Biography | Robert Noyce — The Physics Classroom Where Grant Gale Put the Transistor on the Board

People remember Noyce as a California founder. The first time the transistor entered his life was in Iowa. Robert Norton Noyce was born on 12 December 1927 in Burlington, Iowa, the son of a Congregational minister. The family moved to Grinnell in 1939. He grew up on Park Street, a few doors from Grant O. Gale, the college physicist whose lawn he mowed and whose children he babysat. He entered Grinnell College as a hometown boy and left in 1949 with a B.A. in physics and mathematics, Phi Beta Kappa, and a conference diving title. The Hall of Science that now carries his name did not exist yet. That building opened in 1951 and was later expanded and rededicated as the Robert N. Noyce '49 Science Center. The pin marks the science precinct as it stands today, at 1116 Eighth Avenue. What happened in Gale's classroom in 1948 still matters more than the later brick. Gale had been a classmate of John Bardeen at Wisconsin. When Bardeen and Walter Brattain announced the transistor at Bell Labs, Gale posted the short newspaper item on the physics bulletin board. He also wrote to Bardeen and to Oliver Buckley, a Grinnell alumnus then heading research at Bell. What arrived first were technical monographs, not a packaged device. Leslie Berlin's biography later corrected a popular story: Bell Labs did not ship Gale a physical transistor until after Noyce had already graduated. The undergraduate work was paper and argument. Gale later said it would be a gross overstatement to claim he taught Noyce much about the device. They learned it together, reading papers written for senior researchers, not for undergraduates. That was enough. Noyce went on to MIT for a physics doctorate in 1953, already pointed at solid-state electronics. The later naming of this building is the afterlife of that classroom. The moment itself was a minister's son and a physics professor reading Bell Labs papers in a small Iowa college that had eighteen physics majors. Photo: Intel Free Press, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait of Noyce in 1959; the Grinnell science building that now bears his name opened two years after he graduated.