He Changed the World

What I like about the story behind the invention of the integrated circuit (IC) is that Jack Kilby did it as a first-year employee at Texas Instruments (TI), during a two-week period in the Summer when most of the company took vacation. Since he was new at TI, he couldn't take vacation! Alone with his thoughts, pondering the impracticalness (physically and financially) of mass producing miniature circuits, he began to sketch out the ideas that led to the integrated circuit. When his boss, Willis Adcock, returned from vacation, he asked Jack to "prove it." So Jack built these early ICs. And a year later, TI announced that they had a "significant development."

Slowly, but surely, the entire world shifted with this development. Integrated circuits (better known as microchips) allowed all electronics to shrink dramatically. Nearly every miniature medical device uses an IC. They're inside virtually every electronic device. And microchips eventually led to general computers. (Robert Noyce, a co-founder of Intel, is credited with inventing the IC in parallel with Jack Kilby.)

Jack built the IC in 1958. He died two days ago at the age of 82.

Photo courtesy of Texas Instruments.

Go Daddy

Last Saturday, I took Mia to the park. Some boys were playing basketball, and while Mia went up and down the slide, I cast a look at those boys. All tough. Slam dunking the eight foot rim. I was a boy once, but sometimes it's so hard to remember. I used to spend whole days playing, pausing only to eat.

"Look at me!" Mia will yell. I'll turn to her. She's walking up the slide. Did I ever do that? Now she comes back down. Over and over again. My mind hovers between distraction and attentiveness.

"Let's run, Daddy!" And there she goes, running to the other slide, across the empty parking lot. "You'll never catch me, Daddy!" she shouts.

I slow jog after her, saying the lines that she knows I will say. "I will catch you, Mia!" She laughs and runs. I will catch you.