Source: Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
With his characteristic humility and word economy, Gordon Moore once wrote “my career as an entrepreneur happened quite by accident.” A brilliant scientist, business leader and philanthropist, Gordon co-founded and led two pioneering technology enterprises, Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, and, with his wife, Betty, created one of the largest private grantmaking foundations in the U.S., the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
He may argue that his career as an entrepreneur happened by accident, but his world-changing contributions did not. Never one to trumpet his own accomplishments, Gordon wasn’t able to dissuade others from celebrating his wide and long-reaching legacy: the revolutionary technologies and breakthroughs, a long and generous history of philanthropy, and the very culture of experimentation, invention and relentless progress that now defines Silicon Valley.
It took decades for Gordon to be able to speak with a straight face of his eponymous “Moore’s Law,” the prophetic 1965 observation that became a cornerstone principle of innovation and driving force for the exponential pace of technological progress in the modern world. Gordon later observed that he had looked it up and was pleasantly surprised to find more references on the internet to “Moore’s Law” than to “Murphy’s Law.”
Dubbed a “quiet revolutionary” by his biographers, Gordon always worked in the absence of any pretense or desire for recognition, driven instead by an exceptional curiosity, generosity and unassuming commitment to hard work.
GORDON MOORE
Gordon was always a visionary. Even at the start of his career, he keenly recognized the impact that the technologies he was developing would have on the world. And at an industry event in 1979, he told an Intel audience: “We are bringing about the next great revolution in the history of mankind — the transition to the electronic age.” (Moore’s Law, Thackray, Brock and Jones).
Although Gordon was reluctant to spotlight his own contributions, his biographers have been less reticent about attribution. Gordon is simply, they argue, “the most important thinker and doer in the story of silicon electronics.”
A pioneering start
A fifth generation Californian, Gordon was born in San Francisco in 1929. The son of the local chief deputy sheriff, he grew up in Pescadero, a small coastal community in San Mateo County that had been home to his family since the mid-nineteenth century.
He loved to fish in his neighborhood creek and to experiment with chemicals and “make explosives on a small production basis” behind the house. From an early age, Gordon had a passion for the natural world, science and experimentation, and he pursued that with a bright inquisitiveness, appreciation and sense of gratitude that would last a lifetime and become guideposts for his philanthropy.
Fishing and exploring Pescadero’s untrammeled wilds as a child and venturing to Baja and Costa Rica and even farther afield in later years offered a baseline that illustrated environmental changes brought by development and mass tourism, too often not for the better.
Always an acute observer, this helped instill in Gordon a concern and abiding interest in conserving nature for future generations,
