1960 · Silicon Integrated Oscillator · Work 844 of 1,871
A small experimental circuit on a wooden laboratory bench in Malvern in England on a winter day, a square red plate about three centimetres across carrying a translucent amber block of clear resin, in the middle of the block a tiny silvery-grey square chip, four thin silvery wire legs running from it to small bright solder joints, a red wire looping once around the block, a twisted red and black pair of wires leading to a grey valve oscilloscope, its round screen showing a single green sine wave, a man in a brown tweed jacket seen from behind at the bench, a window onto misty green hills, grey daylight from the left.
What it was used for
Geoffrey Dummer worked at the Royal Radar Establishment in Malvern on the reliability of military electronics; his argument for the circuit in one piece was the failure rate - by the assessment of the Malvern Radar and Technology History Society, the idea he presented in the US in 1952 could have improved mean time between failures by orders of magnitude. In his laboratory in A Block on the South Site, by the account of the Malvern Radar and Technology History Society, Colin Taylor and George Bradshaw produced Britain's first "solid circuit" around 1960. The Science Museum holds an object as 1984-251, "The first British silicon integrated circuit (an oscillator)", dated 1960, credited to the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment, overall size 75 × 50 × 20 mm.
What was new
Dummer's 1952 sentence - "it seems now possible to envisage electronic equipment in a solid block with no connecting wires" - is called by the Malvern Radar and Technology History Society the first public description of an integrated circuit. 8 years lay between that sentence and the silicon oscillator from his own laboratory. In 1957 Dummer showed a model at Malvern that did not work; after that Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Fairchild had working devices. What was new about the 1960 object, for Britain, was that a circuit in silicon there actually worked - it was not a lead. The Society judges that government and industry were not prepared to invest heavily and left the technology to the Americans.
What the sources leave open: The Dummer quotation from the Linda Hall Library, plus the Science Museum object record (1960, oscillator, RSRE) and the Malvern Radar and Technology History Society (Taylor, Bradshaw, A Block, "c. 1960"). The Science Museum names no maker and no purpose and states that it cannot guarantee the accuracy of its information. The Society dates Kilby's working circuit to 1959, the Linda Hall Library to September 1958.