Photo: Intel Corp

I have in my notebooks from [1956] a complete description of the tunnel diode," the speaker told the audience at a symposium on innovation at the MIT Club of New York, in New York City, in December 1976. It was quite a revelation, because the speaker wasn't Leo Esaki, who had won the 1973 Nobel Prize in physics for inventing the tunnel diode in the late 1950s. It was Robert N. Noyce, cofounder of Intel Corp., Santa Clara, Calif.; inventor of the first practical integrated circuit; and a man who, as far as anyone knew before that speech, had no connection to the most storied electronic device never to be manufactured in large numbers.