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OVERVIEW:

Hailed as the Thomas Edison and Henry Ford of Silicon Valley, Robert Noyce co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel and also co-invented the integrated circuit. He was a brilliant inventor, a leading entrepreneur, and a daring risk taker who piloted his own jets and skied mountains accessible only by helicopter. Leslie Berlin spent nearly a decade studying Noyce's life, and her recently published biography, The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley, has received praised from engineers, businesspeople, and academics alike. In this talk based on her research, Berlin captures not only Noyce's work but also the vibrant interplay of technology, business, money, politics, and culture that defines Silicon Valley.

Leslie will give us insight into Robert Noyce the person and the entrepreneur, and what she found out as she researched his life. Noyce came to the Bay Area to work for the brilliant Nobel prizewinning physicist William Shockley. In September 1957, Noyce and seven other Shockley employees, frustrated by the challenges of working for the mercurial Shockley, decamped to start their own firm to build silicon-based transistors. This move, which launched Fairchild Semiconductor, is often cited as the first in the chain of events that launched Silicon Valley. In 1968, Noyce and Gordon Moore, another member of the group of eight that started Fairchild Semiconductor, decided to launch another startup company. Today that firm is called Intel, the largest semiconductor company in the world. Noyce led Intel for seven years as president and another fifteen as a director.

Speaker Biography

Leslie Berlin is a Visiting Scholar in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at Stanford, Berlin is also Project Historian for the Silicon Valley Archives, a division of the Stanford University Department of Special Collections. In this capacity, she is working to find and preserve key papers and artifacts pertaining to the history of Silicon Valley. A former speechwriter for a Fortune 500 CEO, Berlin holds a Ph.D. in History from Stanford and a B.A. in American Studies from Yale. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a consultant to the Intel Museum retrospective on Noyce’s life which opened on June 13, 2005.