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 Continuing the Legacy

How John Sprague became part of the Sprague electronics lineage

by John Sprague Jr.

Growing up, many of the inclinations were there. Young John’s favorite Christmas presents were chemistry kits which he explored with relish. When asked if he understood then about his father’s work with capacitors, he replied that while he knew a little bit about it, he didn’t study capacitor technology. “I was too busy blowing up my room and things like that.” He always loved science, and went on to become a chemistry major at Princeton University. Even now late in this life, John Sprague has subscriptions to Scientific American, and two other science magazines, and continues to educate himself in the sciences.

Along with science and technology, another key theme in John’s life has always been family and relationships. During his Princeton years his academics suffered at times when he fell in love, and then went through heartbreak, and then fell in love again, this time with an amazing young woman from Smith College, Mary-Jane Whitney, who went by the nickname Jid. Jid came from a remarkable family – the Whitney / Loew clan of New York City – which included a prominent early woman jurist, Rosalie Loew Whitney, Jid’s paternal grandmother. Soon enough the young couple made plans to get married, and with that important piece of his life settled, John was able to redouble his academic efforts, particularly on his senior chemistry thesis. With the quality of his thesis work he was able salvage his academic career, and set the stage for the rest of his life.  

His efforts in the relationship domain also proved very worthwhile, as he and his wife Jid have now been married for 68 years. Together they have created a creative and diverse family, who cooperate to this day in their lives. All along the way Jid was a strong and steady teammate, accompanying John as he navigated the ups and downs of his career, engaging in her own significant endeavors, such as serving as President of the Girls Clubs of America (Girls Inc.), as well as taking many memorable trips together, and looking after a beautiful clan of four children and ten grandchildren.

Jid and John were married right after he graduated from Princeton. She had one more year at Smith, and he went straight into the Navy. His scientific interests notwithstanding, his greatest interest at that time was flying.  He was already a licensed pilot with multi-engine rating, and over 200 hours under his belt, and what he really wanted to do was become a Navy pilot and fly jet planes off carriers. Eventually he applied to flight school in Pensacola, was accepted, and was all ready to go.  But first he went home on leave, and everyone, his father, his wife, and even his brother who had taught how how to fly, all told him “that’s crazy!’”  His father asked him if that’s what he wanted to do the rest of his life, and honestly he didn’t know. He just wanted to fly jets off carriers.

However, his father did finally convince him to cancel the flight training and apply instead to Naval electronics school — an intensive six-month program in the San Francisco Bay area called the Officers Electronic Materials School. There were 50 students, 48 graduate electrical engineers, and two chemists. The two chemists had a very difficult time catching up, since they had little prior knowledge of the subject. But eventually they did catch up, and he was able to complete the school.

He was assigned to become an assistant electronics officer on the USS Northampton, which at the time was the most advanced electronics ship in the world.  It was supposedly where the US government would go if there was nuclear war, although they never explained how government officials would get to it during such a war. 

As a part of completing electronic school, each student had to give a talk to the graduating class  It was early 1954, just a few years after the transistor had been invented. Fortune Magazine had proclaimed 1953 the “Year of the Transistor.” The magazine published an article about semiconductors which explained the movement of electric current using an analogy offered by William Shockley (the co-inventor of the transistor) of cars in a two level parking garage.  The premise is that you need to be able to control the movement of electrons in a material. In Shockley’s analogy, when all the slots in one level of a parking garage are filled with cars, no movement is possible, no current can flow. Movement, and thus current becomes possible through a couple possibilities: One is adding a car (electron) to a second level. Alternatively you can move cars / electrons from the first level to the second level, leaving open spaces or holes. In electronics, a conductor has abundant free electrons, and thus easy flow of electricity. Insulators, on the other hand, are materials that do not allow any flow of current – all the slots are full and stable in place. What semiconductors do, especially when you have junctions between them, is allow control over the flow, like a parking attendant managing the movement of cars and open spaces in a two-level garage. Reading this simple explanation, John Sprague experienced an aha moment. Not a lot was understood about semiconductors at that time, and he became hooked, recognizing their importance. Inspired by the Fortune article, this subject became the topic of his graduation talk, and soon enough the focus of his graduate research.  

John began to see that his direction in electronics placed him in the family lineage of electrical engineering. However, while he may have recognized that connection, he nonetheless had decided not to work at Sprague Electric.  He described this decision in this way:  

“Part of it was philosophical – I didn’t believe in nepotism. Also I had noted difficult relations between my father and his brother, Julian, working in the same company, and I had an older brother who worked for Sprague, and I felt that if we both ended up working in the same company, it would make for very difficult family relationship. So I decided I needed a PhD, to have enough background and training to work anywhere for almost anybody.” 

At this time he couldn’t know that Silicon Valley, with its host of semiconductor startups, would soon be awakening in the Bay area. He and his wife simply loved the region, and he wanted a fresh start away from his east-coast family. Also at that point she wasn’t much interested in being a Sprague in the North Adams area. So he applied to Bay area schools, and Stanford accepted him into their PhD program. While he intended to pursue his interest in semiconductors, he was accepted into the chemistry department, and almost all semiconductor research was happening in electrical engineering departments, not chemistry departments. However, he was very fortunate that Stanford happened to have a professor in the chemistry department named Claudio “Butch” Alvarez-Tostado, who had a strong interest in electronics, and was one of the only people in the world working on the materials aspect of semiconductors. Tostado became his thesis advisor, and an influence on the direction of his research. 

Although William Shockley is credited with founding Silicon Valley by his arrival in the area in 1956 to launch Shockley Semiconductors, it is interesting to note how Tostado had already been there working on the chemistry of silicon at Stanford. John Sprague was blessed to be plunged right into the heart of those formative years. Later after he competed his PhD, and ended up working at Sprague Electric, John invited Tostado to North Adams one summer to be a consultant at the research labs, and together they co-authored a patent on a “Method of Forming a P-N Junction”. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

During his grad school years, even though John was dead set against working at Sprague Electric, the connection was valuable to him. The company already had an interest in semiconductors and they were happy to support his graduate research with donations of equipment, and advice from engineers in the Sprague research labs.  John remembers writing his father to see if they would fund an oscilloscope. The connection was obvious, and the stage had long been set for him to eventually work for Sprague.

One of his oft-recounted stories was a cross-country drive he and his father took in the fall of 1955. John was on his way to Palo Alto to begin his PhD program at Stanford. His wife Jid was pregnant with me at the time (I was born in February 1956), and she flew out. So his dad volunteered to take the drive with then 25 year old John. It was a rather unexpected and new experience. They had skied and played tennis together, but never shared anything like that trip.  

It turned out RC Sprague had an ulterior motive. It became clear during that long drive that even though John was only 25 and just starting grad school, his father had decided that he wanted him to run Sprague Electric someday. He wanted one of his two sons to succeed him, and had concluded that his older son, Bob Jr, who worked in human relations, was not suitable for that role. John, on the other hand was on a path of understanding the technology, and with his focus on semiconductors had the potential to take Sprague in important new directions. 

John Sprague tells some colorful stories about that cross-country trip, such as his father staying out late dancing while he went to bed, but the persistent theme was his father making this pitch to him. Although John was still dead set against it, he admits that he was also drawn to it. He understood a lot more about electronic systems than before being in the Navy and attending electronic school. He could understand the business better, and certainly had a strong vision of the importance of semiconductors, which he knew his father shared. This was not enough to overcome his opposition, but in the end the decision was almost made for him.

As he was completing his PhD, John began to interview for jobs in the Bay area. His PhD research and thesis – entitled “The Nature of Metal to Semiconductor Alloy Junctions” – helped further scientific understanding of the alloy junctions which are critical in semiconductor electronics. Many of the legendary figures of this burgeoning industry were in fact interested in his work. He remembers how a group from Fairchild Semiconductor came to visit his lab, including luminaries such as Robert Noyce and Charlie Sporck, and he gave them a talk on what he was doing. He received an invitation to visit Fairchild the following week to see what they were doing. Then, as he was leaving the room, he heard the voice of Bob Noyce saying “this is very interesting John, but you wouldn’t by any chance be related to the Sprague Electric Company would you?”  He replied, “Yeah”. At that point he discovered that his connection with Sprague put an immediate end to the possibility of working in any of the Silicon Valley startups. While Sprague Electric was not a factor in semiconductors yet, it did have a big research effort, and the Silicon Valley startups were all afraid that John would work with them for a few years, and then leave, taking all their technology back to Sprague Electric. Bill Shockley who won the Nobel Prize, told him in another interview: “John I would be happy to support your research financially, but I am not going to let you within a mile of my lab.”

While he felt torn, and wished he could have worked in Silicon Valley for at least a few years, he also wanted to work in semiconductors, and the only legitimate offer he had was to work at Sprague. In retrospect, it was inevitable, and despite his misgivings it was actually not a bad option, considering that Sprague Electric had a robust research effort, and also boasted one of the geniuses of the field, Kurt Lehovec, who was to become John’s first boss. 

It turned out to be very exciting. Right away, John began assisting Lehovec’s research, and was also able to initiate his own projects. During John’s very first year in the lab in North Adams, he helped Lehovec with work on p-n junction isolation, which resulted in one of the key patents associated with the invention of the integrated circuit. To this day Kurt Lehovec is credited as a co-inventor of the integrated circuit, and John Sprague was right there as it was happening, making contributions. He had taken his place in the Sprague lineage of electronics, which he has continued in for the rest of his life, right up to the present.