MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

MIT's Building 20: The Magical Incubator Story, Anecdote, or Reminiscence

The Physical Electronics Group

Walter Gattridge

I was a Post-Doc in Professor W.B. Nottingham's Physical Electronics Group of RLE from September 1951 - October 1953. I shared a lab on the second floor of Building 20, just a few doors down from R.A. Sayer's Office with E. Hensley, also a Post-Doc in Physical Electronics.

Also in Nottingham's Group at that time were A.R. Hutson, who went to Bell Labs; J.M. Houston who went to GE Research Laboratory; and R. Noyce who later was the co-inventor of the integrated circuit and a co-founder of Intel.

Prior to coming to MIT/RLE, I was a Post-Doc from 1949-1951 with A.S. Eisenstein at the University of Missouri. Also on the faculty was G.H. Vineyard, both had been members of the Radiation Laboratory during the War. In October 1953, I joined the GE Research Laboratory in Schenectady, where I worked in J.L. Lawson's Physical Electronics Division, having been recruited to GE by Glen Giddings. The latter two also having been previous members of the Radiation Laboratory.