Jack St. Clair Kilby

Hardware engineer

November 8, 1923 – June 20, 2005

INDUCTED IN THE CLASS OF 2000

Notable accomplishments:

  • Independently developed first integrated circuit, at Texas Instruments (Robert Noyce achieved the same feat at Fairchild Semiconductor (1958)
  • Led team (with James Van Tassel and Jerry Merryman) that developed first handheld calculator at Texas Instruments (1967)
  • Awarded Nobel Prize in Physics (2000)

Quotes:
“In 1958 Texas Instruments sold a single, not very good, silicone transistor for 10 dollars, today you can buy several hundred million much better transistors for that price. Nothing else has ever decreased in cost at that rate, so it’s tremendously opened up the field and permitted new applications.” (Nobel Prize Interview, 2000)

“Today there are well-established courses in school that train everyone to be semiconductor engineers, but when the transistor began to get off the ground they didn’t exist. Therefore all kinds of disciplines were called into the thing — electrical engineers because they might know something about how to use the product, physicists, chemists, metallurgists, the whole gamut. The people who were involved in those days had to come from somewhere. Jim Early, who is one of the best engineers I know, has a background in paper mills.” (IEEE History Center, Dec. 2 1975)

“What we didn’t realize (when we developed the integrated circuit) was that it would reduce the cost of electronic functions by a factor of a million to one.” (Texas Instruments web site)

Suggested reading:
“The Chip” by T.R. Reid (1984)

“Jack St. Clair Kilby: A Man of Few Words” by Ed Mills (2008)

“From Jack Kilby to Intel: A Journey through the History of Transistors”
by Mark Spencer (2024)

Learn more:
Nobel Prize biography of Jack Kilby

Texas Instruments – The chip that changed the world