Jay Last — a rebel who helped found Silicon Valley
Jay Last, a physicist who helped create the silicon chips that power the world’s computers, and who was among the eight entrepreneurs whose company laid the technical, financial and cultural foundation for Silicon Valley, died Nov. 11 in Los Angeles. He was 92.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his wife and only immediate survivor, Debbie.
Last was finishing a Ph.D. in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956 when he was approached by William Shockley, who would share a Nobel Prize that same year for the invention of the transistor, the tiny electrical device that became the essential building block for the world’s computer chips. Shockley invited him to join a new effort to commercialize a silicon transistor at a lab near Palo Alto.
Last was awed by Shockley’s intelligence and reputation but unsure about the job offer. Ultimately, he agreed to join the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory because it sat in the Northern California valley where he had spent a summer harvesting fruit after hitchhiking there from his home in Pennsylvania steel country.
But he and seven of his collaborators at the lab clashed with Shockley, who later became infamous for his theory that Black people were genetically inferior in intelligence to white people. They quickly left the lab to create their own transistor company. They later came to be called “the traitorous eight,” and their company, Fairchild Semiconductor, is now seen as ground zero for what became known as Silicon Valley.
At Fairchild, Last led a team of scientists who developed a fundamental technique that is still used to manufacture computer chips, providing the digital brains for billions upon billions of computers, tablets, smartphones and smartwatches.
“There was nothing more important than Fairchild Semiconductor to the Silicon Valley experience as we know it today,” said David Brock, a curator and director of the Software History Center at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. “Many of the dynamics that still persist were crystallized by the founders of Fairchild, and Jay was right in the middle of it.”
Jay Taylor Last was born on Oct. 18, 1929, in Butler, Pa. His father, Frank, a German immigrant, and his Scotch-Irish mother, Sarah, had met when they were two of the three teachers at a high school in Ohio. After they married, Frank Last felt he could not support a family on a teacher’s salary, so they moved to Pennsylvania, where he went to work in the new Butler steel mill, not far from Pittsburgh.
At the suggestion of his father, he soon enrolled at the University of Rochester in New York state to study optics — the physics of light. During summers back home in Pennsylvania, he worked at a research lab that served local plate-glass manufacturers.
Fulfilling a promise he had made to himself as a teenager, he went on to get his doctorate at MIT, before returning to Northern California and joining the Shockley lab. After about a year, he and his colleagues left to form Fairchild Semiconductor.
The leaders of Fairchild Semiconductor would go on to build several other chip companies, including Intel and Amelco. The company’s founders and employees would also create some of the leading Silicon Valley venture capital firms and personally invest, as Last did, in many of the companies that sprouted up in the region over the decades.
Last retired from the chip business in 1974 and spent the rest of his life as an investor, an art collector, a writer and an amateur mountain climber. His collection of African art was donated to the Fowler Museum at UCLA and his trove of California citrus-box labels — an echo of his teenage summer in Northern California — is now at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino (Los Angeles County).