Newcomer's Growth

Alongside such oldtime giants as General Electric and Radio Corp. of America, Texas Instruments Inc. is a lusty newcomer in the U.S. electronics industry. But it can hold its own in any competition. Launched in electronics at the close of World War II, the Dallas company by 1954 was a major military producer of germanium transistors as tiny substitutes for standard electronic tubes. Soon after, it produced an even better silicon transistor for military use, then swept into civilian markets with its germanium transistor for the fast-growing pocket-radio and industrial-computer fields. Last week Texins set its sights on still another profitable business: it was the world's first quantity producer of ultra-refined silicon, a key electronics material so difficult to make that its price is $980 a pound.

Sand & Science. Refined from common sand, Texins' super silicon is so pure (not more than one part of non-silicon to 1 billion parts of silicon) that the National Bureau of Standards still lacks a grading system for it. In minute amounts, it will enable electronics men to make transistors with nearly twice the heat resistance (up to 300DEG F.) of previous transistors, and open up vast new possibilities for the guidance systems in supersonic planes and pilotless missiles. Says President John Erik Jonsson: "This is the purest product ever made by man."

The new silicon was just one more example of Texins' rare skill in marrying scientific brains to production brawn. Scientists make up 20% of the company's 4,200 employees. Yet Jonsson, whose rule is "Never hire anybody you don't expect to keep the rest of his working life," makes sure that his people are able to translate their research into production-line products. The research men work out problems in the lab, follow them through the production line until all bugs are ironed out. Periodically, production men, many of whom are engineers, are sent back to research to reabsorb the scientific spirit. The intermixing has produced so many workable ideas that sales have shot up from $2,285,000 in 1946 to $45.6 million last year. And with profits of $2,349,000, every employee got almost two months' pay in profit-sharing.

Oil for the Giants. Texas Instruments got into electronics by an unusual route. Originally called Geophysical Service Inc., it started out after World War I as an oil-exploration service, pioneered methods for locating oil-bearing rock formations by shooting sound waves into the earth. The idea was so successful that in the late 1930s Geophysical Service earned a reputation as the world's leading independent oil-exploration service, helping bigger companies find oil pools from Canada to Arabia.

Looking for new fields to enter after World War II, the company decided, says President Jonsson, "that there was a good, honest living to be made in working for the Government," also decided that electronics was the industry of the future. By 1951 it was deep in the field, saw its annual sales top $15 million with Korean war orders for electronic components added to its oil-exploration service. Reorganizing the company as Texas Instruments, President Jonsson and Board Chairman Eugene McDermott, who helped found the company, split it into two separate divisions, later expanded to three: electronics, working on transistors; apparatus, working on overall military weapons sytems; and geophysical services, which currently has 65 field teams seeking oil in the U.S. and 18 foreign countries.

To keep up with growing markets, Texins is busy expanding still more, is adding another 25,000 sq. ft. to its 218,000-sq-ft. Dallas plant. Last month it broke ground for a 280,000-sq-ft. plant outside Dallas. And with high-purity silicon to add to its transistor and oil business, that, says Jonsson, is only the beginning.

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