Jack Kilby

Jack Kilby (1923 to 2005) was an American electrical engineer who, working at Texas Instruments in 1958, took part with Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor in realizing the first integrated circuit. Born in Jefferson City, Missouri, and raised in Great Bend, Kansas, he served as an electronics technician in the United States Army during the Second World War, then graduated from the University of Illinois in 1947 and took a master's degree at the University of Wisconsin in 1950 while working at Centralab in Milwaukee. After he joined Texas Instruments in Dallas he spent the summer of 1958 on the problem known as the tyranny of numbers and showed management a germanium circuit that produced a continuous sine wave, and his patent was filed in 1959. He was also a co-inventor of the handheld calculator and the thermal printer, and he shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for the integrated circuit. He died in Dallas in 2005.