While the top bid hit $850,000, the ground-breaking prototype that sparked the compression of circuitry and has enabled handheld devices to process information exponentially faster than transistor-based computers that filled entire rooms, went unsold at an auction June 19.
Jack Kilby's original integrated circuit was up for auction at Christie's, a seller and auction house for fine art, but none of the submitted bids reached the historic component's reserve price. Reserve prices are values used to prevent auction items from selling at price points much lower than their worth.
Bids topped out at $850,000 for the integrated circuit, which went into the auction with an estimated selling price of $2 million.
Along with the prototype of the integrated circuit, a letter was included from Tom Yeargan, one of the Texas Instruments engineers who helped Kilby realize his vision of compacted circuitry. An excerpt from Yeargan's letter follows:
"I assisted Jack in his work on semiconductor networks. I remember working on the first unit, a phase shift oscillator. At the time, I was assigned to Stacy Watelski and had been working for him on germanium transistor having a horseshoe base and dot emitter. In this work, I evaporated metal to form the base and emitter. I heated the germanium and then evaporated the metal. When metal hit the germanium, it became alloyed in."
While the case that contained the component displayed Yeargan's signature and was accompanied by the letter from the engineer, the prototype was surrounded by a bit of controversy. Texas Instruments has refused to authenticate the component by stating that it couldn't confirm the prototype on display at Christie's was one that Yeargan worked on.
"There were several original prototypes, one of which resides at the Smithsonian and one of which TI still has possession of," stated Texas Instruments. "TI is unable to confirm at this point if this integrated circuit being sold is in fact one of the originals."
Earlier versions of Kilby's prototypes for integrated circuitry have been displayed at the Smithsonian and the Chicago Museum of Technology.
While his Texas Instruments colleagues were out on vacation in 1958, Jack Kilby had lots of time to think and his thoughts eventually led him to the idea constructing circuitry entirely from silicon. Kilby wasn't the only one developing a theory on integrated circuitry, as Robert Noyce was toying with a similar idea around the same time at Fairchild Semiconductor -- Texas Instruments, however, obtained a patent first.
