Welcome to the Engines of Texan.

Episode 9, The Integrated Circuit.

I'm Brandon C.

July in Dallas is hot.

And July in 1958 was even hotter.

Texas was slugging its way through its worst drought on record, and although air conditioning was taking the state by storm,

people still mostly worked according to the rhythms of pre-air conditioned years. And since

closing the office was the normal response to insufferably hot days, some companies just preemptively required

their employees to take their vacations in July.

That was Dallas-based Texas Instruments policy in 1958 when a 34-year-old engineer named

Jack Kilby started working there.

Texas Instruments was one of the oil industry spinoffs alluded to back in episode seven,

founded originally as the Geophysical Research Corporation, dedicated to collecting and processing

seismic data for oil exploration. Actually, the role of oil and gas seismic processing

and advancing the tech industry is pretty significant. From sonar to advances in digital data storage

to quantum computing to auto tune, all of these things found their first applications in the oil

industries need to collect and process staggering amounts of data about the subsurface.

Eventually, though, many of these companies found other ways to commercialize those technologies,

such as in 1954 when Texas Instruments had crossed over into the mainstream with the introduction of the

Regency TR1 Pocket Radio. It was revolutionary, a portable, pocket-sized musical device

that sold for $49.95. Within a year, Texas Instruments sold 100,000 of them,

and was firmly on its path to becoming a technology company rather than just an oilfield services

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