> The semiconductor industry has always had this quality: the difference between a pioneer and a founder is often just access to materials, capital, and time.

This applies not just to the semiconductor industry but almost every industry, especially the ones that don't exist yet.

And to this list I would add: a social and economic system that provides a fertile ground for research, experimentation, immigration and entrepreneurship.

While the US has built up such advantages over the years that they can't all be lost in a manic overnight tweet storm, it's sad and a bit scary to see the current environment, which is much more hostile to all of these things.

> "He was 38. Shortly before his death, he had mailed a manuscript describing a new three-electrode semiconductor device to Physical Review. The paper was lost in the wartime Atlantic. Five years later, Shockley, ..."

I wish the article had a reference for that claim.

I remember from my childhood that my father told me that in the old soviet system, publications from were invented and dated back in order to demonstrate the superiority of their science. Both sides might have done it.

Now, a story from my father is not strong data point. But falsification of scientific theories, statistics and publications was a thing in the Soviet Union [1,2].

Then again, the guy might have really done it.

[1] https://communistcrimes.org/en/falsification-memory-history-... [2] https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/33071/how-often-...

His death at the Siege of Leningrad sounds a lot like Archimedes death at the hands of a centurion during the fall of Syracuse to the Romans. That death was told by the always reliable Livy.

I think there's likely many things even today, hidden papers, that discovered things, that no one has really decided to give it a shot and try, or figured out what can be done with it.

Thus is the crime of the communist Russia: forcing millions into hard labor to die for progress yet squandering innovation for ideological reasons. But the same mechanism is there in, say, Microsoft. To get the attention of leadership, your idea must have 9 zeros at the very least. If it doesn’t, you either leave M$ or stay there and abandon your idea. But a 7-zero idea is a pretty expensive one to be abandoned.