Robert Noyce: The Pig Thief Who Co-Founded Intel and Shaped Silicon Valley

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In the late 1940s, a Grinnell College student stole a 25-pound pig for a campus luau. The farm belonged to the mayor, and Robert Noyce faced expulsion, a felony charge, and at least a year in state prison. His physics professor, Grant Gale, paid for the pig and negotiated a one-semester suspension. When Noyce returned, Gale showed him two of the first transistors from Bell Labs. This episode follows the minister's son from Burlington, Iowa, born in 1927, from that moment to MIT and on to California.

There he worked for transistor co-inventor William Shockley, a brilliant scientist and oppressive manager. In 1957 Noyce and seven colleagues walked out, earned the name the Traitorous Eight, and started Fairchild Semiconductor. In 1959 he invented the monolithic integrated circuit, printing flat aluminum connections on silicon. In 1968 he and Gordon Moore founded Intel, where his flat, open culture became the model for the modern startup.

• At five he beat his father at ping pong and was insulted when his mother suggested his dad had let him win.
• At 12 he and his brother built a boy-sized aircraft and launched it from the roof of the college stables, and at Grinnell he won the Brown Derby Prize for the best grades with the least work.
• Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments built an integrated circuit first in 1958, but it relied on tiny gold wires, while Noyce's planar design could be mass produced.
• At Intel there were no reserved parking spaces, corporate jets, or corner offices, and Noyce sat in an open cubicle, a setup meant to speed the flow of ideas.
• Asked what he would do as emperor of the United States, he named education for the poorest as his top priority. He died of a heart attack in Austin, Texas, in 1990 at age 62.