12th September 1958: The world’s first integrated circuit (aka microchip) demonstrated by Jack Kilby

Kilby began working for semiconductor manufacturer Texas Instruments in 1958, and was still so new to the company that summer that he was unable to take a vacation when almost every other employee left the facility. With time on his hands, he applied himself to addressing the so-called ‘tyranny of numbers’ wherein future electronic developments were limited by the need to wire every component to every other one. Since complex electronics would require more and more components, the tyranny lay in the fact that a single bad component or unreliable solder joint could render the entire machine inoperable. Kilby concluded that Texas Instruments could use their knowledge of producing transistors out of silicon to manufacture entire circuits out of semiconductors. By creating all the components out of silicon and arranging them in such a way as to remove the need for connecting wires, the Kilby surmised that the resulting circuit would be significantly smaller than anything that had gone before and dramatically reduce the cost of producing circuit modules. To test his idea, Kilby assembled a prototype integrated circuit on a germanium chip which he presented to the company’s management on 12 September. He connected the single-transistor circuit to an oscilloscope and showed how it would output a continuous sine wave, proving that his integrated circuit was working. Texas Instruments patented the idea the following February, but it was the similar silicon chip created by California’s Robert Noyce that secured broader commercial interest. Nevertheless, Kilby was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000 for his discovery.