On this day in 1923 the co-inventor of the integrated circuit, Jack Kilby was born. Kilby was born in Missouri and grew up in Great Bend, Kansas. He received his degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois and his master of science in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. While working at Texas Instruments in 1958, Kilby invented the first integrated circuit, which proved that resistors and capacitors could exist on the same semiconductor material. It was Robert Noyce however, who made his invention more practical, thus they are both credited with the invention of the integrated circuit.
Kilby went on to pioneer other applications of microchip technology, co-inventing the handheld calculator and the thermal printer. He retired from Texas Instruments in 1983, and died of cancer on June 20, 2005 at the age of 81.
Jack Kilby – Image taken from Texas Instruments