even realized that Noyce had gone
away from his desk seething. Then there was the business of the new management
techniques. Now that he was an entrepreneur, Shockley came up with some new ways
to run a company. Each one seemed to irritate the elves more than the one
before. For a start, Shockley published their salaries. He posted them on a
bulletin board. That way there would be no secrets. Then he started having the
employees rate one another on a regular basis. These were so-called peer
ratings, a device sometimes used in the military and seldom appreciated even
there. Everybody regarded peer ratings as nothing more than popularity
contests. But the real turning point was the lie detector. Shockley was
convinced that someone in the shed was sabotaging the project. The work was
running into inexplicable delays, but the money was running out on schedule. So he insisted that one employee roll up his sleeve and bare
his chest and let the electrodes be attached and submit to a polygraph
examination. No saboteur was ever found.
There were also some
technical differences of opinion. Shockley was interested in developing a
so-called four-layer diode. Noyce and two of his fellow elves, Gordon Moore and
Jean Hoerni, favored transistors. But at bottom it
was dissatisfaction with the boss and the lure of entrepreneurship that led to
what happened next.
In the summer of 1957
Moore, Hoerni, and five other engineers, but not
Noyce, got together and arrived at what became one of the primary business
concepts of the young semiconductor industry. In this business, it dawned on
them, capital assets in the traditional sense of plant, equipment, and raw
materials counted for next to nothing. The only plant you needed was a shed big
enough for the worktables. The only equipment you needed was some kilns,
goggles, microscopes, tweezers, and diamond cutters. The materials, silicon and
germanium, came from dirt and coal. Brainpower was the entire franchise. If the
seven of them thought they could do the job better than Shockley, there was
nothing to keep them from starting their own company. On that day was born the
concept that would make the semiconductor business as wild as show business:
defection capital.
The seven defectors went
to the Wall Street firm of Hayden Stone in search of start-up money. It was at
this point that they realized they had to have someone to serve as
administrator. So they turned to Noyce, who was still
with Shockley. None of them, including Noyce, had any administrative
experience, but they all thought of Noyce as soon as the question came
up. They didn't know exactly what they were looking for... but Noyce was
the one with the halo. He agreed to join them. He would continue to wear a white
lab coat and goggles and do research. But he would also be the coordinator. Of
the eight of them, he would be the one man who kept track, on a regular basis,
of all sides of the operation. He was twenty-nine years old.
Arthur Rock of Hayden
Stone approached twenty-two firms before he finally hooked the defectors up
with the Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation of New York. Fairchild was
owned by Sherman Fairchild, a bachelor bon vivant who lived in a futuristic
town house on East Sixty-fifth Street in Manhattan. The house was in two
sections connected by ramps. The ramps were fifty feet long in some cases,
enclosed in glass so that you could go up and down the ramps in all weather and
gaze upon the marble courtyard below. The place looked like something from out
of the Crystal Palace of Ming in Flash Gordon. The ramps were
for his Aunt May, who lived with him and was confined to a wheelchair and had
even more Fairchild money than he did. The chief executive officer of Fairchild
was John Carter, who had just come from the Corning Glass Company. He had been
the youngest vice president in the history of that old-line, family-owned firm.
He was thirty-six. Fairchild Camera and Instrument gave the defectors the money
to start up the new company, Fairchild Semiconductor, with the understanding
that Fairchild Carnera and Instrument would have the
right to buy Fairchild Semiconductor for $3 million at any time within the next
eight years.
Shockley took the
defections very hard. He seemed as much hurt as angered, and he was certainly
angry enough. A friend of Shockley's said to Noyce's wife, Betty: "You
must have known about this for quite some time. How on earth could you not tell
me?" That was a baffling remark, unless one regarded Shockley as the father
of the transistor and the defectors as the children he had taken beneath his
mantle of greatness.
If so, one had a point.
Years later, if anyone had drawn up a family tree for the semiconductor
industry, practically every important branch would have led straight from
Shockley's shed on South San Antonio Road. On the other hand, Noyce had been
introduced to the transistor not by Shockley but by John Bardeen, via Grant
Gale, and not in California but back in his own hometown, Grinnell, Iowa.
For that matter, Josiah
Grinnell had been a defector in his day, too, and there was no record that he
had ever lost a night's sleep over it.
Noyce, Gordon Moore,
Jean Hoerni and the other five defectors set up
Fairchild Semiconductor in a two-story warehouse building some speculator had
built out of tilt-up concrete slabs on Charleston Avenue in Mountain View,
about twelve blocks from Shockley's operation. Mountain View was in the
northern end of the Santa Clara Valley. In the business world
the valley was known mainly for its apricot, pear, and plum orchards. From the
work bays of the light-industry sheds that the speculators were beginning to
build in the valley you could look out and see the raggedy little apricot trees
they had never bother to bulldoze after they bought the land from the farmers.
A few well known electronics firms were already in the
valley: General Electric and IBM, as well as a company that had started up
locally, Hewlett-Packard. Stanford University was encouraging engineering
concerns to locate near Palo alto and use the university's research facilities.
The man who ran the program was a friend of Shockley's, Frederick E. Terman, whose father had originated the first scientific
measurement of human intelligence, the Stanford-Binet
IQ test.
IBM had a facility in
the valley that was devoted specifically to research rather than production.
Both IBM and Hewlett-Packard were trying to develop a highly esoteric and
colossally expensive new device, the electronic computer. Shockley had been the
first entrepreneur to come to the area to make semiconductors. After the defections his operation never got off the ground. Here in
the Santa Clara Valley, that left the field to Noyce and the others at
Fairchild.
Fairchild's start-up
couldn't have come at a better time. By 1957 there was sufficient demand from
manufacturers who merely wanted transistors instead of vacuum tubes, for use in
radios and other machines, to justify the new operation. But it was also in
1957 that the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I. In the electronics industry the ensuing space race had the effect
of coupling two new inventions - the transistor and the computer - and
magnifying the importance of both.
The first American
electronic computer known as ENIAC, had been developed by the Army during the
Second World War, chiefly as a means of computing artillery and bomb
trajectories. The machine was a monster. It was one hundred feet long and ten
feet high and required eighteen thousand vacuum tubes. The tubes generated so
much heat, the temperature in the room sometimes reached 120 degrees. What the
government needed was small computers that could be installed in rockets to
provide automatic onboard guidance. Substituting transistors for vacuum tubes
was an obvious way to cut down on the size. After Sputnik
the glamorous words in the semiconductor business were computers and miniaturization.
Other than Shockley
Semiconductor, Fairchild was the only semiconductor company in the Santa Clara
Valley, but Texas Instruments had entered the field in Dallas, as had Motorola
in Phoenix and Transitron and Raytheon in the Boston
area, where a new electronics industry was starting up as MIT finally began to
comprehend the new technology. These firms were all racing to refine the
production of transistors to the point where they might command the market. So
far refinement had not been anybody's long suit. No tourist dropping by
Fairchild, Texas Instruments, Motorola, or Transitron
would have had the faintest notion he was looking in on the leading edge of the
most advanced of all industries, electronics. The work bays, where the
transistors were produced looked like slightly sunnier versions of the garment
sweatshops of San Francisco's Chinatown. Here were rows of women hunched over
worktables, squinting through microscopes doing the most tedious and
frustrating sort of manual labor, cutting layers of silicon apart with diamond
cutters, picking little rectangles of them up with tweezers, trying to attach
wires to them, dropping them, rummaging around on the floor to find them again,
swearing, muttering, climbing back up to their chairs, rubbing their eyes,
squinting back through the microscopes, and driving themselves crazy some more.
Depending on how well the silicon or germanium had been cooked and doped,
anywhere from 50 to 90 percent of the transistors would turn out to be
defective even after all that, and sometimes the good ones would be the ones
that fell on the floor and got ruined.
Even for a machine as
simple as a radio the individual transistors had to be wired together, by hand,
until you ended up with a little panel that looked like a road map of West
Virginia. As for a computer, the wires inside a computer were sheer spaghetti.
Noyce had figured out a
solution. But fabricating it was another matter. There was something primitive
about cutting individual transistors out of sheets of silicon and then wiring
them back together in various series. Why not put them all on a single piece of
silicon without wires? The problem was that you would also have to carve, etch,
coat, and otherwise fabricate the silicon to perform all the accompanying
electrical functions as well, the functions ordinarily performed by insulators,
rectifiers, resistors, and capacitors. You would have to create an entire
electrical system, an entire circuit, on a little wafer or chip.
Noyce realized that he
was not the only engineer thinking along these lines, but he had never even
heard of Jack Kilby. Kilby was a thirty-six-year-old engineer working for Texas
lnstruments in Dallas. In January, 1959 Noyce made
his first detailed notes about a complete solid-state circuit. A month later
Texas Instruments announced that Jack Kilby had invented one. Kilby's
integrated circuit, as the invention was called, was made of germanium. Six
months later Noyce created a similar integrated circuit made of silicon and
using a novel insulating process developed by Jean Hoerni.
Noyce's silicon device turned out to be more efficient and more practical to
produce than Kilby's and set the standard for the industry. So
Noyce became known as the co-inventor of the integrated circuit. Nevertheless,
Kilby had unquestionably been first. There was an ironic echo of Shockley here.
Strictly speaking, Bardeen and Brattain, not Shockley, had invented the
transistor, but Shockley wasn't bashful about being known as the co-inventor.
And, now eleven years later, Noyce wasn't turning bashful either.
Noyce knew exactly what
he possessed in this integrated circuit, or microchip, as the press would call
it. Noyce knew that he had discovered the road to El Dorado.
El Dorado was the vast,
still-virgin territory of electricity. Electricity was already so familiar a
part of everyday life, only a few research engineers understood just how, young
and unexplored the terrain actually was. It had been only eighty years since
Edison invented the light bulb in 1879. It had been less than fifty years since
Lee De Forest, an inventor from Council Bluffs, Iowa had invented the vacuum
tube. The vacuum tube was based on the light bulb, but the vacuum tube opened
up fields the light bulb did not even suggest: long distance radio and
telephone communication. Over the past ten years, since Bardeen and Brattain
invented it in 1948, the transistor had become the modern replacement for the
vacuum tube. And now came Kilby's and Noyce's integrated circuit. The
integrated circuit was based on the transistor, but the integrated circuit
opened up fields the transistor did not even suggest. The integrated circuit
made it possible to create miniature computers, to put all the functions of the
mighty ENIAC on a panel the size of a playing card. Thereby the integrated
circuit opened up every field of engineering imaginable, from voyages to the
moon to robots, and many fields that had never been imagined, such as
electronic guidance counseling. It opened up so many fields that no one could
even come up with a single name to include them all. "The second
industrial revolution," "the age of the computer, " "the
microchip universe, " "the electronic grid," none of them, not
even the handy neologism "high tech. " could encompass all the
implications.
The importance of the
integrated circuit was certainly not lost on John Carter and Fairchild Camera
back un New York. In 1959 they exercised their option
to buy Fairchild Semiconductor for $3 million. The next day Noyce, Moore, Hoerni, and the other five former Shockley elves woke up
rich, or richer than they had ever dreamed of being. Each received $250,000
worth of Fairchild stock.
Josiah Grinnell grew
livid on the subject of alcohol. But he had nothing against money. He would
have approved.
Noyce didn't know what
to make of his new wealth. He was thirty-one years old. For the past four
years, ever since he had gone to work for Shockley, the semiconductor business
had not seemed like a business at all but an esoteric game in which young
electrical engineers competed for attaboy's and
the occasional round of applause after delivering a paper before the IEEE, the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. It was a game supercharged
by the fact that it was being played in the real world, to use a term that
annoyed scientists in the universities. Someone - Arnold Beckman, Sherman
Fairchild, whoever - was betting real money, and other bands of young elves, at
Texas Instruments, RCA, Bell, were out there competing with you by the real
world's rules, which required that you be practical as well as brilliant. Noyce
started working for Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 for twelve thousand dollars
a year. When it came to money, he had assumed that he, Like
his father, would always be on somebody's payroll. Now, in 1959, when he talked
to his father, he told him: "The money doesn't seem real. It's just a way
of keeping score."
Noyce took his family to
visit his parents fairly often. He and Betty now had three children, Bill,
Penny, and Polly, who was a year old. When they visited the folks, they went
off to church on Sunday with the folks as if it were all very much a part of
their lives. In fact, Noyce had started drifting away from Congregationalism
and the whole matter of churchgoing after he entered MIT. It was not a question
of rejecting it. He never rejected anything about his upbringing in Grinnell.
It was just that he was suddenly heading off somewhere else, down a different
road.
In that respect Noyce
was like a great many bright young men and women from Dissenting Protestant
families in the Middle West after the Second World War. They had been raised as
Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, United Brethren,
whatever. They had been led through the church door and prodded toward
religion, but it had never come alive for them. Sundays made their skulls feel
like dried-out husks. So they slowly walked away from
the church and silently, without so much as a growl of rebellion, congratulated
themselves on their independence of mind and headed into another way of life.
Only decades later, in most cases, would they discover how, absentmindedly,
inexplicably, they had brought the old ways along for the journey nonetheless.
It was as if... through some extraordinary mistake... they had been sewn into the
linings of their coats!
Now that he had some
money, Bob Noyce bought a bigger house. His and Betty's fourth child, Margaret,
was born in 1960, and they wanted each child to have a bedroom. But the thought
of moving into any of the "best" neighborhoods in the Palo Alto area
never even crossed his mind. The best neighborhoods were to be found in
Atherton, in Burlingame, which was known as very social, or in the swell old
sections of Palo Alto, near Stanford University. Instead, Noyce bought a
California version of a French country house in Los Altos, a white stucco house
with a steeply pitched roof. It was scenic up there in the hills, and cooler in
the summer than it was down in the flatlands near the bay. The house had plenty
of room, and he and Betty would be living a great deal better than most couples
their age, but Los Altos folks had no social cachet and the house was not going
to make House & Garden come banging on the door. No one
could accuse them of being ostentatious.
John Carter appointed
Noyce general manager of the entire division, Fairchild Semiconductor, which
was suddenly one of the hottest new outfits in the business world. NASA chose
Noyce's integrated circuits for the first computers that astronauts would use
on board their spacecraft (in the Gemini program). After that, orders poured
in. In ten years Fairchild sales rose from a few thousand dollars a year to
$130 million, and the number of employees rose from the original band of elves
to twelve thousand. As the general manager, Noyce now had to deal with a matter
Shockley had dealt with clumsily and prematurely, namely, new management
techniques for this new industry.
One day John Carter came
to Mountain View for a close look at Noyce's semiconductor operation. Carter's
office in Syosset, Long Island, arranged for a limousine and chauffeur to be at
his disposal while he was in California. So Carter
arrived at the tilt-up concrete building in Mountain View in the back of a
black Cadillac limousine with a driver in the front wearing the complete
chauffeur's uniform - the black suit, the white shirt, the black necktie, and
the black visored cap. That in itself was enough to
turn heads at Fairchild Semiconductor. Nobody had ever seen a limousine and a
chauffeur out there before. But that wasn't what fixed the day in everybody's
memory. It was the fact that the driver stayed out there for almost eight
hours, doing nothing. He stayed out there in his uniform, with
his visored hat on, in the front seat of the
limousine, all day, doing nothing but waiting for a man who was somewhere
inside. John Carter was inside having a terrific chief executive officer's time
for himself. He took a tour of the plant, he held conferences, he looked at
figures, he nodded with satisfaction, he beamed his urbane Fifty-seventh Street
Biggie CEO charm. And the driver sat out there all day engaged in the task of
supporting a visored cap with his head. People
started leaving their workbenches and going to the front windows just to take a
look at this phenomenon. It seemed that bizarre. Here was a serf who did
nothing all day but wait outside a door in order to be at the service
of the haunches of his master instantly, whenever those haunches and the paunch
and the jowls might decide to reappear. It wasn't merely that this little peek
at the New York-style corporate high life was unusual out here in the brown
hills of the Santa Clara Valley. It was that it seemed terribly wrong.
A certain instinct Noyce
had about this new industry and the people who worked in it began to take on the
outlines of a concept. Corporations in the East adopted a feudal approach to
organization, without even being aware of it. There were kings and lords, and
there were vassals, soldiers, yeomen, and serfs, with layers of protocol and
perquisites, such as the car and driver, to symbolize superiority and establish
the boundary lines. Back east the CEOs had offices with carved paneling, fake
fireplaces, escritoires, bergeres, leather-bound
books, and dressing rooms, like a suite in a baronial manor house. Fairchild
Semiconductor needed a strict operating structure, particularly in this period
of rapid growth, but it did not need a social structure. In fact, nothing could
be worse. Noyce realized how much he detested the eastern corporate system of
class and status with its endless gradations, topped off by the CEOs and
vice-presidents who conducted their daily lives as if they were a corporate
court and aristocracy. He rejected the idea of a social hierarchy at Fairchild.
Not only would there be
no limousines and chauffeurs, there would not even be any reserved parking
places. Work began at eight A.M. for one and all, and it would be first come,
first served, in the parking lot, for Noyce, Gordon Moore, Jean Hoerni, and everybody else. "If you come late,"
Noyce liked to say, "you just have to park in the back forty." And
there would be no baronial office suites. The glorified warehouse on Charleston
Road was divided into work bays and a couple of rows of cramped office
cubicles. The cubicles were never improved. The decor remained Glorified
Warehouse, and the doors were always open. Half the time Noyce, the chief
administrator, was out in the laboratory anyway, wearing his white lab coat.
Noyce came to work in a coat and tie. but soon the jacket and the tie were off.
and that was fine for any other man in the place too. There were no rules of
dress at all, except for some unwritten ones. Dress should be modest, modest in
the social as well as the moral sense. At Fairchild
there were no hard-worsted double-breasted pinstripe suits and shepherd's-check
neckties. Sharp, elegant, fashionable, or alluring dress was a social blunder.
Shabbiness was not a sin. Ostentation was.
During the start-up
phase at Fairchild Semiconductor there had been no sense of bosses and employees.
There had been only a common sense of struggle out on a frontier. Everyone had
internalized the goals of the venture. They didn't need exhortations from
superiors. Besides, everyone had been so young! Noyce, the administrator or
chief coordinator or whatever he should be called, had been just about the
oldest person on the premises, and he had been barely thirty. And now, in the
early 1960s, thanks to his athletic build and his dark brown hair with the
Campus Kid hairline, he still looked very young. As Fairchild expanded, Noyce
didn't even bother trying to find "experienced management personnel."
Out here in California, in the semiconductor industry, they didn't exist.
Instead, he recruited engineers right out of the colleges and graduate schools
and gave them major responsibilities right off the bat. There was no
"staff," no "top management" other than the eight partners
themselves. Major decisions were not bucked up a chain of command. Noyce held
weekly meetings of people from all parts of the operation, and whatever had to
be worked out was worked out right there in the room. Noyce wanted them all to
keep internalizing the company's goals and to provide their own motivations,
just as they had during the start-up phase. If they did that, they would have
the capacity to make their own decisions.
The young engineers who
came to work for Fairchild could scarcely believe how much responsibility was
suddenly thrust upon them. Some twenty-four-year-old just out of graduate
school would find himself in charge of a major project with no one looking over
his shoulder. A problem would come up, and he couldn't stand it, and he would
go to Noyce and hyperventilate and ask him what to do. And Noyce would lower
his head, turn on his 100 ampere eyes, listen, and say: "Look, here are
your guidelines. You've got to consider A, you've got to consider B. and you've
got to consider C. " Then he would turn on the Gary Cooper smile:
"But if you think I'm going to make your decision for you, you're
mistaken. Hey... it's your ass."
Back east, in the
conventional corporation, any functionary wishing to make an unusually large
purchase had to have the approval of a superior or two or three superiors or
even a committee, a procedure that ate up days, weeks, in paperwork. Noyce turned
that around. At Fairchild any engineer, even a weenie just out of Cal Tech,
could make any purchase he wanted, no matter how enormous, unless someone else
objected strongly enough to try to stop it. Noyce called this the Short Circuit
Paper Route. There was only one piece of paper involved, the piece of paper the
engineer handed somebody in the purchasing department.
The spirit of the
start-up phase! My God! Who could forget the exhilaration of the past few
years! To be young and free out here on the silicon frontier! Noyce was
determined to maintain that spirit during the expansion phase. And for the time
being, at least. here in the early 1960s. the notion of a permanent start-up
operation didn't seem too farfetched. Fairchild was unable to coast on the
tremendous advantage Noyce's invention of the integrated circuit had provided.
Competitors were setting up shop in the Santa Clara Valley like gold rushers.
And where did they come from? Why, from Fairchild itself! And how could that
be? Nothing to it... Defection capital!
Defectors (or redefectors) from Fairchild started up more than fifty
companies, all making or supplying microchips. Raytheon Semiconductor, Signetics. General Microelectronics, Intersil.
Advanced Micro Devices. Qualidyne - off they spun, each
with a sillier pseudotech engineerologism
for a name than the one before. Defectors! What a merry game that was. Jean Hoerni and three of the other original eight defectors from
Shockley defected from Fairchild to form what would soon become known as Teledyne
Semiconductors, and that was only round one. After all, why not make all the
money for yourself! The urge to use defection capital was so irresistible that
the word defection, with its note of betrayal, withered away.
Defectors were merely the Fairchildren, as Adam Smith
dubbed them. Occasionally defectors from other companies, such as the men from
Texas Instruments and Westinghouse who started Siliconix,
moved into the Santa Clara Valley to join the free-for-all. But it was the Fairchildren who turned the Santa Clara Valley into the
Silicon Valley. Acre by acre the fruit trees were uprooted, and two-story
Silicon Modern office buildings and factories went up. The state of California
built a new freeway past the area, Route 280. Children heard the phrase
"Silicon Valley" so often, they grew up thinking it was the name on
the map.
Everywhere the Fairchild
émigrés went, they took the Noyce approach with them. It wasn't enough to start
up a company; you had to start up a community, a community in which there were
no social distinctions, and it was first come, first served, in the parking
lot, and everyone was supposed to internalize the common goals. The atmosphere
of the new companies was so democratic, it startled businessmen from the East.
Some fifty-five-year-old biggie with his jowls swelling up smoothly from out of
his F. R. Tripler modified-spread white collar and silk jacquard print necktie
would call up from GE or RCA and say, "This is Harold B. Thatchwaite," and the twenty-three-year-old secretary
on the other end of the line, out in the Silicon Valley, would say in one of
those sunny blond pale-blue-eyed California voices: "Just a minute, Hal,
Jack will be right with you. " And once he got to California and met this
Jack for the first time, there he would be, the CEO himself, all of
thirty-three vears old, wearing no jacket, no
necktie, just a checked shirt, khaki pants, and a pair of moccasins with welted
seams the size of jumper cables. Naturally the first sounds out of this Jack's
mouth would be: "Hi, Hal. "
It was the 1960s. and
people in the East were hearing a lot about California surfers, California
bikers, hot rodders, car customizers, California
hippies, and political protesters, and the picture they got was of young people
in jeans and T-shirts who were casual, spontaneous, impulsive, emotional,
sensual, undisciplined, and obnoxiously proud of it. So
these semiconductor outfits in the Silicon Valley with their CEOs dressed like
camp counselors struck them as the business versions of the same thing.
They couldn't have been
more wrong. The new breed of the Silicon Valley lived for work. They were
disciplined to the point of back spasms. They worked long hours and kept
working on weekends. They became absorbed in their companies the way men once
had in the palmy days of the automobile industry. In the Silicon Valley a young engineer would go to work at eight in the
morning, work right through lunch, leave the plant at six-thirty or seven,
drive home, play with the baby for half an hour, have dinner with his wife, get
in bed with her, give her a quick toss, then get up and leave her there in the
dark and work at his desk for two or three hours on "a coupla
things I had to bring home with me."
Or else he would leave
the plant and decide, well, maybe he would drop in at the Wagon Wheel for a
drink before he went home. Every year there was some place, the Wagon Wheel,
Chez Yvonne, Rickey's, the Roundhouse, where members of this esoteric
fraternity, the young men and women of the semiconductor industry, would head
after work to have a drink and gossip and brag and trade war stories about
phase jitters, phantom circuits, bubble memories, pulse trains, bounceless contacts, burst modes, leapfrog tests, p-n
junctions, sleeping-sickness modes, slow-death episodes, RAMs, NAKs, MOSes, PCMs, PROMs, PROM blowers, PROM burners, PROM
blasters, and teramagnitudes, meaning multiples of a
million millions. So then he wouldn't get home until
nine, and the baby was asleep, and dinner was cold, and the wife was frosted
off, and he would stand there and cup his hands as if making an imaginary
snowball and try to explain to her... while his mind trailed off to other
matters, LSIs, VLSIs, alpha flux, de-rezzing, forward
biases, parasitic signals, and that terasexy little
cookie from Signetics he had met at the Wagon Wheel,
who understood such things.
It was not a great way
of life for marriages. By the late 1960s the toll of divorces seemed to those
in the business to be as great as that of NASA's boomtowns, Cocoa Beach,
Florida. and Clear Lake. Texas, where other young engineers were giving
themselves over to a new technology as if it were a religious mission. The
second time around the tended to "intramarry.
" They married women who worked for Silicon Valley companies and who could
comprehend and even learn to live with their twenty-four-hour obsessions. In
the Silicon Valley an engineer was under pressure to
reinvent the integrated circuit every six months. In 1959 Noyce's invention had
made it possible to put an entire electrical circuit on a chip of silicon the
size of a fingernail. By 1964 you had to know how to put ten circuits on a chip
that size just to enter the game, and the stakes kept rising. Six years later
the figure was one thousand circuits on a single chip; six years after that it
would be thirty-two thousand, and everyone was talking about how the real
breakthrough would be sixty-four thousand. Noyce himself led the race; by 1968
he had a dozen new integrated circuit and transistor patents. And what amazing
things such miniaturization made possible! In December 1968 NASA sent the first
manned flight to the moon, Apollo 8. Three astronauts, Frank Borman. James Lovell, and William Anders, flew into earth
orbit, then fired a rocket at precisely the right moment in order to break free
of the earth's gravitational field and fly through the minute
"window" in space that would put them on course to the moon rather
than into orbit around the sun, from which there could be no return. They flew
to the moon, went into orbit around it, saw the dark side, which no one had
ever seen, not even with a telescope, then fired a rocket at precisely the
right moment in order to break free of the moon's gravitational pull and go
into the proper trajectory for their return to earth. None of it would have
been possible without onboard computers. People were beginning to talk about
all that the space program was doing for the computer sciences. Noyce knew it
was the other way around. Only the existence of a miniature computer two feet
long, one foot wide, and six inches thick -exactly three thousand times smaller
than the old ENIAC and far faster and more reliable - made the flight of Apollo
8 possible. And there would have been no miniature computer without
the integrated circuits invented by Noyce and Kilby and refined by Noyce and
the young semiconductor zealots of the Silicon Valley, the new breed who were
building the road to El Dorado.
Noyce used to go into a
slow burn that year, 1968, when the newspapers, the magazines, and the
television networks got on the subject of the youth. The youth was
a favorite topic in 1968. Riots broke out on the campuses as the antiwar
movement reached its peak following North Vietnam's Tet offensive. Black youths
rioted in the cities. The Yippies, supposedly a
coalition of hippies and campus activists, managed to sabotage the Democratic
National Convention by setting off some highly televised street riots. The
press seemed to enjoy presenting these youths as the avant-garde who were
sweeping aside the politics and morals of the past and shaping America's
future. The French writer Jean-Francois Revel toured American campuses and
called the radical youth homo novus, "the
New Man," as if they were the latest, most advanced product of human
evolution itself. after the manner of the superchildren in Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's
End.
Homo novus? As Noyce saw it, these so-called radical youth movements were shot
through with a yearning for a preindustrial Arcadia. They wanted, or thought
they wanted, to return to the earth and live on organic vegetables and play
folk songs from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They were anti technology. They looked upon science as an instrument
monopolized by the military-industrial complex. They used this phrase,
"the military-industrial complex," all the time. If industry or the
military underwrote scientific research in the universities - and they
underwrote a great deal of it - then that research was evil. The universities
were to be pure and above exploitation, except, of course, by ideologues of the
Left. The homo novus had set up a
chain of logic that went as follows: since science equals the
military-industrial complex, and the military-industrial complex equals
capitalism, and capitalism equals fascism, therefore science equals fascism.
And therefore, these much-vaunted radical youths, these shapers of the future,
attacked the forward positions of American technology, including the space
program and the very idea of, the computer. And therefore
these creators of the future were what? They were Luddites. They wanted to
destroy the new machines. They were the reactionaries of the new age. They were
an avant-garde to the rear. They wanted to call off the future. They were
stillborn, ossified, prematurely senile.
If you wanted to talk
about the creators of the future, well, here they were here, in the Silicon
Valley! Just before Apollo 8 circled the moon, Bob Noyce
turned forty-one. By age forty-one he had become such a good skier, people were
urging him to enter competitions. He had taken up hang gliding and scuba
diving. When his daughter Penny was almost fourteen, he asked her what she
wanted for her birthday, and she said she wanted to drop from an airplane by
parachute. Noyce managed to convince her to settle for glider lessons instead.
Then, because it made him restless to just stand around an airfield and watch
her soar up above, he took flying lessons, bought an airplane, and began flying
the family up through the mountain passes to Aspen, Colorado, for skiing
weekends. He had the same lean, powerful build as he had had twenty years
before, when he was on the swimming team at Grinnell College. He had the same
thick dark brown hair and the same hairline. It looked as if every hair in his
head were nailed in. He looked as if he could walk out the door any time he
wanted to and win another Midwest Conference diving championship. And he was
one of the oldest CEOs in the semiconductor business! He was
the Edison of the bunch! He was the father of the Silicon
Valley!
The rest of the hotshots
were younger. It was a business dominated by people in their twenties and
thirties. In the Silicon Valley there was a phenomenon
known as burnout. After five or ten years of obsessive racing for the
semiconductor high stakes, five or ten years of lab work, work lunches,
workaholic drinks at the Wagon Wheel, and work-battering of the wife and
children, an engineer would reach his middle thirties and wake up one day; and
he was finished. The game was over. It was called burnout, suggesting mental
and physical exhaustion brought about by overwork. But Noyce was convinced it
was something else entirely. It was...age, or age and status. In the
semiconductor business, research engineering was like pitching in baseball; it
was 60 percent of the game. Semiconductor research was one of those highly
mathematical sciences, such as microbiology, in which, for reasons one could
only guess at, the great flashes, the critical moments of inspiration, came
mainly to those who were young, often to men in their twenties. The thirty-five
year-old burnouts weren't suffering from exhaustion, as Noyce saw it. They were
being overwhelmed, outperformed, by the younger talent coming up behind them.
It wasn't the central nervous system that was collapsing, it was the ego.
Now here you saw youth
in the vanguard, on the leading edge. Here you saw the youths who were, in
fact, shaping the future. Here you saw, if you insisted on the term, the homo
novus!
But why insist? For they
were also of the same stripe as Josiah Grinnell, who had founded Grinnell,
Iowa, at the age of thirty three!
It was in 1968 that
Noyce pulled off the redefection of all redefections. Fairchild Semiconductor
had generated tremendous profits for the parent company back east. It now
appeared to Noyce that John Carter and Sherman Fairchild had been diverting too
much of that money into new start-up ventures, outside the semiconductor field.
As a matter of fact, Noyce disliked many things "back east." He
disliked the periodic trips to New York, for which he dressed in gray suits,
white shirts, and neckties and reported to the royal corporate court and wasted
days trying to bring them up to date on what was happening in California.
Fairchild was rather enlightened, for an eastern corporation, but the truth
was, there was no one back east who understood how to run a corporation in the
United States in the second half of the twentieth century. Back east they had
never progressed beyond the year 1940. Consequently, they were still hobbled by
all of the primitive stupidities of bureaucratism and labor-management battles.
They didn't have the foggiest comprehension of the Silicon Valley idea of a
corporate community. The brightest young businessmen in the East were trained -
most notably at the Harvard Business School - to be little Machiavellian
princes. Greed and strategy were all that mattered. They were trained for
failure.
Noyce and Gordon Moore,
two of the three original eight Shockley elves still at Fairchild, decided to
form their own company. They went to Arthur Rock, who had helped provide the
start-up money for Fairchild Semiconductor when he was at Hayden Stone. Now
Rock had his own venture-capital operation. Noyce took great pleasure in going
through none of the steps in corporate formation that the business schools
talked about. He and Moore didn't even write up a proposal. They merely told
Rock what they wanted to do and put up $500,000 of their own money, $250,000
each. That seemed to impress Rock more than anything they could possibly have
written down, and he rounded up $2.51 million of the start-up money. A few
months later another $300,000 came, this time from Grinnell College. Noyce had
been on the college's board of trustees since 1962, and a board member had
asked him to give the college a chance to invest, should the day come when he
started his own company. So Grinnell College became
one of the gamblers betting on Noyce and Intel - the pseudotech
engineerologism Noyce and Moore dreamed up as the
corporate name. Josiah Grinnell would have loved it.
The defection of Noyce
and Moore from Fairchild was an earthquake even within an industry jaded by the
very subject of defections. In the Silicon Valley
everybody had looked upon Fairchild as Noyce's company. He was the magnet that
held the place together. With Noyce gone, it was obvious that the entire work
force would be up for grabs. As one wag put it, "People were practically
driving trucks over to Fairchild Semiconductor and loading up with
employees." Fairchild responded by pulling off one of the grossest raids
in corporate history. One day the troops who were left at Fairchild looked
across their partitions and saw a platoon of young men with terrific suntans
moving into the executive office cubicles. They would always remember what
terrific suntans they had. They were C. Lester Hogan, chief executive officer
of the Motorola semiconductor division in Phoenix, and his top echelon of
engineers and administrators. Or, rather, C. Lester Hogan of Motorola until
yesterday. Fairchild had hired the whole bunch away from Motorola and installed
them in place of Noyce & Co. like a matched set. There was plenty of
sunshine in the Santa Clara Valley, but nobody here had suntans like this bunch
from Phoenix. Fairchild had lured the leader of the young sun-gods out of the
Arizona desert in the most direct way imaginable. He had offered him an
absolute fortune in money and stock. Hogan received so much, the crowd at the
Wagon Wheel said, that henceforth wealth in the Silicon Valley would be
measured in units called hogans. *(Dirk Hanson, The
New Alchemists, Boston: Little Brown, 1982).
Noyce and Moore,
meanwhile, started up Intel in a tilt-up concrete building that Jean Hoerni and his group had built, but no longer used, in
Santa Clara, which was near Mountain View. Once again there was an echo of
Shockley. They opened up shop with a dozen bright young electrical engineers,
plus a few clerical and maintenance people, and bet everything on research and
product development. Noyce and Moore, like Shockley, put on the white coats and
worked at the laboratory tables. They would not be competing with Fairchild or
anyone else in the already established semiconductor markets. They had decided
to move into the most backward area of computer technology, which was data
storage, or "memory." A computer's memory was stored in ceramic
ringlets known as cores. Each ringlet contained one "bit" of
information, a "yes" or a "no, " in the logic of the binary
system of mathematics that computers employ. Within two years Noyce and Moore
had developed the 1103 memory chip, a chip of silicon and polysilicon the size
of two letters in a line of type. Each chip contained four thousand
transistors, did the work of a thousand ceramic ringlets, and did it faster.
The production line still consisted of rows of women sitting at tables as in
the old shed-and-rafter days, but the work bays now looked like something from
out of an intergalactic adventure movie. The women engraved the circuits on the
silicon photographically, wearing antiseptic Mars Voyage suits, headgear, and
gloves because a single speck of dust could ruin one of the miniature circuits.
The circuits were so small that "miniature" no longer sounded small
enough. The new word was "microminiature." Everything now took place
in an air-conditioned ice cube of vinyl tiles, stainless steel, fluorescent
lighting, and backlit plastic.
The 1103 memory chip
opened up such a lucrative field that other companies, including Fairchild,
fought desperately just to occupy the number-two position, filling the orders
Intel couldn't take care of. At the end of Intel's first year in business,
which had been devoted almost exclusively to research, sales totaled less than
three thousand dollars and the work force numbered forty-two. In 1972, thanks
largely to the 1103 chip, sales were $23.4 million and the work force numbered
1,002. In the next year sales almost tripled, to $66 million, and the work
force increased two and a half times, to 2,528.
So Noyce had the chance to run a new company from start-up to full
production precisely the way he thought Shockley should have run his in Palo
Alto back in the late 1950s. From the beginning Noyce gave all the engineers
and most of the office workers stock options. He had learned at Fairchild that
in a business so dependent upon research, stock options were a more powerful
incentive than profit sharing. People sharing profits naturally wanted to
concentrate on products that were already profitable rather than plunge into
avant-garde research that would not pay off in the short run even if it were
successful. But people with stock options lived for research breakthroughs. The
news would send a semiconductor company's stock up immediately, regardless of
profits.
Noyce's idea was that
every employee should feel that he could go as far and as fast in this industry
as his talent would take him. He didn't want any employee to look at the
structure of Intel and see a complex set of hurdles. It went without saying that
there would be no social hierarchy at Intel, no executive suites, no pinstripe
set, no reserved parking places, or other symbols of the hierarchy. But Noyce
wanted to go further. He had never liked the business of the office cubicles at
Fairchild. As miserable as they were, the mere possession of one symbolized
superior rank. At Intel executives would not be walled off in offices.
Everybody would be in one big room. There would be nothing but low partitions
to separate Noyce or anyone else from the lowliest stock boys trundling in the
accordion printout paper. The whole place became like a shed. When they first
moved into the building, Noyce worked at an old, scratched, secondhand metal
desk. As the company expanded, Noyce kept the same desk, and new stenographers,
just hired, were given desks that were not only newer but bigger and better
than his. Everybody noticed the old beat-up desk, since there was nothing to
keep anybody from looking at every inch of Noyce's office space. Noyce
enjoyed this subversion of the eastern corporate protocol of small metal desks
for underlings and large wooden desks for overlords.
At Intel, Noyce decided
to eliminate the notion of levels of management altogether. He and Moore ran
the show: that much was clear. But below them there were only the strategic
business segments, as they called them. They were comparable to the major
departments in an orthodox corporation, but they had far more autonomy. Each
was run like a separate corporation. Middle managers at Intel had more responsibility
than most vice-presidents back east. They were also much younger and got
lower-back pain and migraines earlier. At Intel, if the marketing division had
to make a major decision that would affect the engineering division, the
problem was not routed up a hierarchy to a layer of executives who oversaw both
departments. Instead, "councils," made up of people already working
on the line in the divisions that were affected, would meet and work it out
themselves. The councils moved horizontally, from problem to problem. They had
no vested power. They were not governing bodies but coordinating councils.
Noyce was a great
believer in meetings. The people in each department or work unit were
encouraged to convene meetings whenever the spirit moved them. There were rooms
set aside for meetings at Intel, and they were available on a first come, first
served basis, just like the parking spaces. Often meetings were held at lunch
time. That was not a policy; it was merely an example set by Noyce. There were
no executive lunches at Intel. Back east, in New York, executives treated lunch
as a daily feast of the nobility, a sumptuous celebration of their eminence, in
the Lucullan expense-account restaurants of Manhattan. The restaurants in the
East and West Fifties of Manhattan were like something from out of a dream.
They recruited chefs from all over Europe and the Orient. Pasta primavera, saucisson, sorrel mousse, homard
cardinal, terrine de legumes Montesquiou, paillard de pigeon, medallions of beef Chinese Gordon, veal
Valdostana, Verbena roast turkey with Hayman sweet
potatoes flown in from the eastern shore of Virginia, raspberry soufflé, baked
Alaska, zabaglione, pear torte, creme brulee; and the
wines! and the brandies! and the port! the Sambuca! the cigars! and the decor!
walls with lacquered woodwork and winking mirrors and sconces with little
pleated peach-colored shades, all of it designed by the very same decorators
who walked duchesses to parties for Halston on Eaton Square! and captains and maitre d's who made a fuss over you in movie French in
front of your clients and friends and fellow overlords! it was Mount Olympus in
mid-Manhattan every day from twelve-thirty to three P.M. and you emerged into
the pearl-gray light of the city with such ambrosia pumping through your veins
that even the clotted streets with the garbage men backing up their grinder
trucks and yelling, " 'Mon back, 'mon back, 'mon back, 'mon back," '
as if talking Urban Chippewa - even this became part of the bliss of one's
eminence in the corporate world! There were many chief executive officers who
kept their headquarters in New York long after the last rational reason for
doing so had vanished...because of the ineffable experience of being a CEO and
having lunch five days a week in Manhattan!
At Intel lunch had a
different look to it. You could tell when it was noon at Intel, because at noon
men in white aprons arrived at the front entrance gasping from the weight of
the trays they were carrying. The trays were loaded down with deli sandwiches
and waxed cups full of drinks with clear plastic tops, with globules of Sprite
or Diet Shasta sliding around the tops on the inside. That was your lunch. You
ate some sandwiches made of roast beef or chicken sliced into translucent
rectangles by a machine in a processing plant and then reassembled on the bread
in layers that gave off dank whiffs of hormones and chemicals, and you washed
it down with Sprite or Diet Shasta, and you sat amid the particle-board
partitions and metal desktops, and you kept your mind on your committee
meeting. That was what Noyce did, and that was what everybody else did.
If Noyce called a
meeting, then he set the agenda. But after that, everybody was an equal. If you
were a young engineer and you had an idea you wanted to get across, you were
supposed to speak up and challenge Noyce or anybody else who didn't get it
right away. This was a little bit of heaven. You were face to face with the
inventor, or the co-inventor, of the very road to El Dorado, and he was only forty-one
years old, and he was listening to you. He had his head down
and his eyes beamed up at you, and he was absorbing it all. He wasn't a boss.
He was Gary Cooper! He was here to help you be self-reliant and do as much as
you could on your own. This wasn't a corporation...it was a congregation.
By the same token, there
were sermons and homilies. At Intel everyone - Noyce
included - was expected to attend sessions on "the Intel Culture." At
these sessions the principles by which the company was
run were spelled out and discussed. Some of the discussions had to do
specifically with matters of marketing or production. Others had to do with the
broadest philosophical principles of Intel and were explained via the Socratic
method at management seminars by Intel's number-three man, Andrew Grove.
Grove would say,
"How would you sum up the Intel approach?" Many hands would go up,
and Grove would choose one, and the eager communicant would say: "At Intel
you don't wait for someone else to do it. You take the ball yourself and you
run with it. " And Grove would say, "Wrong. At Intel
you take the ball yourself and you let the air out and you fold the ball up and
put it in your pocket. Then you take another ball and run with it and when
you've crossed the goal you take the second ball out of your pocket and reinflate it and score twelve points instead of six."
Grove was the most
colorful person at Intel. He was a thin man in his mid-thirties with tight
black curls all over his head. The curls ran down into a pair of mutton chops
that seemed to run together like goulash with his mustache. Every day he wore
either a turtleneck jersey or an open shirt with an ornamental chain twinkling
on his chest. He struck outsiders as the epitome of a style of the early 1970s
known as California Groovy. In fact, Grove was the epitome of the religious
principle that the greater the freedom- for example, the freedom to dress as
you pleased- the greater the obligation to exercise discipline. Grove's own
groovy outfits were neat and clean. The truth was, he was a bit of a bear on
the subject of neatness and cleanliness. He held what he called "Mr. Clean
inspections." showing up in various work areas wearing his mutton chops
and handlebar mustache and his Harry Belafonte-cane cutter's shirt and the gleaming
chain work, inspecting offices for books stacked too high, papers strewn over
desktops, everything short of running a white glove over the shelves, as if
this were some California Groovy Communal version of Parris Island, while the
chain twinkled in his chest hairs. Grove was also the inspiration for such
items as the performance ratings and the Late List. Each employee received a
report card periodically with a grade based on certain presumably objective
standards. The grades were superior, exceeds requirements, meets
requirements, marginally meets requirements,and does not meet
requirements. This was the equivalent of A, B, C, D, and F in school.
Noyce was all for it. "If you're ambitious and hardworking," he would
say, "you want to be told how you're doing." In
Noyce's view, most of the young hotshots who were coming to work for Intel had
never had the benefit of honest grades in their lives. In the late 1960s and
early 1970s college faculties had been under pressure to give all students passing
marks so they wouldn't have to go off to Vietnam, and they had caved in, until
the entire grading system was meaningless. At Intel
they would learn what measuring up meant. The Late List was also like something
from a strict school. Everyone was expected at work at eight A.M. A record was
kept of how many employees arrived after 8:10 A. M. If 7 percent or more were
late for three months, then every body in the section
had to start signing in. There was no inevitable penalty for being late,
however. It was up to each department head to make of the Late List what he saw
fit. If he knew a man was working overtime every night on a certain project,
then his presence on the Late List would probably be regarded as nothing more
than that, a line on a piece of paper. At bottom - and this was part of the
Intel Culture - Noyce and Grove knew that penalties were very nearly useless.
Things like report cards and Late Lists worked only if they stimulated
self-discipline.
The worst form of
discipline at Intel was to be called on the Antron II carpet before Noyce
himself. Noyce insisted on ethical behavior in all dealings within the company
and between companies. That was the word people used to describe his approach, ethical; that
and moral. Noyce was known as a very aggressive businessman,
but he stopped short of cutting throats, and he never talked about revenge. He
would not tolerate peccadilloes such as little personal
I'll-reimburse-it-on-Monday dips into the petty cash. Noyce's Strong Silent
stare, his Gary Cooper approach, could be mortifying as well as inspiring. When
he was angry, his baritone voice never rose. He seemed like a powerful creature
that only through the greatest self-control was refraining from an attack. He
somehow created the impression that if pushed one more inch, he would fight. As
a consequence he seldom had to. No one ever trifled
with Bob Noyce.
Noyce managed to create
an ethical universe within an inherently amoral setting: the American business
corporation in the second half of the twentieth century. At Intel
there was good and there was evil, and there was freedom and there was
discipline, and to an extraordinary degree employees internalized these
matters, as if members of Cromwell's army. As the work force grew at Intel, and
the profits soared, labor unions, chiefly the International Association of
Machinists and Aerospace Workers, the Teamsters, and the Stationary Engineers
Union, made several attempts to organize Intel. Noyce made it known, albeit
quietly, that he regarded unionization as a death threat to Intel, and to the
semiconductor industry generally. Labor-management battles were part of the
ancient terrain of the East. If Intel were divided into workers and bosses,
with the implication that each side had to squeeze its money out of the hides
of the other, the enterprise would be finished. Motivation would no longer be
internal; it would be objectified in the deadly form of work rules and
grievance procedures. The one time it came down to a vote, the union lost out
by the considerable margin of four to one. Intel's employees agreed with Noyce.
Unions were part of the dead hand of the past... Noyce and Intel were on the
road to El Dorado.
By the early 1970s Noyce
and Moore's 1103 memory chip had given this brand-new company an entire corner
of the semiconductor market. But that was only the start. Now a
thirty-two-year-old Intel engineer named Ted Hoff came up with an invention as
important as Noyce's integrated circuit had been a decade earlier: something
small, dense, and hidden: the microprocessor. The microprocessor was known as
"the computer on a chip," it put all the arithmetic and logic
functions of a computer on a chip the size of the head of a tack. The
possibilities for creating and using small computers surpassed most people's
imagining, even within the industry. One of the more obvious possibilities was
placing a small computer in the steering and braking mechanisms of a car that
would take over for the drive in case of a skid or
excessive speed on a curve.
In Ted Hoff, Noyce was
looking at proof enough of his hypothesis that out here on the electrical
frontier the great flashes came to the young. Hoff was about the same age Noyce
had been when he invented his integrated circuit. The glory was now Hoff's. But
Noyce took Hoff's triumph as proof of a second hypothesis. If you created the
right type of corporate community, the right type of autonomous congregation,
genius would flower. Certainly the corporate numbers
were flowering. The news of the microprocessor, on top of the success of the
1103 memory chip nearly trebled the value of Intel stock from 1971 to 1973.
Noyce's own holdings were now worth $18.5 million. He was in roughly the same
position as Josiah Grinnell a hundred years before, when Grinnell brought the
Rock Island Railroad into Iowa.
Noyce continued to live
in the house in the Los Altos hills that he had bought in 1960. He was not
reluctant to spend his money; he was merely reluctant to show it. He spent a
fortune on landscaping, but you could do that and the world would be none the
wiser. Gradually the house disappeared from view behind an enormous wall of
trees, tropical bushes, and cockatoo flowers. Noyce had a pond created on the
back lawn, a waterscape elaborate enough to put on a
bus tour, but nobody other than guests ever saw it. The lawn stretched on for
several acres and had a tennis court, a swimming pool, and more walls of boughs
and hot-pastel blossoms, and the world saw none of that, either.
Noyce drove a Porsche
roadster, and he didn't mind letting it out for a romp. Back east, when men
made a great deal of money, they tended to put a higher and higher value on
their own hides. Noyce, on the other hand, seemed to enjoy finding new ways to
hang his out over the edge. He took up paragliding over the ski slopes at Aspen
on a Rogolla wing. He built a Quicksilver hang glider
and flew it off cliffs until a friend of his, a champion at the sport,
fractured his pelvis and a leg flying a Quicksilver. He also took up scuba
diving, and now he had his Porsche. The high performance foreign sports car
became one of the signatures of the successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur. The
sports car was perfect. Its richness consisted of engineering beneath the body
shell. Not only that, the very luxury of a sports car was the experience of
driving it yourself. A sports car didn't even suggest a life with servants.
Porsches and Ferraris became the favorites. By 1975 the Ferrari agency in Los
Gatos was the second biggest Ferrari agency on the West Coast. Noyce also
bought a 1947 Republic Seabee amphibious airplane, so that he could take the
family for weekends on the lakes in northern California. He now had two
aircraft, but he flew the ships himself.
Noyce was among the
richest individuals on the San Francisco Peninsula, as well as the most
important figure in the Silicon Valley, but his name seldom appeared in the San
Francisco newspapers. When it did, it was in the business section, not on the
society page. That, too, became the pattern for the new rich of the Silicon
Valley. San Francisco was barely forty-five minutes up the Bayshore Freeway
from Los Altos, but psychologically San Francisco was an entire continent away.
It was a city whose luminaries kept looking back east, to New York, to see if
they were doing things correctly.
In 1974 Noyce wound up
in a situation that to some seemed an all-too-typical Mid-life in the Silicon
Valley story. He and Betty, his wife of twenty-one years, were divorced, and
the following year he "intramarried."
Noyce, who was forty-seven, married Intel's personnel director, Ann Bowers, who
was thirty-seven. The divorce was mentioned in the San Francisco
Chronicle, but not as a social note. It was a major business story.
Under California law, Betty received half the family's assets. When word got
out that she was going to sell off $6 million of her Intel stock in the
interest of diversifying her fortune, it threw the entire market in Intel stock
into a temporary spin. Betty left California and went to live in a village on
the coast of Maine. Noyce kept the house in Los Altos.
By this time, the
mid-1970s, the Silicon Valley had become the late-twentieth-century-California
version of a new city, and Noyce and other entrepreneurs began to indulge in
some introspection. For ten years, thanks to racial hostilities and the leftist
politics of the antiwar movement, the national press had dwelled on the subject
of ethnic backgrounds. This in itself tended to make the engineers and
entrepreneurs of the Silicon Valley conscious of how similar most of them were.
Most of the major figures, like Noyce himself, had grown up and gone to college
in small towns in the Middle West and the West. John Bardeen had grown up in
and gone to college in Madison, Wisconsin. Walter Brattain had grown up in and
gone to college in Washington. Shockley grew up in Palo Alto at a time when it
was a small college town and went to the California Institute of Technology.
Jack Kilby was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, and went to college at the
University of Illinois. William Hewlett was born in Ann Arbor and went to
school at Stanford. David Packard grew up in Pueblo, Colorado, and went to
Stanford. Oliver Buckley grew up in Sloane, Iowa, and went to college at Grinnell.
Lee De Forest came from Council Bluffs, Iowa (and went to Yale). And Thomas
Edison grew up in Port Huron Michigan, and didn't go to college at all.
Some of them, such as
Noyce and Shockley, had gone east to graduate school at MIT, since it was the
most prestigious engineering school in the United States. But MIT had proved to
be a backwater... the sticks... when it came to the most advanced form of
engineering, solid-state electronics. Grinnell College, with its one thousand
students, had been years ahead of MIT. The picture had been the same on the
other great frontier of technology in the second half of the twentieth century,
namely, the space program. The engineers who fulfilled one of man's most
ancient dreams, that of traveling to the moon, came from the same background,
the small towns of the Midwest and the West. After the triumph of Apollo
11, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first mortals to
walk on the moon, NASA's administrator, Tom Paine, happened to remark in
conversation: "This was the triumph of the squares. " A reporter
overheard him; and did the press ever have a time with that! But Paine had come
up with a penetrating insight. As it says in the Book of Matthew, the last
shall be first. It was engineers from the supposedly backward and narrow-minded
boondocks who had provided not only the genius but also the passion and the
daring that won the space race and carried out John F. Kennedy's exhortation,
back in 1961. to put a man on the moon "before this decade is out."
The passion and the daring of these engineers was as remarkable as their
talent. Time after time they had to shake off the meddling hands of timid souls
from back east. The contribution of MIT to Project Mercury was minus one. The
minus one was Jerome Wiesner of the MIT electronic research lab who was brought
in by Kennedy as a special adviser to straighten out the space program when it
seemed to be faltering early in 1961. Wiesner kept flinching when he saw what
NASA's boondockers were preparing to do. He tried to
persuade to forfeit the manned space race to the Soviets and concentrate
instead on unmanned scientific missions. The boondockers
of Project Mercury, starting with the project's director, Bob Gilruth, an aeronautical engineer from Nashwauk, Minnesota,
dodged Wiesner for months, like moonshiners evading a roadblock, until they got
astronaut Alan Shepard launched on the first Mercury mission. Who had time to
waste on players as behind the times as Jerome Wiesner and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology...out here on technology's leading edge?
Just why was it that
small-town boys from the Middle West dominated the engineering frontiers? Noyce
concluded it was because in a small town you became a technician, a tinker, an
engineer, and an and inventor, by necessity.
"In a small
town," Noyce liked to say, "when something breaks down, you don't
wait around for a new part, because it's not coming. You make it
yourself."
Yet in Grinnell
necessity had been the least of the mothers of invention. There had been
something else about Grinnell, something people Noyce's age could feel but
couldn't name. It had to do with the fact that Grinnell had once been a
religious community; not merely a town with a church but a town that was
inseparable from the church. In Josiah Grinnell's day
most of the towns people were devout Congregationalists, and the rest were
smart enough to act as if they were. Anyone in Grinnell who aspired to the
status of feed store clerk or better joined the First Congregational Church. By
the end of the Second World War educated people in Grinnell, and in all the Grinnells of the Middle West, had begun to drop this side
of their history into a lake of amnesia. They gave in to the modern urge to be
urbane. They themselves began to enjoy sniggering over Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg,
Ohio, Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, and Grant Wood's American
Gothic. Once the amnesia set in, all they remembered from the old days
were the austere moral codes, which in some cases still hung on. Josiah
Grinnell's real estate covenants prohibiting drinking, for example.... Just
imagine! How absurd it was to see these unburied bones of something that had
once been strong and alive.
That something was
Dissenting Protestantism itself. Oh, it had once been quite strong and very
much alive! The passion, the exhilaration, of those early days was what no one
could any longer recall. To be a believing Protestant in a town such as
Grinnell in the middle of the nineteenth century was to experience a spiritual
ecstasy greater than any that the readers of Main Street or the viewers of
American Gothic were likely to know in their lifetimes. Josiah Grinnell had
gone to Iowa in 1854 to create nothing less than a City of Light. He was a New
Englander who had given up on the East. He had founded the first Congregational
church in Washington, DC., and then defected from it when the congregation,
mostly southerners, objected to his antislavery views. He went to New York and
met the famous editor of the New York Herald, Horace Greeley. It was while
talking to Josiah Grinnell, who was then thirty-two and wondering what to do
with his life, that Greeley uttered the words for which he would be remembered
forever after: "Go west young man, go west." So
Grinnell went to Iowa, and he and three friends bought up five thousand acres
of land in order to start up a congregational community the way he thought it
should be done. A City of Light! The first thing he organized was the
congregation. The second was the college. Oxford and Cambridge had started
banning Dissenting Protestants in the seventeenth century; Dissenters founded
their own schools and colleges. Grinnell became a champion of "free
schools," and it was largely thanks to him that Iowa had one of the first
and best public-school systems in the west. To this day Iowa has the highest
literacy rate of any state. In the 1940s a bright youngster whose parents were
not rich, such as Bob Noyce or his brother Donald, was far more likely to
receive a superior education in Iowa than in Massachusetts.
And if he was extremely
bright, if he seemed to have the quality known as genius, he was infinitely
more likely to go into engineering in Iowa, or Illinois or Wisconsin, then
anywhere in the East. Back east engineering was an unfashionable field. The
east looked to Europe in matters of intellectual fashion, and in Europe the
ancient aristocratic bias against manual labor lived on. Engineering was looked
upon as nothing more than manual labor raised to the level of a science. There
was "pure" science and there was engineering, which was merely
practical. Back east engineers ranked, socially, below lawyers; doctors; army
colonels; Navy captains; English, history, biology, chemistry, and physics
professors; and business executives. This piece of European snobbery that said
a scientist was lowering himself by going into commerce. Dissenting Protestants
looked upon themselves as secular saints, men and women of God who did God's
work not as penurious monks and nuns but as successful workers in the everyday
world. To be rich and successful was even better, and just as righteous. One of
Josiah Grinnell's main projects was to bring the Rock Island Railroad into
Iowa. Many in his congregation became successful farmers of the gloriously
fertile soil around Grinnell. But there was no sense of rich and poor. All the
congregation opened up the virgin land in a common struggle out on the
frontier. They had given up the comforts of the East ... in order to create a
City of Light in the name of the Lord. Every sacrifice, every privation, every
denial of the pleasures of the flesh, brought them closer to that state of
bliss in which the light of God shines forth from the apex of the soul. What
were the momentary comforts and aristocratic poses of the East...compared to
this? Where would the fleshpots back east be on that day when the heavens
opened up and a light fell 'round about them and a voice from on high said:
"Why mockest thou me?" The light! The
light! Who, if he had ever known that glorious light, if he had ever let his soul
burst forth into that light, could ever mock these, my very seed, with a Main
Street or an American Gothic! There, in Grinnell,
reigned the passion that enabled men and women to settle the West in the
nineteenth century against the most astonishing odds and in the face of
overbearing hardships.
By the standards of St.
Francis of Assisi or St. Jerome, who possessed nothing beyond the cloak of
righteousness, Josiah Grinnell was a very secular saint, indeed. And Robert
Noyce's life was a great deal more secular than Josiah Grinnell's. Noyce had
wandered away from the church itself. He smoked. He took a drink when he felt
like it. He had gotten a divorce. Nevertheless, when Noyce went west, he
brought Grinnell with him... unaccountably sewn into the lining of his coat!
In the last stage of his
career Josiah Grinnell had turned from the building of his community to broader
matters affecting Iowa and the Middle West. In 1863 he
became one of midland Iowa's representatives in Congress. Likewise, in 1974
Noyce turned over the actual running of Intel to Gordon Moore and Andrew Grove
and kicked himself upstairs to become chairman of the board. His major role
became that of spokesman for the Silicon Valley and the electronic frontier
itself. He became chairman of the Semiconductor Industry Association. He led
the industry's campaign to deal with the mounting competition from Japan. He
was awarded the National Medal of Science in a White House ceremony in 1980. He
was appointed to the University of California Board of Regents in 1982 and
inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in February 1983. By now
Intel's sales had grown from $64 million in 1973 to almost a billion a year.
Noyce's own fortune was incalculable. (Grinnell College's $300,000 investment
in Intel had multiplied in value more than thirty times, despite some
sell-offs, almost doubling the college's endowment. )
Noyce was hardly a famous man in the usual sense, however. He was practically
unknown to the general public. But among those who followed the semiconductor
industry he was a legend. He was certainly famous back east on Wall Street.
When a reporter asked James Magid of the underwriting
firm of L. F. Rothschild, Unterberg, Towbin about
Noyce, he said: "Noyce is a national treasure."
Oh yes! What a treasure,
indeed, was the moral capital of the nineteenth century? Noyce happened to grow
up in a family in which the long-forgotten light of Dissenting Protestantism
still burned brightly. The light, the light at the apex of every human soul!
Ironically, it was that long-forgotten light...from out of the churchy,
blue-nosed sticks. . . that led the world into the twenty-first century, across
the electronic grid and into space.
Surely the moral capital
of the nineteenth century is by now all but completely spent. Robert Noyce
turns fifty-six this month, and his is the last generation to have grown up in
families where the light existed in anything approaching a pure state. And yet
out in the Silicon Valley some sort of light shines still.
People who run even the newest companies in the Valley repeat Noycisms with conviction and with relish. The young CEOs
all say: "Datadyne is not a corporation, it's a
culture, " or "Cybernetek is not a
corporation, it's a society, " or "Honey Bear's assets" - the
latest vogue is for down-home nontech names - "Honey
Bear's assets aren't hardware, they're the software of the three thousand souls
who work here." They talk about the soul and spiritual vision as if it
were the most natural subject in the world for a well-run company to be
concerned about.
On June 8, 1983, one of
the Valley's new firms, Eagle Computer. Inc., sold its stock to the public for
the first time. Investors went for it like the answer to a dream. At the close
of trading on the stock market, the company's forty-year-old CEO, Dennis
Barnhart, was suddenly worth nine million dollars. Four and a half hours later
he and a pal took his Ferrari out for a little romp, hung their hides out over
the edge, lost control on a curve in Los Gatos, and went through a guardrail,
and Barnhart was killed. Naturally, that night people in the business could
talk of very little else. One of the best-known CEOs in the Valley said,
"It's the dark side of the Force." He said it without a trace of
irony, and his friends nodded in contemplation. They knew exactly what Force he
meant.