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The year 1954 was important for TI, not only for getting the first silicon transistors into production, but also for getting germanium transistors into radios. The company wanted consumers to be aware that transistors were no passing fad. What was needed, felt Pat Haggerty, executive vice president, was a consumer product. A radio!
Texas Instruments grew out of Geophysical Service Inc., a seismic-survey company that moved from New Jersey to Texas and was renamed Texas Instruments in 1951. The following year, TI was one of 20 companies to pay Western Electric $25,000 for a license to produce transistors. The company got more than that from Bell Labs. It hired Gordon Teal in November 1952 to head its Central Research Labs and make it grow. He did. At Bell Labs, Teal had devised a technique for growing singlecrystal germanium, a powerful development. One of the first men Teal hired, in 1953, was an old school chum from Brown University, Willis Adcock. And he gave him an enormous challenge: Grow silicon.
Willis Adcock
Adcock started higher education at Hobart College in Geneva, N.Y. He likes to point out that Hobart, founded in 1822, was the first college to graduate a woman doctor, Elizabeth Blackwell. Adcock took a doctorate in physical chemistry at Brown University in Providence, R.I., in 1948, then joined the research lab of a subsidiary of Standard Oil of Indiana.
When Adcock announced he was leaving to work on transistors, his boss tried to dissuade him. "You're out of your mind," he said. "That company is smaller than our research lab. And there's no future in that stuff. Just remember that people will always buy gas."
Geophysical Service had developed some expertise in electronics, as it built its own survey equipment. The company moved to Texas because that's where the oil was. During World War II, it couldn't sell much surveying services because surveying wasn't considered a critical industry. The company had to find a use for its electronics capability. It started building systems for anti-submarine warfare.
The company developed an interest in silicon because germanium transistors failed at high temperatures-a problem for military equipment. When Teal ordered Adcock to grow silicon and make silicon transistors, Adcock succeeded, he says, because he didn't know...