7 The 100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time 7

McDonnell Douglas Corporation, where Engelbart worked
on information systems. In 1989 he founded the Bootstrap
Institute, a research and consulting firm. Over the follow-
ing decade he finally began to receive recognition for his
innovations, including the 1997 Turing Award, a major
achievement in computer science.

Robert Noyce

(b. Dec. 12, 1927, Burlington, Iowa, U.S.—d. June 3, 1990, Austin, Texas)

A

merican engineer Robert Norton Noyce was coinventor
of the integrated circuit, a system of interconnected
transistors on a single silicon microchip.

Education

In 1939 the Noyce family moved to Grinnell, Iowa, where
the father had accepted a position as a Congregational
minister and where the son began to demonstrate the
traits of an inventor and tinkerer. Noyce majored in
physics at Grinnell College (B.A., 1949) and earned a
doctorate in solid state physics from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT; Ph.D., 1953), for a dissertation
related to the technology he found most fascinating, the
transistor.

Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory

Developed at Bell Laboratories in 1947, the transistor had
figured in Noyce’s imagination since he saw an early one in
a college physics class. In 1956, while working for Philco
Corporation, Noyce met William Shockley, one of the
transistor’s Nobel Prize-winning inventors. Shockley was
recruiting researchers for Shockley Semiconductor
Laboratory, a company that he had started in Palo Alto,