Friday, April 3, 2009

Trivia #11 : Magazine name : Electronics; Quantity : 1; Price : $10,000

I am an American who co-founded a major electronics company which is world famous.

California Institute of Technology popularly known as Caltech is one of the institution in which I studied. Later on, I became the Chairman of board of trustees of Caltech. In 2001, I donated a whopping sum of $600 million to Caltech, making it the largest donation ever to an institute of higher education. In 2007, I donated an amount of $200 million to Caltech and University of California for the construction of the world's largest optical telescope.

The library at the Center for Mathematical Sciences in the University of Cambridge is named after me and my wife.

Here starts the interesting part of this trivia.

I wrote an article in Electronics, a magazine published by McGraw-Hill in April 19, 1965. That article outlined some of my predictions of the electronics industry which turned out to be prophetic.

In order to commemorate the 40th anniversary of me publishing that article the company which I founded put up an online auction in eBay.com on April 11, 2005. That announcement offered a reward of $10,000 to anyone who gives them the original copy of Electronics in which I had written that legendary article, as I myself was not in possession of an original copy.

This put the library copies of that magazine in danger and in fact one of the two copies of that magazine in the engineering library of University of Illinois was stolen. This prompted my company to announce that library copies of that magazine will not qualify for the reward.

David Clark, an engineer from UK, who had somehow preserved years old magazines under his floorboard turned out to be the winner.



The bloke in the above photo is David Clark and the magazine which fetched him $10,000 is in his hand.

1. Who am I ?

2. Which company did I co-found ?

3. What did I outline in that article ?

2 comments:

  1. Moore or Noyce..definitely one those..founded Intel.had Moore-Noyce Law..

    ReplyDelete
  2. u r absolutely correct
    It is Gordon Moore who co-founded Intel.
    He propounded Moore's law in that article.

    ReplyDelete