T. R. Reid

The Chip is a humanistic look at one of the key inventions of the 20th century, the microchip which undergirds every digital change to our life. Thanks to chips, "just put a computer in it" has been a solution to almost every engineering problem, and the cause of a similar number of engineering problems.

In the 1950s, the electronics industry was carrying a blade with no handle. The silicon transistor had opened up vast possibilities by replacing large, power-hungry, and unreliable vacuum show more tubes. But the new solid state circuits were still built the same way, by wiring together discrete components like resistors, capacitors, and transistors, and the labor cost of hand wiring all these components was stalling future growth. Worse, as the complexity of circuits increased, their reliability went way down, a fatal flaw for aerospace and military applications.

Kilby at Texas Instruments and Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor hit on the key idea at roughly the same time. If you could lay down resistors, capacitors, and wires inside silicon, you could make a circuit as a monolithic unit. Kilby was first by several months, but Noyce figured out how to get the leads between the chip and world laid down, which is a very important step. Doing everything in silicon is counter-intuitive, by raw materials it's comparable to building a boxcar out of solid gold, but the advantage in not having to wire together components is incredible. Cue the digital revolution that we know, though from the perspective of decades on the revolution was slower than we remember. The first few years of production went entirely to the military. The consumer product which blew the world open was the pocket calculator, which came out in 1971, 15 years after the invention of the chip.

Reid follows the rise of Japanese firms in high tech, as well as the divergent careers of Noyce and Kilby. Noyce went on to become the patriarch of Silicon Valley and a billionaire investor. Kilby kept inventing, though never with the same success. He was finally awarded the Nobel Prize in 2000, but neither of the two are household names despite their impact as inventors.

Reid also makes some odd choices in the technical explanations. There's a lot on Boolean algebra and binary logic, which is key to how chips work, and precisely nothing on photolithography, which is key to how they're made. This is an older book, which is beneficial because there's nothing like interviews with your subjects to get the right feeling across, and Noyce and Kilby are no longer available for interviews. show less

I mostly sat out the Great Health Care Debate of '09, largely because, as Reid's book points out, American conversations about health care seem to focus on ideologically charged technicalities, not societal values. For folks like me, who read the paper but still can't get their heads around the issues surrounding national health care policy, "The Healing of America" is a pretty good place to start. Reid's book has a fine hook – he takes the same physical problem to doctors in a variety of show more countries – and the author writes entertainingly about a subject that can sometimes get pretty dry. Reid does a good job of showing national character traits and value systems influence how each of the countries he visits handles health care, and some of his experiences, such as the week he spent in an Ayurvedic spa in India, are even pretty interesting from an anthropological perspective.

In the end, Reid's book isn't about the healing of America; it's about how sick America is, and why. He doesn't propose any specific solution to America's health care mess, but instead hammers home the point that America does health care less efficiently and effectively than just about every other nation in its weight class.Capitalism is an essential part of the American experience, but when it comes to health care, the free market seems to deliver goods more expensively and less efficiently than many supposedly socialist systems do. To his credit, Reid knows that he's writing for an American audience and works to show how health care seems to run against the grain of American assumptions about how everything works. Still, this book might reach across partisan lines, since the rancor and indignation that colored so much of the health care debate a couple of years ago are absent here. What's missing from it, perhaps, is an insurance-free trip through America's own dysfunctional health care system. It might have provided a useful, if saddening, point of comparison to the author's generally satisfactory experiences elsewhere. show less

Though the votes are in, this is still a timely book and overall I would definitely recommend it. TR Reid travels to various countries (US, France, Germany, Japan, UK, India) to complain about an ailing shoulder as an excuse to discuss and compare health care systems. The personal story is appropriately secondary to the description and discussion of different modes of practice, care, insurance, etc. One main argument is that there are elements of many different systems that may be useful to show more incorporate to cover more people and lower overall costs. He states at the outset that the healthcare system choices made by a country are a reflection of and directly related to the moral choices that country makes regarding its citizens.

I learned a lot about heath care (both providers and insurers) in the US and many other countries. I think I have a clearer understanding of the very basics. Which is not saying much considering where I was starting from! But now I recognize why health care and health insurance are so complicated in the US - there are so many different systems all at once for different demographics - Medicare, Medicaid, veterans system, dialysis patients, health insurance tied to employee benefits, and pay-out-of-pocket insurance for those in between the cracks. No wonder it's a mess! So in terms of informing the general reader, this book was very successful at its mission.

TR Reid, the author, used his shoulder and journey to explore what's going on elsewhere and to see if we can use some ideas from other countries in the US to reduce costs and improve the product that we get: the overall health of Americans. Many countries use models that are similar to portions of the US health care system. Several have private health care providers and/or insurers while others have public run systems (like the US system for veterans) and others pay out of pocket (like those in the US who fall through the cracks). He makes some good arguments, sets up a few straw men, and personalizes the story with his shoulder and a few anecdotes. Overall a compelling read, whatever one thinks about what the US should be doing.

But I think the one take away message of the book, and one that is correct, is that fundamentally, the question of health care is a moral/ethical question: what do you do if someone gets sick or worse?. The way health care systems are set up (both insurers and providers) is a country's answer to that question.

Often, its these questions of morals, principles and ethics that are thornier, more vitriolic, and at the root of big issues. Once answered one way or another, setting up the system to reflect that answer is (while not trivial) perhaps somewhat more straightforward. show less

Technophobes might as well move on to the next review. I loved this book. It explained in clear, precise language how innumerable barriers were overcome by innovative and insightfully brilliant individuals to create a device that revolutionized our lives. I've always been fascinated by electronics, built my own radios and earned an amateur radio license in 7th grade, just because the subject and theory of how electrons move around to perform useful functions is intriguing. Reid has captured show more much of that fascination and translated it into a great story.

Before integrated circuits could be produced, the transistor had to be invented. Before that time, switching mechanism, required a vacuum tube to control, amplify and switch the flow of electrons through a circuit. It was the discovery that some semiconductor materials could be doped to have an excess of positive charges or negative charges that provided the breakthrough. A strip of germanium could be doped at each end with differing charges leaving a junction in the middle. The junction worked like a turnstile that could control the flow of current when connected to a battery. Variations in current across these junctions connected in the transistor formation could rectify (prevent current from flowing in both directions) and amplify. That's all that's needed to make a radio (I'm oversimplifying obviously) and hundreds of other devices. Transistors required vastly less current than vacuum tubes, were almost infinitely stable, were cheap and gave off little heat.

But, transistors required thousands of connections to the wires coming in order to make a useful circuit, and as demands for more complex circuitry arose the wiring became infinitely complex. This interconnection problem became a huge barrier that could have prevented the effective utilization of the advantages of the transistor

"You read everything. . . You accumulate all this trivia, and you hope that someday maybe a millionth of it will be useful," remembers Jack Kilby, one of the inventors of the integrated circuit. He also insists that he is not a scientist but an engineer. "A scientist is motivated by knowledge; he basically wants to explain something. An engineer's drive is to solve problems, to make something work. . . . Reid has elegantly interwoven the biographies of Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce. One of the delights of the book was learning how the two inventors thought, how they proceeded, and why they went in the directions they did.

Robert Noyce, founder of Intel, had developed a process to make transistors in arrays on a silicon wafer. They cut apart the transistors and then hired "thousands of women with tweezers to pick them up and try to wire them together. It just seemed so stupid." He, too, realized the tyranny of interconnection numbers. What they both came up with was the "Monolithic Idea." The notion that an entire circuit could be designed and produced on those silicon chips.

Obviously, there is little suspense in the story, but Reid captures and holds our attention. Both men accomplished the same feat at about the same time, approaching it from different directions. Kilby showed how the transistors could be placed on a single wafer and Noyce showed how the chips and circuits could be manufactured. Every transistor radio used the patent Kilby was awarded for his work. In so doing, he turned the future that Orwell had predicted in 1984 on its head. Instead of a monolithic centralization of power in the hands of a few computer elite who controlled all the computing power, "the mass distribution of microelectronics had spawned a massive decentralization of computing power. In the real 1984, millions of ordinary people could match the governmental or corporate computer bit for bit. In the real 1984, the stereotypical computer user had become a Little Brother seated at the keyboard to write his seventh-grade science report."

The social impact was enormous. Slide rules that had been ubiquitous were completely eliminated in just a few years by the handheld calculator that has become so cheap it is often given away in promotions. The Japanese gained virtual control over the memory chip industry because of the way they handled their work force. Americans had a monopoly until the 1973 recession. American companies typically lay off workers to save money during downturns. The Japanese try to keep their work force employed. This meant that when the demand for chips exploded, Americans did not have the capacity to produce enough to meet the demand. The Japanese, having trained workers available, met that demand and were able to produce enough at such a volume to keep the price so low as to inhibit any competition. That and their emphasis on high quality gained them 42% of the world market by 1980. The "Anderson Bombshell" report of 1980 (Anderson was a manager at Hewlett-Packard) that showed that Japanese chips were far more reliable than those made in the United States helped seal their market share.

It took winning the Nobel Prize for Noyce and Kilby to be recognized in the United States (Japan, a nation that honors its engineers, had awarded Noyce and Kilby numerous accolades over the years.) The final irony remains that in "our media-soaked society, with its insatiable appetite for important, or at least interesting, personalities, has somehow managed to overlook a pair of genuine national heroes- two Americans who had a good idea that has improved the daily lot of the world." show less