Notable Innovators

Douglas C. Engelbart was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1925, the second of three children of Scandinavian and German descent. His father was an electrical engineer who owned a radio shop until he died when Douglas was nine years old. He graduated from high school in 1942 and went on to study electrical engineering at Oregon State University, where he was trained as a radar technician before being drafted into the military in 1944. He was in the Navy from 1944 to 1946, stationed for a year in the Philippines, where during that year he read Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" — a crucial influence on his later work. After receiving a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1955, he stayed on as an acting assistant professor for a year before accepting a position with the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. Engelbart's dream was to use computers to connect individuals in a network that would allow them to share and update information in real time. He combined this idea of collaborative software with his experience interpreting radar displays and with ideas gleaned from Vannevar Bush's essay to envision networked computers employing a graphical user interface. Engelbart died on July 2, 2013, in Atherton, California, at age 88.

While at SRI, Engelbart's most important work began with his 1959 founding of the Augmentation Research Center, where he developed some of the key technologies used in computing today. He brought the various strands of his research together for his "Mother of All Demos" in San Francisco on December 9, 1968, which presaged many of the technologies and computer-usage paradigms used decades later. His system, NLS, showed actual instances of, or precursors to, hypertext, shared-screen collaboration, multiple windows, on-screen video teleconferencing, and the mouse as an input device. Results of his ARC work included the basic patent for the mouse, development of two-dimensional editing, the concept of windows, cross-file editing, uniform command syntax, remote procedure-call protocol, mixed text-graphic files, structured document files, idea processing, and hypertext, among many more developments. Early in 1967, Engelbart's laboratory became the second site on the ARPANET, the primary precursor to the Internet. Over the course of his career, Engelbart received over 40 awards and honors, including the Lemelson-MIT Prize (1997), the ACM A.M. Turing Award (1997), the IEEE John Von Neumann Medal (1999), and the USA National Medal of Technology (2000).

Engelbart had, after all, introduced word processing, document sharing, version control, and hyperlinks, and integrated text, graphics, and video conferencing — and foreshadowed the internet. He thought the audience members would line up afterward to ask how they could join his network and help develop his ideas. The irony of his legacy is that those ideas were carried forward by others, often without credit to their source. Later in the 1970s, Engelbart lost his key engineers to Xerox PARC, a lavish and well-funded research center a few miles away. Under Alan Kay's direction, the engineers created a personal computer geared toward individual productivity — their software included more user-friendly versions of a few of Engelbart's original ideas, including multiple windows, text with integrated graphics, and the mouse. A cruel joke of the time was that Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center had been a training program for PARC. With its mouse-driven GUI, the Xerox Alto went on to influence Steve Jobs and Apple's Macintosh computer in the 1980s. Eventually, Microsoft's Windows operating system also used a mouse and a GUI in the same way that the Alto and the NLS system did. The ideas of networked computers and shared information that Engelbart demonstrated inspired subsequent research and eventually formed the global network we use today. Every touchscreen swipe, hyperlink click, and video call on Earth traces its conceptual lineage directly back to his vision.

John Bardeen (May 23, 1908 – January 30, 1991) was born and raised in Wisconsin and earned both his bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin before receiving a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University. Walter Houser Brattain (February 10, 1902 – October 13, 1987) was born in Amoy, China, to American parents, spent his childhood on a cattle ranch in Washington State, and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1929. He joined Bell Laboratories' technical staff that same year, where the chief field of his research was the surface properties of solids. William Bradford Shockley (February 13, 1910 – August 12, 1989) was born in London to American parents and raised in Palo Alto, California. After World War II, Bell Labs director Mervin Kelly assembled these three scientists to develop a solid-state semiconductor switch to replace vacuum tubes. Shockley was the team leader, Brattain was the experimentalist, and Bardeen was the theorist. Bardeen suggested experiments and interpreted results while Brattain built the equipment and ran them — a complementary division of talent that proved decisive. All three men were joint recipients of the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of the transistor effect.

The trio's most celebrated achievement was the invention of the transistor, but each contributed distinctive and lasting work to science. On December 16, 1947, Bardeen and Brattain's research culminated in the first successful semiconductor amplifier. They applied two closely-spaced gold contacts held in place by a plastic wedge to the surface of a small slab of high-purity germanium. The voltage on one contact modulated the current flowing through the other, amplifying the input signal up to 100 times. Chagrined at having had no direct role in the crucial breakthrough, Shockley conceived the junction transistor shortly thereafter. The first junction transistor was successfully tested on April 12, 1950 — more durable and practical than the point-contact transistor, it also proved much easier to manufacture and became the most commonly used transistor until the late 1960s. Bardeen subsequently left Bell Labs in 1951 and at the University of Illinois worked with Leon Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer to propose the BCS theory of superconductivity in 1957. In 1972 he was awarded a second Nobel Prize in Physics for this work — making him the only person ever to win the Nobel Prize in Physics twice. Brattain's chief contributions included the discovery of the photo-effect at the free surface of a semiconductor, and continued surface-properties research throughout his career at Bell Labs.

The transistor was 1/50 the size of the vacuum tubes it replaced in televisions and radios, used far less power, was far more reliable, and allowed electrical devices to become more compact. Hearing aids, in 1952, were the first consumer application. But it was the transistor radio that captured the public imagination — a team from Texas Instruments introduced the first commercial transistor radio, the Regency T1, in time for the 1954 holiday season. The geographic consequences of Shockley's later career proved as transformative as his science. In 1956, Shockley started Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California, close to his mother in Palo Alto. He recruited brilliant employees, but quickly alienated them with his autocratic and erratic management; they left and founded major companies in the industry. Eight of his top researchers — the "Traitorous Eight" — left in 1957 to found Fairchild Semiconductor, igniting the spark of Silicon Valley. Their rebellion didn't just create a company; it birthed the modern tech industry. From Fairchild grew scores of spin-offs, including Intel and AMD. Noyce's own mentorships created a domino effect; his influence on Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page would ultimately help shape the founding of Apple and Google. The transistor today is the most manufactured device in human history, with trillions produced annually — the foundation of every microprocessor, smartphone, and computer on Earth.

Vannevar Bush (March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor, and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all wartime military R&D was carried out, including important developments in radar and the initiation and early administration of the Manhattan Project. Born in Everett, Massachusetts, Bush was educated at Tufts College, graduating in 1913, and received a doctorate in engineering from MIT and Harvard University jointly in 1917. Bush joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT in 1919 and founded the company that became Raytheon in 1922. He became vice president of MIT and dean of the MIT School of Engineering in 1932, and president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1938. Bush was a well-known policymaker and public intellectual during World War II, when he was in effect the first presidential science advisor. As head of NDRC and OSRD, he coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. At a public memorial held by MIT after his death, Jerome Wiesner declared: "No American has had greater influence in the growth of science and technology than Vannevar Bush."