The Man Behind the Microchip Read online

  But these elements of Noyce’s character make him more of a man, not less. And to watch him come to recognize—and then devise means of working around—his own shortcomings, particularly as a manager, is to observe an exceptionally creative mind in action.

  NOYCE’S INNER CIRCLE included the best-known players in Silicon Valley—Andy Grove and Gordon Moore of Intel, Arthur Rock and Eugene Kleiner of venture capital fame, Steve Jobs of Apple, William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor—as well as the inventors of the planar process (which made it possible to mass produce complex microelectronic devices) and the microprocessor. Some of the lesser-known Silicon Valley pioneers who worked with Noyce hold their own interest: among them are a monomaniacal genius, a Swiss with two doctorates, an aristocratic refugee from Nazi terror, and the son of a New York cabbie who really wanted to run a bed-and-breakfast. Most of the people who worked with Noyce admired him—some loved him—but a few resented his notoriety, which they felt obscured their own contributions. “Credit floats up” was the only comment one would offer about his former boss.

  Together these men built a network of specialized equipment providers, high-caliber technical trade schools and engineering programs, and tech-savvy financial, public relations, and legal support services that helped to transform the once rural Santa Clara Valley into a high-tech business machine called Silicon Valley. When Noyce arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area in April 1956, electronics was the fastest growing industry in the region, with government defense contracts and sales to the military accounting for well over half the business. But the plum, cherry, and apricot trees that had once anchored the valley’s economy still dotted the landscape. Twenty years later, the orchards were gone, government purchases accounted for less than a quarter of integrated circuit sales, and the electronics industry that had been suckled on government work was now sustained by a complex private network founded on a culture of high-stakes risk. Noyce’s career offers an ideal window into how this happened.

  That Noyce and his contemporaries changed their world is only half the story. Their lives bear the marks of the monumental social, political, technical, and economic shifts that reshaped America in the second half of the twentieth century. When Noyce went west, he joined the massive postwar migration to California. His industry, launched in the torrent of defense spending and creative panic triggered by a tiny beeping satellite that the Soviets had lofted into orbit in 1957, placed itself at the center of the debate over industrial policy in the 1980s. Semiconductors also catalyzed the high-tech bubble in the 1990s.

  Little more than a dozen years ago, the San Jose Mercury News declared Noyce the Thomas Edison and the Henry Ford of Silicon Valley. He received the National Medal of Science from President Carter and the National Medal of Technology from President Reagan. Noyce was featured in hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles. Peter Jennings profiled him as “the person of the week” on ABC. CBS anchor Charles Osgood called Noyce “the man who changed the world.” Tom Wolfe, who knew a hero when he saw one, wrote about Noyce in a 1983 Esquire article that ran next to pieces on other “American Originals,” including Jackie Robinson, John F. Kennedy, Betty Friedan, Walt Disney, and Elvis Presley. Futurist George Gilder called Robert Noyce “undoubtedly the most important American of the postwar era,” while Isaac Asimov went even further by hailing the invention of the integrated circuit as “the most important moment since man emerged as a life form.”9

  And yet until now the story of Robert Noyce has not been told in full. “High-tech history’ is almost an oxymoron,” Noyce once said. “Our major activity is to make yesterday’s ‘gee-whiz!’ mundane today.” Writing the history of a man, an industry, and a place that consider self-obsolescence the pinnacle of success is not easy. Companies routinely shred their paperwork, and those items not destroyed by corporate fiat are consigned to wastebaskets and dumpsters by employees unable to imagine that the world might one day be as interested in their past as these technologists are in the future. It is only now that the one-time young Turks of the semiconductor industry are entering their seventies and eighties that they have begun to look backward, and remember.

  Noyce did not live to look back. In 1990, at age 62, and just weeks after informing the board of SEMATECH—a two-year-old, billion-dollar, manufacturing consortium jointly funded by 14 semiconductor companies and the Department of Defense—that he planned to leave his job as the consortium’s founding CEO, Noyce succumbed to a heart attack. Three thousand people attended memorial services for him. President George H. W. Bush phoned Noyce’s widow to offer his personal condolences.

  And yet even Noyce, the man who always looked forward, acknowledged that “roots are important.” His core had been shaped by his Depression-era boyhood in the small town of Grinnell, Iowa, and by his birth into a family with deep Midwestern roots and a tradition of its men serving as teachers, ministers, or both. Noyce knew that his high-flying, high-tech adult self had its source in the Iowa boy who pedaled flat-rate annual snow-shoveling contracts to his neighbors and who spent every spare minute building motorized sleds and the town’s best model airplanes. Surely the shape of the future electronics entrepreneur can be divined in 12-year-old Bobby Noyce’s comment from a long-forgotten journal: “My hobby is handicraft,” he wrote in 1939. “I like this hobby because it is useful. You can make things cheaply that are worth a lot.”10

  1

  Adrenaline and Gasoline

  Ask nearly anyone who lived in Grinnell, Iowa, during the 1940s and 1950s what they remember about Bob Noyce, and the answer is bound to involve a glider. In the summer of 1940, Noyce, who was then 12, built a boy-sized aircraft with his 14-year-old brother, Gaylord. This glider has attained mythic proportions among native Grinnellians, some of whom claim to have seen one of the Noyce brothers take flight from the roof of the Grinnell College stables, from the bleachers at the college stadium, from a large open window on the third floor of the Noyce home. The most dramatic story involves Gaylord and Bob convincing their seven-year-old brother to climb in the glider, which the older boys then tied to the bumper of a car that took off at top speed.

  For Bob Noyce, the glider was “an all-time high” in “my long career of making things”—or so he claimed at 17. He had built a radio from scratch and motorized his sled by welding a propeller and an engine from an old Briggs and Stratton washing machine to the back of it. When the winter weather grew bitter and his hands cracked from one too many cold mornings delivering the Des Moines Register through the quiet streets of Grinnell, he had wired a car headlight to a battery that he found at the dump. Early risers could watch him precariously balance his way along his route, morning papers over his shoulder, warm headlight in his hands, ten-pound battery perched in the wire basket on his handlebars. He filled a scrapbook with Popular Science plans for constructing various ship models, a bed, a contraption that worked like a windsurfer but was used on ice, a skate sharpener, a xylophone, and a “half-horsepower sidewalk roadster.”1

  But always, his passion was flight. On summer evenings, he and Gaylord built balloons from wrapping paper and wire, lit oily rags underneath and watched their creations rise into the night skies like so many moons before drifting into a farmer’s field when the rags burned out. They built innumerable balsa-wood model airplanes, the parts forever littering the window sills and steps of their house, to their mother’s great displeasure. Bob Noyce could spend weeks on a plane, perfecting the design, fine tuning the motor, and hunting it through the tall weeds that dotted the fields around town. But when a plane was shopworn, he showed no remorse. Grandly, boldly, he lit it on fire and sailed it from a window.2

  When Bob Noyce was 11, he and a neighbor rode their bikes to a pasture where Grinnell’s first barnstormer was giving 15-minute trips in his new Ford tri-motor for a dollar per ride. Noyce and his friend spent the day craning their necks upward, and when the line for rides had dwindled, the two boys convinced the ticket seller to let them share a seat. Perched on th
e edge of his half of the seat, Noyce watched the ground fall away, and soon he could see the Congregational Church where his family worshipped every Sunday and Grinnell College, where his oldest brother Don attended classes and his father, a minister, worked for the regional Congregationalist offices. Bob found his house, a modest one on a well-kept lot, just across the street from the college. And after they landed, after the two boys pedaled furiously home for dinner, after Noyce washed up and bowed his head for grace, he told his parents nothing of his great adventure. Keeping it secret made it that much more exciting.3

  Bob Noyce was almost certainly remembering this flight when he proposed to Gaylord that they make their own glider. Bob had long ago proven himself the mastermind of mischief in their home, the daredevil forever pulling Gay, who would one day become a minister and who was already a very good boy, into impish hijinks. The two boys designed the glider themselves, working from their experience building model planes and from an illustration that they found in the Book of Knowledge, a multivolume encyclopedia that their parents kept deliberately accessible on a low shelf in the living room bookcase.

  The brothers pooled their combined savings of $4.53 to buy materials and sent word to their neighborhood pals that a great invention was under construction. Soon the friends were helping too. Bob Smith, whose father owned a furniture store that regularly received rolls of carpet wound around bamboo spindles, provided sticks for the frame. Charlotte Matthews, the only girl on their block of 17 boys, sewed the cheese cloth to cover the wings. When the Noyce brothers declared the glider finished, it stood some four feet tall, and its wings stretched nearly 18 feet from tip to tip. Constructed largely from 1´ × 2´ pine boards, it had neither wheels nor skids and ran entirely on boy power.4

  The pilot moved and steered the plane by standing amidship in an opening, holding up the frame with his two hands, and running as fast as he could. “We succeeded in running and jumping to get a little lift as experienced by the pilot,” Gaylord recalls. “In running off a mound about four or five feet high, we got more.” This was not good enough for Bob. Together he and Gaylord convinced their neighbor Jerry Strong, newly possessed of a driver’s license and the keys to his father’s car, to hitch the glider to the auto’s bumper. Jerry was instructed to drive down Park Street fast enough to launch the glider and keep it aloft. The experiment, which in no way involved a seven-year-old brother, proved more terrifying than effective.5

  Still this was not sufficiently thrilling for Bob Noyce. He and Jerry Strong decided to try, as Noyce put it a few years later, “to jump off the roof of a barn and live.” The barn in question was in Merrill Park, just across the empty fields and asparagus patch behind the Noyces’ house. Word spread through town, and the Grinnell Herald sent a photographer.6

  Bob clambered up to the barn’s roof and a few other boys handed him the glider, which weighed about 25 pounds. Bob then took a deep breath, thrust his sturdy body against the glider’s frame … and jumped. Then, for one second, two, three, young Bob Noyce was flying. He hit the ground almost immediately, but as he proudly reported in a college admissions essay a few years later, “We did [it]!” Even the boys’ mother, who privately thought her sons’ fascination with airplanes a bit frivolous, was impressed. “It was all their idea,” Harriet Noyce later recalled with emphasis, “but I made the paste.”7

  IT WAS UNDOUBTEDLY FROM HIS MOTHER Harriet that Noyce inherited his love of adventure. Growing up in suburban Chicago, the daughter and granddaughter of Congregationalist ministers, Harriet Norton had dreamed of work as a missionary—perhaps the most daring path available to churchgoing young women of her age. She could imagine herself in China, where her mother’s alma mater Oberlin had established a mission school. Harriet would have made a good missionary. She was fearless, quick witted, studious, and voluble, with an opinion on nearly every subject and a habit of narrating her thoughts aloud so that she seemed never to stop talking. She often said that she liked to “do a lot and do it well.” When she left home to attend Oberlin at the age of 17, it was with scarcely a backwards glance.8

  In 1920, when Harriet was wrapping up her sociology major, her brother introduced her to Ralph Noyce, a shy, quiet man just finishing his studies at Oberlin’s Graduate School of Theology. The soon-to-be Reverend Noyce, slight and barely over five-and-a-half feet tall in his Sunday shoes, was 28 years old, a veteran of the Great War. He had been raised in the northeast corner of Nebraska, where his father, an ordained Congregationalist minister, preached and ran a dairy. A careful, soft-spoken man, Ralph Noyce loved philosophy and fancied himself more an intellectual than a religious leader. He studied ancient Greek and Latin at Doane College and collected images of the Madonna on which he could discourse in the manner of an art historian.

  The church centered their courtship, which is not to say that it dictated their beliefs. No Congregationalist creed or formalized set of rituals defined the religion, and the individual churches for the most part operated independently, with no bishop or synod above them. Instead, the religion offered Harriet Norton and Ralph Noyce a common language and set of values: tolerance, respect for education, egalitarianism, and a belief in an unmediated relationship between God and His earthly servants. As Harriet put it, she and Ralph shared the same dream: “to be Christian leaders, in the best sense … equip[ped with] a concern for the needy, [and] an attitude towards people as equals, sacred in some way.”9

  But Harriet, always independent and strong willed, insisted on working for a year after college before she would marry. She taught high-school Latin and English near her parents’ home and proved to her own satisfaction that she was capable of caring for herself. As soon as the school year ended, on June 20, 1922, Harriet Norton and Ralph Noyce were married. Her father performed the service; his assisted.

  After a short honeymoon, the young couple arrived in Denmark, Iowa, a town of about 250 in the southeasternmost corner of the state. The Denmark church was small but prestigious: the oldest Congregational church west of the Mississippi, it was crowned with a 250-foot spire visible from farms miles away. The families on those farms were Ralph Noyce’s parishioners, and they braved icy country roads in the winter and sweltering heat in the summer to hear Ralph speak to them from his well-annotated outlines on subjects such as “Christian Optimism.”10

  Ralph and Harriet Noyce lived in the parsonage. With housing expenses covered by the church, his $1,500 annual salary could provide small indulgences such as barbershop haircuts, a secondhand car, and hospital births for Donald Sterling Noyce, who arrived in May 1923, and Gaylord Brewster Noyce, born in July 1926.11

  When Harriet discovered that a third child would arrive around Thanksgiving 1927, she and Ralph decided that their family could benefit from an increase in pay and a move to a larger community. Ralph learned of an opening at the church in Atlantic, Iowa, a town roughly triple the size of Denmark and a few hours’ ride west on the Burlington and Rock Island railroad. He arranged to “candidate” for the job, and when he was offered the position at a salary nearly twice his current pay, he agreed to start as soon as the new baby was born.

  Meanwhile, Harriet prepared for the arrival of her third child. A friend came to help Ralph with the boys and, at the suggestion of her doctor, Harriet took a room near the hospital in Burlington, 18 miles from home. She told her mother, her in-laws, and her friends that after two boys, she desperately wanted a little girl. Hedging her bets, she did not even pick out a boy’s name. On December 12, 1927, the Noyces’ third son arrived in a flash, beating his doctor to the delivery room. “Congratulations, and my sincere sympathy,” read a letter from Ralph’s brother. “Too bad he was a he.” Harriet rallied soon enough, however. The healthy baby boy was named Robert, to be called Bobby.12

  WHEN BOBBY WAS SIX WEEKS OLD, the Noyce family arrived in Atlantic. The church had 200 active members and a study for Ralph, who spent most days there, meeting with parishioners and clipping articles from Life, Literary Digest, and Christian Cen
tury for sermon fodder. Harriet found kindred spirits among a group of church women who organized Chautauqua-style study sessions for themselves. The two older Noyce boys—Don, who was nearly five, and almost-two-year-old Gaylord—delighted in the sanctuary’s opera-style seats, which provided hours of slamming and clambering fun.

  The parsonage in which the Noyce family lived was not only owned by the church, it was furnished and decorated by the Ladies Auxiliary, which meant that Ralph and Harriet were never comfortable changing things to suit their taste. Harriet ran the vacation bible school, headed the makeshift kitchens on church-sponsored camping trips, witnessed marriage licenses, oversaw the Ladies Auxiliary, and whispered forgotten lines from backstage at Christmas pageants.

  For the boys, there were hymns and prayers most evenings at home, as well as Sunday services, Sunday school, and Sunday supper. Reverend Noyce devoted his ministry to the children of the church, and he assumed his own sons would participate in the classes, retreats, church youth group meetings, and Christmas plays he organized. Moreover, if no one volunteered to lead these activities, the Noyce brothers were expected to do so. And though neither Harriet nor Ralph emphasized them, the boys also had to contend with the intangible responsibilities of being a preacher’s child: their behavior reflected not only on themselves, but on their father, their religion, and maybe even on God.

  Ralph Noyce was a constant presence in his sons’ lives. He often worked at home, in a room lined with his books in Greek and Latin. Even when he was spending his day at the church, he walked the three blocks to the parsonage at noon to eat with his wife and sons. The boys knew not to disturb Dad on Saturdays, when he finished his sermons, but otherwise, he was usually available. Bob Noyce’s earliest childhood memory involves beating his father at Ping Pong and feeling absolutely devastated when his mother’s reaction to this thrilling news was a distracted “Wasn’t that nice of Daddy to let you win?”