The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce

Tom Wolfe's Esquire profile traces how Robert Noyce, a Grinnell, Iowa native, became a central figure in the technological revolution that produced the silicon chip. The piece describes Grinnell in 1948, a town of about seven thousand people that Wolfe portrays as steeped in Midwestern Protestant tradition. It details how Grant Gale, a Grinnell College physics professor, obtained some of the first transistors invented at Bell Laboratories by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain and taught early solid-state electronics to his students, including Noyce.