My late father was an Ivy League educated research chemist, a bright guy who died way too soon after being ravaged by Alzheimer’s.  He was a fun bird in his own way, and knew other bright guys who did interesting research.  Perhaps the brightest of all was Dr. Willis Adcock, who worked at the Standard Oil of Indiana research facility at Tulsa, Oklahoma.  In the early 1950’s, Adcock left Standard and went to work with a startup in Dallas, Texas. His goal was to take silicon and convert it into a form that could be used by electronics devices.  His boss at Standard told him at the time of his departure that he was crazy, which is quite possibly true in the corporate sense.

     The electronics of the day used vacuum tubes; radios needed to be “warmed up” as the miniature fires were ignited in their glass cylinders.  They would glow with warm tones of orange and purple, electrons flowing from filament to plate, pouring out heat as part of the process. Solid state electronics were on the horizon, but the material of choice in that time was germanium.  Silicon had the necessary and desirable properties but a process needed to be developed to properly use the element.  It was Adcock who developed that process.

     We went to visit Dr. Adcock in the early 1960’s, and he gave us a tour of the facility.  The humble little startup of a few years earlier was Texas Instruments. In that day, individual transistors were being manufactured by hand by countless rows of technicians, hand soldering each connection on the little one lung transistors. The most advanced machine in the assembly facility was a testing device, a large unit with a rotating wheel that passed the transistors over contact points that would illuminate a green light if the unit was good or a red light if it was bad.

   The other advanced device in the facility was the silicon kiln, where rods of silicon were drawn through 1,400° heat, slowly purifying it, pushing the impurities forward as it went.  The process left little concentric rings on the surface of the silicon rod.

     I have two souvenirs from our visit, one a single transistor from that day’s production. Below, two vacuum tubes and the transistor that would replace them: