 Born: July 18, 1906,
Pittsburgh, PA
Died: Oct. 31, 1997
at his home in Exeter, N.H. He was 91.
Always a tinkerer, Dr. Sidney Darlington in the 1950's spent a weekend
at home playing with a new gadget, the transistor. Trying to get more gain
from an amplifier the size of a kernel of corn, he found a way to combine
two
or more transistors in one chip, an idea that became the Darlington
Compound Chip and pointed the way toward integrated circuits. He patented
the idea and lived to see the Darlington chip become required study for
electrical engineering students everywhere. One of them, Edgar Gilbert,
who became his colleague, said the chip was a universal component until
the era of integrated circuits. Being practical about money, Dr. Darlington
told Bell Labs' lawyers to write the patent for his idea to cover any
number of transistors. But they wrote it for only
two. Dr. Darlington said later he believed that if the patent
had been unlimited, he and Bell Labs, a part of Lucent Technologies, would
have received a royalty on every integrated circuit
chip produced!
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