Texas Instruments has created a special Web site in honor of September 12, 1958 -- the day Jack St. Clair Kilby introduced the integrated circuit, otherwise known as the technology that "makes the Internet, PCs, cell phones and, well, the world, go round," as TI proudly puts it. Kilby, who won the Nobel Prize in 2000 and who died in Dallas in June 2005, is the namesake of TI's new "innovation center" introduced today: the Kilby Labs. And in a speech posted online today by way of introducing the labs and honoring Kilby, TI's chairman, president and CEO Rich Templeton recounts a favorite tale about Kilby. It's below. --Robert Wilonsky
A few years before Jack won the Nobel Prize, he was speaking to a group of TI employees here in Dallas. When he finished his talk, a woman in the audience asked him, “What can we do to help our children invent new things?” And Jack told her, “Read them fairy tales.” Jack Kilby was a hero, an artist, a philanthropist, a genius -- and a real believer in the power of the imagination.
