07/30/2026
Not just train heroes!
A radio repairman from the small Central Texas town of Hearne was recruited to Texas Instruments in 1963, and two years later, his boss handed him an assignment that most people in the entire electronics industry considered impossible.
Jerry Merryman had been fixing neighbors' radios since he was about eleven years old, the kind of kid police would pull out of movie theaters because their own radios had broken and needed him. He went to Texas A&M but never finished, working instead at the university's oceanography department and later on an oil platform measuring hurricane wind force before finally landing at Texas Instruments in Dallas in 1963. Colleagues quickly learned that when nobody else could solve a difficult circuit problem, the answer was always the same: you need to see Merryman. In the fall of 1965, working alongside Jack Kilby, the TI engineer who had already invented the integrated circuit, and fellow engineer James Van Tassel, Merryman was tasked with building a handheld electronic calculator at a time when even the smallest calculators on the market weighed more than forty five pounds. Eighteen months of night and day work later, in 1967, the team delivered a three pound working prototype called Cal-Tech, small enough to fit in the palm of a hand. Texas Instruments filed the patent that same year, finally receiving it in 1974, though when the resulting commercial product hit the market, popular media at the time never mentioned Merryman or his colleagues by name at all, leaving their work almost entirely anonymous for decades.
Jerry Merryman died in 2019, and that original three pound prototype he helped build now sits preserved in the Smithsonian Institution, a small piece of plastic and circuitry that helped launch an entire electronic revolution most people never realized started with a radio repairman from Hearne, Texas. Texas has given the world plenty of inventions built for cattle and oil, but this one fit in a shirt pocket and changed how the whole planet did math. š§®
