#356 How The Sun Rose On Silicon Valley: Bob Noyce (Founder of Intel)

**David Senra** (0:00)
So the book that I want to talk to you about today is not a book. It is a long-form article, long-form piece written for Esquire magazine all the way back in 1983 It is very well-known long-form piece for those that study the history of the technology industry, specifically the history of Silicon Valley. It is called The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce, How the Sun Rose on the Silicon Valley, and it was written by Tom Wolfe. And I was reading it and rereading it in in anticipation for another book, another biography on Bob Noyce that I'm going to, at the end of this, encourage you to read along with me. But as I was reading this to serve as supplemental research for the other book, I realized like this piece is so good that it could stand on its own and it should be an episode on its own. So I want to read to you and it gives you an idea of why this is so important. Because even though the technology has changed, like if you strip away what new technology is being invented in this article, you could easily replace it with the technology that is being created today. And yet, humans' reaction is almost identical. But let me give you the intro to this article because I think it sets it up perfectly. Remember, this is written in 1983, okay? America is today in the midst of a great technological revolution. With the advent of the silicon chip, information processing and communications, the national economy has been strikingly altered.
The new technology is changing how we live, how we work, how we think. People say the exact same thing today, it's remarkable. The revolution didn't just happen. It was engineered by a small number of people. Collectively, they engineered tomorrow. Foremost among them is Robert Noyce.
And so before I jump into the beginning of this piece, I want to read this quote that comes from Steve Jobs because a little background on Bob Noyce, in case it's the first time you come across him, he was the founder of Fairchild Semiconductor, the founder of Intel. He's known as like the godfather, the grandfather, the grandfather of Silicon Valley. He was also one of Steve Jobs' mentors. I've read in a bunch of Steve Jobs' biographies, hilarious stories about like a young Steve Jobs is in his twenties. Bob Noyce is probably in his fifties by then, would come over and, you know, Bob is just kind of like smacking him on the back of the head, telling him, hey, you need to learn how to act. It's just kind of funny because you think of Steve Jobs as, you know, one of the greatest entrepreneurs ever do it. This very formidable individual who seemed in complete control in any environment he was in. He's like, yeah, but he wasn't like that when he was in his twenties and he needed the guidance. But this is what Steve Jobs said about Bob Noyce after Bob died. He said, he was one of the giants in this valley who provided the model and inspiration for everything we wanted to become. He was the ultimate inventor, the ultimate rebel, the ultimate entrepreneur.
So this story starts in 1948 in this tiny town of 7,000 people called Grinnell, Iowa. And so Tom Wolfe writes, Grinnell, Iowa was one of the last towns in America that people would have figured to become the starting point of a bolt into the future that would create the very substructure, the electronic grid of life in the year 2000 and beyond. It was in the summer of 1948 that Grant Gale, a 45-year-old physics professor at Grinnell College ran across an item in a newspaper concerning a former classmate of his, John Bardeen. Bardeen was now working at Bell Laboratories and Bardeen and another engineer at Bell, Walter Brattain, had invented a novel little device they called a transistor. Many years later, the transistor is gonna be called one of the most important inventions of the 20th century. But at the time, in 1948, in the newspaper, it certainly didn't register as that. This was only a small news item. However, the invention of the transistor in 1948 did not create headlines.
The transistor performed the same function as the vacuum tube, which is an essential component of telephone relay systems and radios at the time. But this transistor was 50 times smaller than a vacuum tube. And so I'm gonna pause right in the middle of this before I tell you what Grant Gale does next, which changes the trajectory of Bob Noyce's life. He just doesn't know it yet. So there's a great line that Paul Graham had when he wrote this phenomenal essay. It's episode 314 It's called How to Do Great Work. I'm just gonna read a paragraph for you because we're about to see a great illustration of this in the life of Grant Gale and Bob Noyce now.