Editorial: A giant of our times

Thursday, June 23, 2005 | 9:03 a.m.

It's not everyone who at the end of his life can be credited -- literally -- with having changed the world. Nobel Prize winner Jack Kilby, however, who died Monday at age 81 in his Dallas home, earned that distinction. Working for Texas Instruments in the late 1950s, he was the first to develop an integrated circuit, commonly known today as a microchip.

For Kilby's obituary in the Los Angeles Times, Texas Instruments' chairman Tom Engibous said, "In my opinion there are only a handful of people whose works have truly transformed the world and the way we live in it -- Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers and Jack Kilby."

High praise for a man most of the world had never heard of. But that was Jack Kilby's choice. Described by his family and colleagues as easygoing and soft-spoken, the 6-foot, 6-inch Kilby never sought celebrity or vast riches, and neither came his way. Born in Jefferson City, Mo., in 1923 and raised in Great Bend, Kan., he never lost touch with the quiet values of the Midwest.

Months after Kilby's invention, another inventor, Robert N. Noyce (later a co-founder of Intel Corp.), also patented a microchip using different technology. After fighting in the courts for a few years, Kilby and Noyce agreed to share the license for the microchip. This agreement eventually led to the ongoing revolution in computers and electronics. The microchip was used in government applications at first. But the consumer electronics industry woke up to its potential with Texas Instruments' introduction in 1967 of the hand-held calculator -- co-invented by Kilby.

When Kilby was asked what he did after learning he had won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000, the New York Times reported he said, "I made coffee." Which reminds us, even our coffee makers today are controlled by microchips.