Biography | Craig Barrett — The NATO Year at the Laboratory in Teddington

People treat a Stanford doctorate as a ticket straight onto a California faculty.

Barrett's first post after the degree was a year inside Britain's national measurement laboratory.

From 1964 to 1965 he held a NATO postdoctoral fellowship at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington.

The laboratory occupies ground beside Bushy Park. Bushy House, the original home of the institution, still stands on the site.

NPL had been founded in 1900 to hold physical standards for British industry and to test materials against those standards.

A materials scientist trained on defects in solids belonged in those rooms.

He returned to Stanford in 1965 as an assistant professor in materials science and engineering.

The Teddington year is easy to skip in an Intel chronology that starts in 1974.

It is the first time his training left the Farm and entered a laboratory whose job was to make measurements hold still from one bench to the next.

Intel's later rule that factories must copy one another is a manufacturing story written in Oregon and Santa Clara.

The earlier address for treating a process as something to reproduce, not reinvent, is this campus on Hampton Road.

Photo: Stephen Dawson, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons / Geograph. Bushy House: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.