Biography|Robert Noyce — The Iowa Campus Where He First Held a Transistor

People treat Robert Noyce as a California founder who arrived already knowing silicon.

The first transistors he ever held were on this Iowa campus.

In the fall of 1948 Grant O. Gale, Grinnell's physics professor, obtained two of Bell Laboratories' earliest point-contact transistors.

Gale had written John Bardeen, a Wisconsin classmate, and Oliver Buckley, a Grinnell graduate then running Bell Labs.

He used the devices in what later accounts call the first undergraduate course in solid-state electronics.

One of the seniors in that small physics class was Robert Norton Noyce, class of 1949.

Noyce had grown up a minister's son on Park Street, a short walk from the laboratories.

He finished a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics here that spring, Phi Beta Kappa.

The brick science complex now named for him was not the building he used.

The Robert N. Noyce '49 Science Center was dedicated in the fall of 1997, seven years after his death, on the site of older laboratory wings.

A visitor today walks a renovated courtyard and a physics historical museum that still keeps early chip hardware he later sent back to Gale.

The 1948 lesson is the moment.

The named hall is the afterlife of that lesson, not the room itself.

From Grinnell he went to MIT for a doctorate in physical electronics, finished in 1953, then to Philco, then west.

The pin is the campus that first put a transistor in his hand.

Photo: Grinnell College, Robert Noyce Science Center, after the 1997 naming. Ken Lund, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.