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They started off manufacturing in a converted bakery and later on in an old knitting mill.
The company’s first product was a point contact germanium diode with a welded gold whisker suitable for the military because it could handle higher voltages than other diodes.
The company was notoriously mean on R&D spend but manufactured cheaply, was among the most profitable companies in the industry and became No.2 in the rankings.
Moral. The down and dirty approach can succeed
Wilf Corrigan was another, so was Pierre Lamond.
The 741 I’ve thought about before. There were companies producing modular opamps before Fairchild. Fairchild produced the first opamp IC but it’s performance was awful so people continued to buy the modular ones, since they could accurately trim the performance before potting the module. It wasn’t until the likes of Precision Monolithics and Burr-Brown developed wafer trimming that decent performance opamp ICs emerged. I guess there was some crude zener zapping later on in the life of the early opamps. They were still purchased in volume for low end apps.
Absolutely spot on Jamo and one of those clever guys was Dave Fullagar who realised after a few months at Transitron that his American colleagues were being paid twice as much as him for the same work so he pushed off to Fairchild and invented the 741 which made zillions for Fairchild
Transition, starting in Warren St, Melrose Mass, then an old mill in Wakefield. Brought loads of clever guys over from Europe, but didn’t let any of them share in the company’s financial success. Off to the west coast to make their fortunes. This was the main reason why the east coast lost out to the newer west coast companies.