Elizabeth Noyce

Elizabeth Noyce
Born	October 7, 1930 Auburn, Massachusetts, United States
Died	Bremen, Maine, United States
Alma mater	Tufts University
Occupation	Philanthropist
Net worth	$100 million to $1 billion
Spouse(s)	Robert Noyce (divorced)
Children	William, Pendred, Priscilla, Margaret
Parent(s)	Frank Bottomley and Helen McLaren

Elizabeth Noyce (October, 7 1930 – September 18, 1996) was an American philanthropist in the state of Maine.

She was born Elizabeth Bottomley in Auburn, Massachusetts, United States, 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 (later moving to Santa Clara, California in 1971). Intel became a huge financial success; it developed the first commercially available dynamic RAM (i1103), the first EPROM (i1702), and the first commercially available microprocessor (i4004).

During this time, the couple lived in Los Altos, California. They had four children: William B., Pendred, Priscilla, and Margaret. Elizabeth loved New England, so the family acquired a 50-acre coastal summer home in Bremen, Maine. Elizabeth and the children would summer there. Robert would visit during the summer, but he continued working at Intel during the summer.

Robert started an extramarital affair with an attractive, intelligent, 28-year-old, self-sufficient, divorced mother of three, Intel mask designer, Barbara Maness; the affair was an "open secret" at Intel. After Elizabeth learned of the affair, the marriage ended in divorce. Elizabeth received half of the couple's assets under California's community property law. Robert later married Ann Bowers, Intel's head of personnel.

She then took up residence at the Maine summer home. She became the area's leading philanthropist and art collector. Among other major gifts, she founded the Libra Foundation.

Elizabeth Noyce smoked cigarettes, developed emphysema, and died from a heart attack on September 18, 1996, aged 65, at her home in Bremen, Maine.

External links

• Sarasota Herald-Tribune 27 September 1996
• Eugene Register-Guard 27 September 1996
• State Bids Goodbye to 'Best Friend': Elizabeth Noyce is praised for her Generosity to Maine at a Portland Memorial Service, John Richardson Staff Writer, Portland Press Herald (ME), September 24, 1996. About 1200 people, including school children and four Maine governors, attended. Governor Angus King spoke.
• Ellen Goodman, Boston Globe, 26 September 1996, Betty Noyce used her enormous wealth to give what others needed — work, "Yet by her death at 65, she had become a legend. People searching for a label to describe her work called her a one-woman 'economic development corporation.'"