Biography | Andrew Grove — The Chemistry Hall Where a Fluid-Dynamics Thesis Ended

People treat Grove's move into semiconductors as if a recruiter invented it on a factory floor.

The ticket west was a chemical-engineering doctorate about heat moving through particles.

After City College, Grove came to the University of California, Berkeley, and worked under Andreas Acrivos on fluid dynamics.

He published four papers from the thesis and took the Ph.D. in 1963.

Gilman Hall, opened in 1917, is the historic home of Berkeley's College of Chemistry. Room 307 later became a National Historic Landmark for plutonium chemistry that Grove had nothing to do with.

The relevant fact is simpler. A young engineer who had learned English in Harlem lecture halls finished a West Coast doctorate in three years.

Chemical-engineering doctorates then went into teaching or into aerospace. Grove went to Fairchild Semiconductor because Gordon Moore, already running research there, was willing to hire outside the usual pipeline.

Moore wrote to Acrivos for a recommendation. Grove later said Moore's presence was the reason he took the job.

From Fairchild he followed Moore and Robert Noyce to Intel in 1968 as employee number three and director of operations.

The building on this quad did not make the microprocessor. It made the person Intel could hire.

He lectured in electrical engineering and computer science on this campus from 1966 to 1972, after he had already clocked in at Fairchild, which tells you how thin the wall still was between the lab and the factory.

Photo: Coro, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.