Jack Kilby: A Appreciation (Inventor or microchip obit)

[northzax]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/21/AR2005062101646.html

From the Post.

Jack Kilby, Touching Lives on Micro and Macro Scales

By T.R. Reid
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 22, 2005; Page C01

For decades after Jack St. Clair Kilby got the revolutionary idea that has enhanced daily life for almost everybody on Earth, people used to tell the inventor of the microchip that he deserved a Nobel Prize. He always scoffed at the notion. "Those big prizes are for the advancement of understanding," Kilby would explain in his slow, plainspoken Kansas way. "They are for scientists, who are motivated by pure knowledge. But I'm an engineer. I'm motivated by a need to solve problems, to make something work. For guys like me, the prize is seeing a successful solution."

As it happened, Jack Kilby did eventually win the Nobel Prize -- although the Royal Swedish Academy didn't award it until more than 40 years after his 1958 breakthrough and after he had received almost every other honor and award an engineer can receive.

read on...

[Dudley_DUright]

1. Glad he won the Nobel Prize in Physics before he died

(You can't win one posthumously). He certainly deserved it. Not every Nobel in physics is for basic research, which is OK with me.

[northzax]

2. I think the Nobel was richly deserved

but I wouldn't have voted for him, because it was more of an engineering problem (and believe me, he deserved every other science prize possible, hell he should have gotten Field just for making modern math possible) but it wasn't really physics, per se.

[Burma Jones]

3. Quite the Guy.......

Here's a quote from the Washington Post Appreciation......

Jack did get a shot at big-time fame, when Diane Sawyer interviewed him for the CBS Morning News. Sawyer was peppy and excited; Jack was his slow, laconic self. When Sawyer noted that his invention had "kept the United States at the forefront of technology," Jack stewed over the idea for a moment and then said, "Well, I hadn't thought of it in those terms."

Sawyer asked, "Have you made money from this invention?" Jack paused again, and finally said, "Some, yeah." With that, CBS broke for a commercial and Jack's moment in the sun was over.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/22/business/22kilby.html

Oh, and by the way, Kilby went to College under the GI Bill of Rights - a Government program that would undoubtedly be called Socialist today......