The Man Behind the Microchip Read online

  Even at age five, Noyce was offended by the notion of intentionally losing at anything. “That’s not the game,” he sulked to his mother. “If you’re going to play, play to win!”13

  THE RAPIDLY DEEPENING agricultural depression fully descended upon Atlantic in 1932, when farm prices and income hit record lows. By 1935, a bushel of wheat still fetched only 20 percent of its 1919 price, and at ten cents a bushel, the most efficient use for corn was to burn it to save the need for coal. Farm foreclosures were common. A drought plagued the countryside. The Atlantic bank failed in February 1933, shortly before the birth of the Noyces’ fourth son, Ralph Harold, taking with it the amount Reverend Noyce had borrowed against his government life insurance policy to cover hospital expenses.14

  Ralph’s church began “adopting” needy families, with one member paying the way to statewide Congregationalist conferences, another sewing school clothes, and the Noyces regularly inviting small children to play with Gaylord and Bobby while the parents did what work they could. The parsonage became a regular stopping point for hoboes. Harriet could almost always manage to offer them a sandwich and a glass of milk, or sometimes a short stint of labor in exchange for a meal and a spot to sleep in an unused chicken coop.

  Although the Noyce family was initially blessed with a steady income and reliable housing, they too soon felt the pinch of the Depression. In 1932, the trustees closed Ralph’s beloved church office to save the expenses of heat and a telephone. (They gave Ralph the telephone handset, which he and his boys promptly wired to ring in the study he set up at home—no easy feat at the time.) Ralph’s salary, officially $2,400 annually, plummeted. In 1934, he was paid only $1,200. By mid-1935, the church was five months in arrears; often he was given a wagonload of corncobs or a ham in lieu of remuneration. The family found itself dipping into the GI life insurance benefits of Harriet’s younger brother Don, who had died of meningitis shortly after introducing Harriet and Ralph. This money, now pressed into service for daily expenses, had been earmarked for investments and college savings.

  The strain was too much. After eight years of service, Ralph preached his last sermon in Atlantic on October 25, 1936. The family strapped a Halloween pumpkin to the bumper of their old Ford and began a drive across the state to Decorah, in the northeastern corner of Iowa that had not suffered as badly from drought. The Noyces hoped the church in a less depressed area could meet its commitments to its minister, but within months of the family’s arrival, Ralph’s approach to religion had rankled several prominent congregants. Ralph was a humanitarian and an intellectual—Bobby was unsure if his father believed in an afterlife—who felt a minister, first and foremost, should be a listener, “someone to tell things to.” The congregation wanted a bit more fire and brimstone, and so, less than two years after they came to Decorah, the Noyces were on the move once more, this time to Webster City, 65 miles north of Des Moines, a town roughly the size of Atlantic. Bobby was ten years old.15

  Ralph’s work and his relationship with his sons changed significantly with this move. The Webster City job was not a parish ministry but an administrative post with the Iowa Congregational Conference, the umbrella organization for the churches in the state. As associate superintendent, Ralph planned and ran meetings, filled in for absent ministers, and directed youth education programs throughout Iowa. In a single year, Ralph drove more than 25,000 miles of twisting rural roads and addressed 110 different audiences. His boys felt lucky if he made it home for Sunday dinner once every six weeks.16

  Harriet called these the years of “Mothering with a Daddy on the Road.” She was fiercely devoted to her boys, playing anagram games with them, listening to their troubles (always taking their side), and keeping watch over their friends and their homework. She schooled her sons in manners and social niceties, cautioning them again and again to speak only in ways that were “kind, necessary, and honest.” It could not have been an easy time for her. Don developed asthma so debilitating that he could attend school only in the mornings. Bobby and Gaylord’s early interest in science progressed from digging up earthworms, to taxidermy experiments with cats and saltpeter, to chemistry disasters involving nitrogen tri-iodide and exploding houseflies. Harriet nonetheless found this period strangely liberating. “I felt the sense of belonging as a person of worth for myself,” she said, “and not just as the minister’s wife.”17

  Webster City proved yet another temporary stop. Barely a year after their arrival, the boys were told they would be moving at the end of the school year. Their father’s job had been transferred to the campus of Grinnell College, site of the state conference’s headquarters. Ralph and Harriet had secretly been hoping for this outcome ever since Ralph accepted the Webster City job. Grinnell College offered all children of local ministers, regardless of denomination, a scholarship equivalent to roughly one-third the cost of tuition. For parents expecting to send three boys to college in the next five years, this was an attractive offer indeed. For the boys themselves, it meant yet another new school and another new set of friends, with no guarantee the family would stay any more than a year or two.

  GRINNELL, at least for Bobby, became home in a way no other town had been. He had moved three times in the four years before he came to Grinnell, but he would stay in this town from the age of 12 until he graduated from college. Grinnell had 6,000 residents and 21 churches when the Noyces moved into a white Victorian they rented at the corner of Tenth and Park in the spring of 1940. The neighborhood, which abutted the college campus to the east and the city limits to the north, teemed with children—children tearing down the streets on bikes, or rushing in the front door when their mothers rang the cow bells they kept on the porch to call them home for dinner. Parents worked as teachers or lawyers, or they owned one of the town’s small businesses: the lumber yard or funeral home or feed shop. These people had felt the impact of the Depression but had not suffered inordinately during the past few years. Nearly everyone was white, and nearly everyone, whether or not they went to church, was Christian. The Noyces set up housekeeping quickly, and Ralph resumed his traveling, though at a somewhat reduced intensity.18

  Grinnell sat in the middle of prime Iowa farmland. Scarcely a decade after the fiery Congregationalist minister Josiah Grinnell founded his namesake village in 1853 (choosing the site because it was rumored to become the crossing point of Iowa’s main East-West and North-South railroads), homesteading farmers had cleared every tree within a three-mile radius of the town’s borders. When the Noyces arrived nearly a century later, soybean, corn, and livestock flourished in the farmland that ringed the city limits. Farmers were a regular part of daily life and an essential part of the town’s economy. Men drove to Grinnell for feed and fertilizer. The women sold their produce and handmade soaps at the market. Their children came to school in yellow buses paid for by the county.

  HOW HIS OWN BRAIN stacked up against his older brothers’ caused Bobby Noyce no small measure of worry as he prepared to start eighth grade in Grinnell. Harriet and Ralph Noyce expected their boys to be excellent students. Not only were Harriet and Ralph college graduates, but all four of their parents had also graduated college—a remarkable fact given that, at the end of the nineteenth century, less than 2 percent of the population received a university education. The boys’ great-great-grandfather Reuben Gaylord had helped found Grinnell College in 1846, one of some 20 “prairie colleges” founded by Congregationalists in the mid-nineteenth century.19

  Noyce’s eldest brother Don set a blistering academic pace. Despite multiple moves and asthma-related absences, he managed to graduate second in his high school class and earn a generous merit-based scholarship at Grinnell College before the family left Webster City. Gaylord, just starting high school when the family moved to Grinnell, was poised to extend the family’s intellectual honor. At 15, with a lean build and an unruly cowlick, he was a model student, polite and handsome with a near-perfect grade point average. He would graduate as valedictorian and would one day
be nominated for a Rhodes scholarship, like his father before him. Bobby Noyce, on the other hand, was short, stocky, and sullen at 12. He brought home report cards marred with the occasional B, usually appearing in penmanship or conduct. He would delay doing his schoolwork until the last possible instant.20

  He was three months into his freshman year at Grinnell High when Principal Cranny called a special assembly for all 400 students. It was the day after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Cranny told the students that President Roosevelt had just delivered a speech declaring December 7 “a day which will live in infamy” and requesting that Congress “accept the state of war Japan had thrust upon the United States.” Some of the boys whispered excitedly. Most of the students were subdued by the thought of the brothers they had at home or by their own proximity to draft age. No one knew exactly what war meant for the town of Grinnell, Iowa, but everyone knew what it meant for 18-year-old boys.21

  Within months, the government had rationed rubber, meat, coffee, and gasoline. Nearly 2,000 men arrived on the campus of Grinnell College to participate in military training programs. The Grinnell Herald Register exhorted townfolk and farmers to bring iron, rubber, aluminum, copper, brass, and burlap to the World War One cannon in Central Park. The 250-ton take, along with a 500-pound fire bell that was lowered from the tower where it had hung for decades, was towed off for scrap. Druggists donated quinine to the government for war use. A group of 53 Grinnell women made sweaters, stockings, blankets, and clothes for refugee infants in England. The federal government issued a “Call to (F)arms!” urging farmers to “keep ‘em eating” by upping production by ten percent; the county’s farms were to expected to produce 2.2 million dozen eggs, nearly 10,000 acres of soybeans, and more than 66 million pounds of milk in 1942.22

  Noyce and his classmates felt the effects of the war every day. On Tuesday mornings, teachers sold ten-cent stamps that could be pasted into a book and traded in for a war bond. The Grinnell High School newspaper carried stories of graduates in the war, and the yearbook began with a sobering series of photos featuring very young men in uniform who would never return for their reunions. Bobby volunteered for the civil air patrol, which was on alert during blackout drills. He and Gaylord compiled, annotated, and laboriously typed booklets of war poetry. Farm kids, whose parents were allowed unlimited gasoline for their tractors, suddenly found themselves uncommonly popular. Did they want to go to the football game, and by the way, would they mind driving?

  In many ways, though, life for Bobby Noyce proceeded in much the same way as it might have without the war. Midway through high school, he started calling himself Bob. He played the oboe in the band—Gaylord was on bassoon—and proudly labeled the band photo in his freshman annual “STATE WINNERS SINCE ‘39!” Afternoons were filled with taffypulls, hayrides, play rehearsals, parties, and listening to Tom Mix, Jack Armstrong, and Little Orphan Annie on the radio. Noyce spent his share of time at Candyland, the soda fountain on Fourth Street, eyeing the girls in wool skirts and bobby socks crammed together in the high-backed booths.

  Bob Noyce also worked nearly 20 hours each week beginning in very early adolescence. He threw the Des Moines Register on porches in the mornings before school, and he worked almost every afternoon either at Bates Flower Shop downtown, where he arranged flowers and corsages, or at the post office, where he delivered special orders on his bike. He developed a flat-rate annual snow shoveling contract that he would offer his neighbors—and then he would hope for mild weather. These jobs were his primary source of spending money. He later said he felt no particular deprivation as a child, but finances were tight in the Noyce household.

  Reverend Noyce’s employment was precarious. Shortly after the family moved to Grinnell, he suffered a mild cerebral hemorrhage that damaged his short-term memory and left him partially blind. Harriet did not want to assume the debt they would need to buy a home, which meant that nearly every year, the family moved to a new house.

  “Harriet had her hands full,” recalled a Grinnell neighbor. “Those boys, especially Bob, were into devilment.” Noyce would show up at neighbors’ houses, his pockets full of wires and clips, and ask to borrow the 220-volt outlet for the kitchen range so he could try to build the electrical arc Popular Science claimed was capable of burning a hole through steel. He started smoking cigarettes. He and his friends enjoyed tipping over outhouses on the nearby farms, though attacks of conscience often sent them back to the scene of the crime, swearing and sweating in the stench as they righted the wooden building. They shot firecrackers off the slides at Merrill Park and from the roof of Gates Hall on the college campus. And while his older brothers’ commitments to Congregationalism deepened in high school, Bob began spending less and less time at the old stone church at the corner of Fourth and Broad.23

  At 16, Noyce was one of the select few in his class to have a car at his disposal, a ‘39 Plymouth that belonged to his mother but that she rarely drove. (His father put the miles on the old family Ford.) Noyce was not beyond sneaking off to a farm and siphoning a bit of precious gasoline from the tank of an unprotected tractor. He drove like a man possessed, taking ditches at 40 miles per hour and racing his friends down Sixth Avenue, one of the town’s two main drags. “It seemed like he was always in a hurry to get somewhere,” one of his friends observed. “And he got there.”24

  By the time Noyce was a junior in high school, “all the girls were crazy about [him],” recalls one of his classmates. “They though he was the most handsome thing on the face of the earth.” The quick lopsided smile, the good manners and fine family, the wavy hair high on his forehead, the dash of rapscallion—it made for an appealing combination. He was not tall, only 5’8”, but his childhood pudginess had hardened into muscle, and he had acquired a visible confidence in his body. “He was probably the most physically graceful man I’ve ever met. Just walking across the lawn … on a horse, even driving a car,” recalls Marianne Standing, Noyce’s steady girlfriend for several years of high school. Marianne was the glamour girl of the class of ‘45: a gorgeous brunette with smoky eyes, a biting wit, a penchant for unfiltered cigarettes—and, most shocking of all, a divorced mother. Harriet Noyce, who thought Marianne “had a gift for trouble, learned from playing one divorced parent against the other,” made sure the family sang hymns after dinner whenever she joined them for a meal.25

  His high-spirited antics did not keep Noyce from practicing his oboe, doing his homework (and sometimes his friends’ homework, too), or maintaining a reputation among teachers as a “very fine boy.” The yearbook called him “the Quiz Kid of our class, the guy who has the answers to all the questions.” He maintained a straight-A record in high school and demonstrated an astonishingly intuitive sense for science and math, never earning less than 96 percent in either subject. Although he spent much of the first semester of high school physics dismantling and rebuilding a watch under his desk during lectures—he had the audacity to use a jeweler’s loupe when the teacher’s back was turned—he nonetheless aced every test.26

  Harriet may not have known about the watch or Noyce’s other antics, but she well understood that high-school physics bored Bob and that he would create his own special brand of challenge in the absence of more appropriate alternatives. This was especially true after Gaylord, who had always moderated Bob’s tendencies towards excess, had left home in 1944 for the navy’s V-12 officer training program. Gaylord had read about the Nazis’ concentration camps and decided this war was a moral imperative. Bob admired his brother’s ideals, but Gaylord’s departure left him bereft and even more restless than usual.27

  Desperate for a productive time-filler for Bob, Harriet Noyce took it upon herself to pay a call on Mr. Grant Gale, the physics professor at Grinnell College. The Noyces and the Gales attended church together, and Bob or his brothers went to the Gales every few weeks to help with babysitting, snow shoveling, repairing the lawn mower, or installing screens on the windows.28

  In her characteristically str
aightforward way, Harriet asked Gale to let Bob join his introductory physics course. After verifying that a few other high school students had taken an occasional course at Grinnell College over the years, Gale agreed to let Noyce enroll when the second semester began in January 1945. As it was, his classes were unusually small, since nearly every physics major on the campus had been drafted.

  In this introductory course, Gale focused on demonstrating the relevance of physics to daily life. He eschewed note taking—“that’s what textbooks are for”—in favor of real-life demonstrations. With what force did the snowball he hurled against the side of the science building hit the bricks? Why did a skater spin faster when she pulled her arms in to her side? Why could you fill a drinking straw with water, seal the top with your finger, and lift the straw without spilling the water? How could you prove your answers to these questions? His stock of homilies was legendary. “Have the courage of your convictions,” he would urge a student hesitating to guess an answer. “Be brave.” When a student with real promise began to ramble, Gale would gently admonish, “If you can’t define it in one sentence, you probably don’t understand it.”29

  Noyce was the only male in the class of 14, a position to which he did not object. While Gale lectured, Noyce would lean back in his chair, listening carefully and occasionally volunteering comments. “[Gale’s] interest was infectious,” Noyce later recalled. “I caught the disease.” At the lab tables, Noyce was eager and thorough, despite being somewhat preoccupied with flirting with his lab partners, who despite his best efforts, treated him like a kid brother. At the semester’s end, Noyce had earned the highest grade in the course.30