Jack Kilby, slow of speech and sunburned by the Kansas sun, begins working for Texas Instruments. He will create the integrated circuit using monolithic technology a few weeks later. As a new hire, he is not entitled to summer vacations, and he spends them developing an idea that has been buzzing around in his head: the integrated circuit, made from a single piece of semiconductor. For the following decades, all billions of integrated circuits will be built according to his basic design, albeit with silicon, not germanium. In 2000, with considerable delay, he will be awarded the Nobel Prize for this.
