Almost every important discovery since the start of the industrial age has a contested history. Heinrich Gobel, from a town near Hanover in Germany, filed suit in 1893 claiming that he, not Thomas Edison, had invented the light bulb years earlier in New York City. Something similar has occurred for the airplane, telephone, rotor encryption machine, television, integrated circuit, and microprocessor, to name but a few. Such counterclaims often have merit—invention and research are often group activities, and discoveries regularly appear in different places at almost precisely the same time. And sometimes such claims come from experimenting hacks eager for a measure of recognition for themselves.

Noyce was no hack, obviously—his integrated circuit nestles at the heart of essentially every piece of modern electronics. In fact, the invention of the IC was recognized as a Nobel-level achievement in 2000, when the prize for physics was awarded to Jack S. Kilby, credited by U.S. courts as the coinventor of the IC. Unfortunately for Noyce, he missed his chance to join the pantheon of laureates when he died in 1990; the prizes are not awarded posthumously.

Nor was Noyce pursuing glory when he mentioned his work in his talk at that symposium in 1976. In fact, immediately after claiming to have the invention in his notebooks, Noyce said, "The work had been done elsewhere [by Leo Esaki] and was published shortly thereafter." He had mentioned it in the first place only because he thought the way his boss had handled Noyce's tunnel diode efforts in 1956 "may be instructive in how not to motivate people."