Prof. Dr. Thorsten Jungmann (last updated 2026-10-03)
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Jack St. Clair Kilby (1923–2005) was an American electrical engineer. He was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, and raised in Great Bend, Kansas, where his father ran a small electric company. After serving in the U.S. Army as an electronics technician during the Second World War, he studied electrical engineering at the University of Illinois and graduated in 1947. He then joined the Centralab Division of Globe Union in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and obtained a master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1950 through evening classes at the University of Wisconsin.
In mid-1958, as a newly employed engineer at Texas Instruments, Kilby worked on a problem in circuit design that was commonly called the ‘tyranny of numbers’. He concluded that manufacturing the circuit components en masse in a single piece of semiconductor material could solve it. On 12 September 1958 he showed the management of the company a piece of germanium with an oscilloscope attached; the oscilloscope showed a continuous sine wave, which proved that his circuit worked. This phase-shift oscillator – one transistor, one capacitor and three resistors on a single piece of germanium – was the first integrated circuit (German: integrierter Schaltkreis). His patent application ‘Miniaturized electronic circuits’ was filed on 6 February 1959. Kilby’s circuit still relied on external gold-wire connections, which made large-scale production impractical. A few months later, in January 1959, Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor independently conceived a monolithic version. Along with Noyce, Kilby is generally credited as co-inventor of the integrated circuit; for his part in this invention he received one half of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics. Noyce had died in 1990.
Kilby was also a co-inventor of the handheld calculator (together with Jerry Merryman and James Van Tassel) and of the thermal printer, for which he held patents. In 1970 he took a leave of absence from Texas Instruments to work as an independent inventor; from 1978 to 1984 he was Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering at Texas A&M University. He retired from Texas Instruments in 1983 and died in Dallas, Texas.
Reference and further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Kilby
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit
Image source: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0, James R. Biard)
