On September 12, 1958, Jack Kilby demonstrated the first working integrated circuit at Texas Instruments in Dallas. Kilby, a newly hired engineer who hadn’t yet earned enough vacation time to join his colleagues on their summer break, used the quiet lab to test an idea he’d been sketching out: put multiple electronic components on a single piece of semiconductor material instead of wiring them together separately. His prototype was a tiny sliver of germanium, about the size of a paperclip, with a transistor, resistors, and a capacitor etched into it and connected by fine gold “flying wires.” When he powered it up as an oscillator circuit, it worked.
It’s hard to overstate how much that little germanium sliver changed. Before Kilby’s circuit, engineers built electronics the way they always had, one discrete component at a time, hand-soldered and wired together, which put a hard ceiling on how complex and reliable a device could be. By proving that a whole circuit could exist on one chip, Kilby (working independently and around the same time as Robert Noyce at Fairchild, who solved the manufacturing side of the same idea) laid the groundwork for the integrated circuit industry. Texas Instruments shipped its first commercial IC-based product in 1960, and the basic concept scaled from a handful of components on a chip to the billions packed into a modern processor. Kilby won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the work in 2000.
Source: Computer History Museum, “This Day in History”
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