Geoffrey Dummer
Encyclopedia : G : GE : GEO : Geoffrey Dummer
Geoffrey W.A. Dummer, MBE (1909 – February, 2002) is credited as being the first person to conceptualise the integrated circuit, commonly called the microchip, in the late-1940s and early 1950s. Dummer was also a pioneer of reliability engineering at the Telecommunications Research Establishment in Malvern in the 1940s.
Dummer studied electrical engineering at Manchester College of Technology starting in the early 1930s. By the early 1940s he was working at the Telecommunications Research Establishment in Malvern (later to become the Royal Radar Establishment).
His work with colleagues at TRE led him to the belief that it would be possible to fabricate multiple circuit elements on and into a substance like silicon. In 1952 he presented his work at a conference in Washington, DC, some six years before Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments was awarded a patent for essentially the same idea, but who did go on to manufacture working devices.
In the UK of course, Dummer's groundbreaking ideas were derided and dismissed, and no finance for further development was available by either private or public finance so yet again British technology which could have led the world was discounted, rather like the ideas of Barnes Wallis' BAC TSR-2, or the technology of the Frank Whittle Whittle jet engine which was given away to the other Allies at the end of World War II.
External links
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.