As the co-inventor of the integrated circuit, Robert Noyce was a founder of the modern electronics industry. He was born and raised in Iowa, the son of a Congregational minister. As a physics major at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, Noyce worked with one of the first transistors. It had been given to his physics professor Grant Gale by one of its co-inventors, John Bardeen. Noyce received his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953 and became a research engineer at Philco Corporation, working on germanium transistor development. In 1956 Noyce began research on the physics of silicon transistors at the newly established Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, started by another transistor co-inventor, William Shockley. The lab's whereabouts, near Palo Alto, California, eventually became known as Silicon Valley because so many electronics companies sprouted there.

Noyce's story is a case in point. Unhappy with Shockley's management style...