Biography | Robert Noyce — The Physics Rooms in Goodnow Hall Where Two Transistors Arrived

People treat Silicon Valley as if it started on a California bench.

It started earlier, in a pink quartzite hall on a small Iowa campus.

Robert Norton Noyce was born in Burlington on 12 December 1927, the third of four sons of a Congregational minister.

The family settled in Grinnell while he was still a child.

He took Grant Gale's freshman physics course as a Grinnell High School senior, then entered the college in the autumn of 1945.

By 1948 the physics department still sat in Goodnow Hall.

The 1885 Richardsonian building had been the college library until Carnegie Hall opened in 1905.

After that it held mathematics and physics classrooms.

In the summer of 1948 Gale read that his University of Wisconsin classmate John Bardeen had helped invent a new solid-state amplifier at Bell Labs.

Through that acquaintance Gale obtained two of the first transistors produced there.

By the fall term he was showing them to Grinnell's handful of physics majors.

Tom Wolfe later described the class as the first academic instruction in solid-state electronics available anywhere.

Noyce was one of those seniors.

He graduated in 1949 with a B.A. in physics and mathematics and a Phi Beta Kappa key.

Gale then pointed him at MIT, where Noyce took a doctorate in physical electronics in 1953.

Physics left Goodnow in the early 1950s, after the Hall of Science opened in 1951.

The building still stands on the west side of campus, the oldest structure left after the 1882 tornado.

The transistors are gone. The rooms are not.

Photo: Smallbones, 2011, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons (Goodnow Hall).
Photo: Intel Free Press, 1959, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Noyce).