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David C. Brock, co-author of Makers of the Microchip: A Documentary History of Fairchild Semiconductor, reflects on Julius Blank's sense of humor.
Julius Blank
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I was surprised and saddened on Tuesday to learn that Julius Blank, one of the eight co-founders of the seminal Silicon Valley electronics firm Fairchild Semiconductor, had died. I first met Mr. Blank five years ago when he sat for a three and a half hour oral history interview with me as part of a Chemical Heritage Foundation project supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The project sought to use oral history to document the stories of the first silicon startups in Silicon Valley – the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory of Beckman Instruments and the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation – and Mr. Blank had been deeply involved with both. I learned a lot from that oral history with Julius, as he often reminded me to address him. It, along with many other oral histories and interviews conducted by me and Christophe Lécuyer, proved to be an invaluable and enriching resource for the history of Fairchild Semiconductor that he and I co-authored recently. (Makers of the Microchip: A Documentary History of Fairchild Semiconductor, MIT Press, 2010, www.makersofthemicrochip.com) Fairchild earned its place in the history of technology by pioneering silicon electronics technology, including the planar integrated circuit (the direct ancestor of today’s microchips), and the Silicon Valley dynamic of the venture funding of new technology startups and spinoffs (of which there were many from Fairchild, including Intel).
Julius had a long career in Silicon Valley that was captured well by his obituaries in the San Jose Mercury News and New York Times. What does not come through in these accounts though was Mr. Blank’s wonderful, even disarming, sense of humor. After our oral history, Mr. Blank was kind enough to talk to me with some regularity when I didn’t understand some aspect of history. Why were four-layer diodes hard to make? What were the relative advantages of resistance versus RF crystal pullers? How did the automated wire wrapping effort at Western Electric develop in the early 1950s? He was always ready to take my call, and his droll, plainspoken answers to these questions invariably had me – and often him – chuckling. His clipped language typical of many engineers combined with a Lower East Side accent certainly aided my laughter. I’m certain that it did as well for many of his associates in the semiconductor industry and the Valley. Part of my shock at the news of his death was that less than a month ago I was on the phone with him, listening to his answers about the Western Electric question above. He was his usual self: insightful, patient, and funny. We shared a laugh at one of his characteristically unvarnished assessments of one of the characters involved. With Julius, I’d imagine it was an assessment he would have happily shared – and probably did – with them.
For more about Julius Blank and to experience something of his voice, consult one of his oral histories:
http://www.chemheritage.org/discover/collections/oral-histories/details/blank-julius.aspx
http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/102658264
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