Jack Kilby

Hello. My name is Jack Kilby. When I was a boy growing up in Great Bend, Kansas, I was fascinated by electronics. My father ran an electric company, so our house was always full of interesting gadgets. My favorite hobby was tinkering with radios. I loved figuring out how all the wires, tubes, and circuits worked together to pull sounds out of thin air. I was born on November 8th, 1923, and even back then, I knew I wanted to spend my life solving puzzles with electricity.

When I grew up, I became an engineer. In 1958, I started a new job at a company called Texas Instruments. Back then, electronics like computers were gigantic. They filled entire rooms with complicated parts and tangles of wire. I thought, 'There has to be a better way.' While most of my coworkers were on summer vacation, I stayed in the lab and worked on a big idea. What if all those separate parts could be made from just one single piece of material? On September 12th, 1958, I showed my bosses my new invention. It was a small, flat piece of material with some wires sticking out. It wasn't very pretty, but when we turned it on, it worked. I had created the very first integrated circuit.

People started calling my invention the 'microchip.' It was like a tiny brain that could be put inside all sorts of machines to make them smarter and smaller. Because of the microchip, I was later able to help invent the first handheld calculator. No more giant adding machines. Now, you could hold the power to solve math problems right in your hand. This was only possible because we could fit all the 'thinking' parts onto one tiny chip.

Many years later, in 2000, I was given a very special award called the Nobel Prize in Physics for my invention. I lived to be 81 years old, and I was happy to see how my little chip changed the world. Today, my invention is in almost everything you use that plugs in or has batteries—your family's car, your television, the computer you use at school, and even your toys. It all started with one small idea to make something big, tiny.