The little-known history of Jack Kilby's misadventure in solar power

In the summer of 1958, a new employee at Texas Instruments, Jack St. Clair Kilby, had not yet accrued enough time off to take a company-wide vacation. Alone in the lab, Kilby pondered the then-current "tyranny of numbers" problem: the time-consuming and imperfect process of soldering connections between very large numbers of discrete solidstate components. Within a few short weeks, Kilby came up with a solution-the integrated circuit. This revolutionary invention, for which Kilby usually shares credit with Robert Noyce, launched the entire field of modern microelectronics and more than a half century of staggering technological progress.