Cecil H. Green, 102, Dies; Texas Instruments Founder
By PAUL LEWIS (New York Times)

Cecil H. Green, a founder of Texas Instruments and a major educational and medical philanthropist, died on Friday [April 11, 2003] in La Jolla, Calif. He was 102.

On Dec. 6, 1941, Mr. Green joined with Eugene McDermott, J. Erik Jonsson and H. Bates Peacock to buy a Dallas company called Geophysical Service Inc., which was working on seismic explorations for oil but moved into electronics during World War II, making submarine detection devices and radars.

In 1951, the company changed its name to Texas Instruments, retaining the Geophysical Service name for a subsidiary. The next year it entered the semiconductor business, and in 1954 produced the first pocket-size transistor radio.

In 1958, the company developed the integrated circuit that made possible a vast new range of electrically controlled machines. Today, Texas Instruments has annual earnings of about $8.4 billion and employs 43,000 people in more than 30 countries.

Cecil Howard Green was born in England, near Manchester, on Aug. 6, 1900. As a child he moved with his family to Canada. He graduated from the University of British Columbia before earning a master's degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1924.

In 1926, he married Ida Mabelle Flansburg, who died in 1986. They had no children and he leaves no immediate survivors.

After graduating from M.I.T., Mr. Green tried his hand at various businesses, including selling neon lighting, cars and insurance. For a while he worked at the Raytheon Corporation as an assistant to Charles Litton, who went on to found Litton Industries.

Mr. Green joined G.S.I. in 1932, two years after the company was founded, and as a seismographic field crew chief spent several years exploring for oil in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana before joining with his three partners to buy the business and develop it into a world leader in microelectronics.

He was vice president of Texas Instruments from 1941 to 1951 and president from 1951 to 1955.

Mr. Green's philanthropy, which eventually totaled $200 million, benefited numerous medical and educational institutions in the United States as well as in Britain, Canada and Australia. He received more than a dozen honorary degrees, including a doctorate of science from Oxford University. In 1991, Queen Elizabeth II gave him an honorary knighthood.