Elizabeth Bottomley

Who was Elizabeth Bottomley?

Elizabeth Noyce was an American philanthropist in the state of Maine.

She was born Elizabeth Bottomley on October 7, 1930 in Auburn, Massachusetts, the daughter of Frank Bottomley and Helen McLaren. She was a 1951 graduate of Tufts University.

In the early 1950s, Robert Noyce was working on a PhD at MIT, which is close to Tufts. In 1953, she married Robert Noyce and became Elizabeth Noyce. Robert Noyce received his PhD in 1953; he would become general manager of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel Corporation.

The couple moved to California where Nobel laureate William Shockley had started Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California in 1956. Robert Noyce was one of the "traitorous eight" who left Shockley in 1957 and started Fairchild Semiconductor. Fairchild's Robert Noyce and Texas Instruments' Jack Kilby are credited with inventing the integrated circuit. In 1968, Robert Noyce and Gordon E. Moore started Intel Corporation in Mountain View. Intel became a huge financial success; it developed the first commercially available dynamic RAM, the first EPROM, and the first commercially available microprocessor.