[1] Last was born in Butler, Pennsylvania, on October 18, 1929,[2] at the beginning of the Stock Market Crash of 1929, and grew up during the Great Depression.
[3][4] Both his parents were teachers, but his father left teaching to work in a steel mill in hopes of earning a better living.
Between his junior and senior years of school, at age 16, he and a friend hitch-hiked to San Jose, California, and worked for the summer picking fruit.
[3] Last graduated from Butler Senior High School in 1947 and applied for a scholarship to study Optics at the University of Rochester.
Last worked for a summer at the trouble-shooting department of Kodak's optical instrumentation plant, before his senior year of university.
A material he was working with, barium titanate, underwent unusual structural changes when it became ferroelectric, requiring Last to study it using infrared spectroscopy.
Last spent much of his time working on basic surface properties of materials, trying to explain anomalous results from four-layer silicon diodes.
[3] The dissatisfied scientists included much of the core technical talent of the project: Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, and Robert Noyce.
He made a great contribution…he was the only one that knew how to blow glass so he was making all the jungles for the diffusion and he also was involved with metal evaporation.
[4]: 17–25 In 1959, developing an idea he had noted as early as 1957, Jean Hoerni submitted two patent applications describing his "Planar process".
Robert Noyce showed how Hoerni’s planar process could be exploited to electrically interconnect the components of an integrated circuit.
[4]: 38–39 [12] On February 12, 1960, Last, Robert Norman, and Isy Haas reported on the first integrated circuits at the IRE Solid State Conference in a paper entitled Solid-State Micrologic Elements.
[12][13] They described hybrid silicon integrated circuits that they had developed, including a flip-flop, a gate, an adder, and a shift register.
By the summer of 1960, Last's Fairchild Semiconductor team succeeded in building and demonstrating the first working planar integrated circuits.
[4]: 223 The electrically isolated circuits were initially a side project of Haas and Kattner, who worked on the idea in their own time.
[3]: 85 On January 31, 1961, Jay Last, Jean Hoerni, Sheldon Roberts, and (briefly) Gene Kleiner of the "traitorous eight" resigned from Fairchild Semiconductor to create Amelco Corporation as a division of Teledyne.
[16] By targeting specialty military applications as their primary market, Teledyne avoided putting itself in direct competition with Fairchild, and stayed on generally good terms with the larger company.
[1] Last insisted on staying in the area that became Silicon Valley, because it was developing the necessary infrastructure for obtaining materials, equipment and personnel.
[3]: 93 They created circuits used by NASA and military space operations, including products used in the Doppler system for Moon landings.
[3]: 107 [1]: 179 From 1966 to 1974 Last served as Vice President of Research and Development for Teledyne, moving to Los Angeles, California to work more closely with George Roberts.
"[19] Last appeared on the PBS documentary series American Experience in the episode titled "Silicon Valley", which debuted on February 6, 2013.
[20][21][22] In the program, Last reflected on how, at age 16, between his junior and senior years of high school, he hitchhiked to California and spent the summer picking apricots in Santa Clara Valley.
Another early acquisition has become Hopewell Culture National Historical Park,[27] part of a proposed UNESCO World Heritage Site.
: 71–72 He became a significant collector, specializing in art from West and Central Africa, particularly works of the Lega people of Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Beginning in 1973, Last and his wife Deborah have given more than 660 works to the Fowler Museum at UCLA, including a 2013 gift of 92 Lega wood and ivory figures, masks, tools and spoons.
[25][29][30] He said of his interest in the Lega people and their artwork: I was fascinated by the concept of the Lega society, one without hereditary or elected rulers, unified by a semisecret group, the Bwami Society, whose members rose in prestige and increasing influence as they practiced a highly moral standard of social behavior.
The emphasis was on harmony in social relationships, circumspection, filial piety, group spirit, obedience, self-discipline and tenacity of purpose.
The labels were produced for wooden crates of oranges, lemons and grapefruits distributed by Southern Californian growers, packers and distributors.