Biography | Gordon Moore — The Gates Chemistry Rooms Where He Finished a Thesis on Infrared Light

The story of Moore's Law is usually told as if a businessman noticed a graph.

The graph sat on top of a chemistry doctorate.

Moore took a bachelor's degree in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1950.

The day after he married Betty Irene Whitaker, he began graduate work at the California Institute of Technology.

Caltech awarded him a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1954.

The thesis title is exact: infrared studies of nitrous acid, the chloramines, and nitrogen dioxide, plus a second part on the photochemical decomposition of nitric oxide.

That work happened in the Gates laboratories of chemistry, opened in 1917 as the second building on this campus.

The 1917 block was wrecked by the 1971 Sylmar earthquake, gutted, and rebuilt in 1983 as Parsons-Gates Hall of Administration.

The Gates Annex and Crellin Laboratory, added in 1927 and 1938, kept chemistry on the same quad.

This pin sits on the Gates complex.

A visitor now finds an administration hall where the original bench rooms were.

The exterior still reads as the old chemistry court.

After Pasadena he went east, to the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins, then back west in 1956 when William Shockley hired him into a new silicon laboratory in Mountain View.

The chemist who had measured infrared bands was about to measure transistors.

Photo: Caltech chemical laboratory, 1923, from The Big T yearbook, public domain. Gates Chemistry Library interior: Antony-22, CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons.