What year was the integrated circuit invented?

1958 → tub · lava.

Jack Kilby built the first working integrated circuit at Texas Instruments in September 1958, wiring several components onto a single piece of semiconductor instead of soldering separate parts together. Months later Robert Noyce at Fairchild independently made a more practical silicon version using the "planar" process that made mass production possible — so the two are usually credited jointly. The integrated circuit is what let engineers pack first dozens, then billions, of transistors onto one chip, launching the microelectronics era and everything downstream from it. Kilby received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000. Peg 19 · 58 → tub · lava: lava bubbling up in a tub.

Go deeper:

• The History of Computing — Vacuum Tube to Transistor to Integrated Circuit — its later half covers Kilby and Noyce packing many components onto one chip.