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Biographic Note
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Over a 46 year RCA career,
Israel (Iz) Kalish was involved in a variety of highly successful and
technically challenging transistor projects. As you’ll discover in the
comprehensive Oral History, Mr. Kalish was associated as either a team
member or manager in projects ranging from the first hermetically sealed
germanium alloy hearing aid transistors (TA-187, 2N104/105), the first
commercially successful audio power transistors (2N301) , germanium
switching transistors for computer applications (2N404), the first CMOS
linear IC’s (CA3001) through to one of the early microprocessors (1802).
He was honored as an IEEE Fellow for his work on the first CMOS IC’s.
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The 2N301 power transistor and the
2N404 computer transistor both sold in the millions of units throughout the
1950’s, 60’s and 70’s. Mr. Kalish was a project member on each of the
teams that developed these very successful transistors.
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Go To Kalish Oral History, Page 2
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Oral History – Iz Kalish
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(This
Oral History was taken in Dec, 2000)
I worked at RCA from May 25
1953 until June 30, 1999 (at that point the Sarnoff labs). I joined RCA
right out of school (Cooper Union). There was a shortage of engineers at
the time (May, 1953) because 4 years earlier the GI bill had produced a
bumper crop without any job prospects. I worried in 1949 whether I would
find a job and actually started to study to be a math teacher at CCNY but
after 3 months I decided not to limit my aspirations and switched to
engineering. I then transferred to Cooper in the fall. In retrospect
things worked out well since I became an engineer and also had a chance to
teach at Cooper at night for 16 years.
In June of 1950 the North
Koreans ended the engineer surplus and so at the time I graduated I had
choices. The highest paying jobs were at defense contractors but I didn't
want to get into the insecurities of the military contract business (a
friend told me he saw no immediate threat of peace - and he was right for
almost 40 years) so I applied to RCA (conscious of the fact that I might be
drafted) because they had a training program that would give me some input
as to the specialization to choose. I had summer jobs where I saw
permanent employees staying a jobs the didn't like just to stay out of the
draft and their life looked miserable. Because I actually started work a
month before graduation there weren't a lot of trainees around and I had
good choices at the end of my cycle. The assignments were in the
transistor group in Harrison, the Bizmac computer group in Camden, the
picture tube division in Lancaster, and the antenna group in Camden.
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