Science & Technology:

Life After Death

I don't believe in heaven or hell. I think when you die that's it-the end. But at the same time we all achieve a certain amount of immortality. We are remembered for some time after our deaths for good deeds and bad. How long depends on how good or bad they were. Some have a place in history and their names are remembered for generations. There are some, that although their names were never very well known, did something that had a profound impact on how humans live. One such man died recently, Jack Kilby, the inventor of the integrated circuit.

For decades after Jack St. Clair Kilby got the revolutionary idea that has enhanced daily life for almost everybody on Earth, people used to tell the inventor of the microchip that he deserved a Nobel Prize. He always scoffed at the notion. "Those big prizes are for the advancement of understanding," Kilby would explain in his slow, plainspoken Kansas way. "They are for scientists, who are motivated by pure knowledge. But I'm an engineer. I'm motivated by a need to solve problems, to make something work. For guys like me, the prize is seeing a successful solution."

As it happened, Jack Kilby did eventually win the Nobel Prize -- although the Royal Swedish Academy didn't award it until more than 40 years after his 1958 breakthrough and after he had received almost every other honor and award an engineer can receive.

Kilby expressed amazement at the vast range of applications -- calculators, computers, digital cameras, pacemakers, cell phones, space travel and so forth -- that have developed around the tiny circuit-on-a-chip that he devised when he was the most junior engineer at Texas Instruments.

"It's astonishing what human ingenuity and creativity can do," he said. "My part was pretty small, actually." Whenever people would mention that Kilby was responsible for the entire modern digital world, he liked to tell the story of the beaver and the rabbit sitting in the woods near Hoover Dam. "Did you build that one?" the rabbit asked. "No, but it was based on an idea of mine," the beaver replied.