Happy Birthday to the Integrated Circuit

It’s hard to know what our lives would be like without the integrated circuit, the basis for all the electronic gadgetry on which we have become to depend so intensely.  In addition to all our goodies like cell phones and computers, we need to remember that the harnessing of solar energy via photovoltaics would never have happened in the absence of this development.

As it turns out, it’s the 65th anniversary of the date on which British engineer Geoffrey Dummer first presented the concept. Per the Writer’s Almanac:

Five years later, in 1957, Dummer presented a prototype of his idea, and tried to get the British government to invest in the integrated circuit, but to no avail. He later said: “The plain fact is that nobody would take the risk. The Ministry wouldn’t place a contract because they hadn’t an application. The applications people wouldn’t say we want it, because they had no experience with it. It was a chicken-and-egg situation. The Americans took financial gambles, whereas this was very slow in this country.” Meanwhile, American scientists beat Dummer to the punch, patenting their own circuit in 1958, and it would be years before the United Kingdom had a semiconductor industry. While Dummer didn’t get a patent for his concept, he did earn the title “The Prophet of the Integrated Circuit.”

The reason this story is worth retelling is that the U.S. has regrettably lost a great deal of its interest in science–certainly from the perspective of support from the federal government.  This was integral, pardon the pun, in bringing along the semiconductor industry in the mid-20th Century; the U.S. Department of Defense placed huge orders for ICs early on, believing, correctly, that this would be critical in bringing the industry out of its infancy.

It’s impossible to know what opportunities are being lost due to this unfortunate phenomenon.