12 September 1958: Jack Kilby demonstrates the integrated circuit
At Texas Instruments, engineer Jack Kilby demonstrated the first working integrated circuit, putting multiple electronic components on a single piece of semiconductor material. It was crude, but it worked. Robert Noyce independently developed a more practical version soon after. The invention made modern electronics possible, from calculators to smartphones, and Kilby later shared a Nobel Prize in Physics for it.
The lesson: Breakthrough inventions often look crude at first; their value appears over decades of improvement.
What it meant for investors
$1,000 in Texas Instruments at the start of 1990 → $133,333 today, vs $19,429 in the S&P 500.
We start the clock at the start of 1990, the first year in our price data after the event. That is 133.3 times the money, and $113,905 more than a plain index fund made over the same years.
What Texas Instruments teaches: Boring can be beautiful; Texas Instruments' shift from glamorous mobile chips to dull analog parts sold to thousands of customers produced steadier, more durable returns.
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $1.50 | $133,333 | $19,429 |
| 1995 | $3.50 | $57,143 | $14,783 |
| 2000 | $48.00 | $4,167 | $4,626 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
What if you bought Texas Instruments? Every starting year and the full story →
More Texas Instruments history
Could you have called it at the time? The wheel picks the year, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick.
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