Person of the Week: Jack Kilby

June 24, 2005 — -- Jack Kilby was not a household name, but his work is a fixture in the American household. He was the Nobel Prize-winning inventor of the computer chip.

Kilby died Monday at age 81, following a battle with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

"The public sees the end product, but has very little idea how the product came into being, or who worked on it, and what kind of work had to be done to bring it about," Kilby told ABC News in a 1990 interview.

"You name a product -- it's there," said T.R. Reid, author of the book, "The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution." "The microchip is in computers, in calculators, in cell phones, in pacemakers, in space rockets. There are at least 100,000 of Jack Kilby's chips in your home. There are another 20,000 in your garage. There are another million or so in your office. They are everywhere."

Without Kilby, the computer as it is known would be far, far bulkier.

"A laptop computer circuit would have filled Yankee stadium in those days," Reid said. "Jack reduced all the circuitry to a tiny little sliver of silicon. He reduced the size by about 1 million, and therefore made all the digital world that we live with today possible."

Kilby helped pave the way for all the things the world now take for granted -- online shopping, video games, streetlights, the entire space program, iPods and digital cameras, to name a few.

"A good problem is a real challenge," said Kilby. "They're fun to work on."

They are also profitable beyond belief. Electronics is a trillion-dollar-a-year industry. This year, teenage girls are the No. 1 consumer of Kilby's chips.

If Japan or Germany had developed the microchip, Silicon Valley might be overseas, with all the wealth that accompanied it.

"Jack Kilby was a true technology pioneer," said Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. "His work literally transformed the world."

Kilby was 34 and working for Texas Instruments when he invented the microchip in 1958.

There had been little public appreciation for a man who won virtually every engineering prize in a career that spanned 50 years. Friends describe him as soft-spoken, modest and someone who never coveted the spotlight.