Julius Blank (June 2, 1925 – September 17, 2011) was an American semiconductor pioneer. A member of the traitorous eight, he left Nobel-winning physicist William Shockley's company to form Fairchild Semiconductor.
Early life and education Blank was born and raised in Manhattan's Lower East Side, the youngest of three children of Jewish immigrants Charles and Gussie Blank. His father made musical-instrument cases and luggage, and also worked as a Russian translator. Julius Blank attended Erasmus Hall High School, graduating at 15. He began taking classes at City College of New York while working at various jobs. His first job, in a factory, motivated him to learn more, and he attended a trade school as well.
“I decided I needed to get a little bit more knowledge about practical matters and I wanted to become a machinist. While I was going to school I went to another school at night at Brooklyn Tech where I learned how to operate lathes, machines, read blueprints, and that kind of stuff. I got a job as a machinist after that." When he turned 18, he was drafted to serve in the U.S. Army in World War II. He reported for active duty on July 5, 1943. After basic infantry training, he was placed in the Army Specialized Training Program. In April 1944, he was sent overseas, where he was injured in December 1944 during the Battle of Hürtgen Forest. He was subsequently transferred to the Air Corps to serve as a machinist for airplane parts to overhaul radial engines. He held a variety of positions during the war, gaining considerable experience in the practicalities of general engineering. In 1946 he returned home, where he completed his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the City College of New York, financed by the G.I. Bill.
Career Blank worked as an engineer at Babcock & Wilcox in Barberton, Ohio, from 1950 to 1951, making large steam boilers for the power industry. He then moved to Goodyear Aircraft, where he worked from 1951 to 1952 on a wide variety of research and design projects including aircraft propulsion, air ship fabrics, parachutes, and submarines. Because his wife Ethel wanted to move back to New York, they returned there in 1952. After their return, Blank found a job in manufacturing engineering at Western Electric in Kearny, New Jersey where he worked from 1952 to 1956. At Western Electric he worked on No. 4 toll crossbar switching equipment, used in the first dialing systems for connecting calls automatically without a human long-distance operator. One of the pieces of equipment involved was a card translator with an array of germanium photo transistors that routed calls in the switching system. Blank also worked as a troubleshooter for a plating room, where he gained practical experience in metal finishing and the use of acids and chemicals.
Shockley Semiconductor Two of the people Blank worked with at Western Electric were Dean Knapic and Eugene Kleiner. Knapic was approached by William Shockley to form an engineering group at the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory division of Beckman Instruments, in California. Knapic recommended Blank and Kleiner, who were interviewed by Shockley in a restaurant at Newark Airport, between flights. In April 1956, Blank joined Shockley Semiconductor, followed a couple of months later by Kleiner. Blank was a Senior Staff Engineer from 1956 to 1957. The Blanks lived initially in Palo Alto, California, moving to Los Altos Hills, California in 1966. One of Blank's first assignments at Shockley was to build a crystal grower. Shockley had a number of ideas about how to build a crystal grower so as to eliminate contamination from oxygen in the quartz, but the resulting equipment was elaborate and had several problems. Blank eventually built a conventional crystal grower based on the Czochralski process instead. Diffusion furnaces also had to be built, because existing laboratory furnaces did not meet the requirements of semiconductor production. They were too small, not well enough controlled, and not capable of being used for long periods of time. Vacuum evaporators for evaporating metals also needed to be more robust and readily controlled. Blank worked at Shockley Semiconductor until he and others, later dubbed the "traitorous eight", left to form the influential Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation. Blank indicated that he personally had not had problems with Shockley, but that Shockley's treatment of others was disturbing. Management difficulties accelerated after Shockley won the Nobel Prize:
"He began to travel around the world rather extensively... And he would come back with new ideas and new projects, and we never really got to finish the ones that we started with. And this got to be frustrating." Julius Blank, 2008.
Fairchild Semiconductor In August 1957 Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce and Sheldon Roberts reached an agreement with Sherman Fairchild of Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation. On September 18, 1957, they formed Fairchild Semiconductor. Julius Blank found the company's first home, a 14,000 square foot building at 844 Charleston Road, between Palo Alto and Mountain View. Little more than a shell, it lacked both plumbing and electricity. Kleiner and Blank were in charge of transforming the empty building into usable spaces for production, research and offices. In addition to mundane requirements like sewer and water, the work spaces required extra electrical power, air conditioning to afford some level of climate control during processing, and piping and venting of gases. Blank's experience during the war and at Western Electric was helpful in dealing with these physical requirements. As they were readying the building itself, the founders were also ordering desks, lab benches and scientific equipment, and starting to build specialized equipment that they couldn't order: crystal growers, diffusion furnaces, vacuum evaporators, and optical lithography equipment for mask-making. Everyone worked toward the goal of getting the business underway.
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