Reviewed by Tara Lohan

"This is our revolution," Jeffrey Zygmont writes in his new book Microchip: An Idea, Its Genesis, and the Revolution it Created. According to Zygmont, the integrated circuits that we know of today as microchips account for the biggest change that has occurred in our culture during the last 40 years. "Pervasive and ubiquitous," Zygmont tells us, microchips have restructured our lives, creating a change that is "so complete it has burrowed down to the roots of our culture."

Zygmont traces the development of the microchip from its beginnings as flakes of silicon and scientific vision through to the technology that has been incorporated into everything from Talking Barbie to the Patriot defense missile. The chronicle of innovation begins in a moment that Zygmont likens to the years of the Wild West frontier. As techno cowboys race to make things "smaller, faster, cheaper," there are more betrayals than an afternoon soap opera. Ideas are developed and sold and stolen, as engineers defect from companies, sometimes in numbers large enough to create their own start-ups.

While the book is an interesting look at the way a piece of technology develops, the narrative itself is awkward. As the story progresses, the wild ride of innovation promised by the first chapters gets tangled in the complicated play-by-play of lab work and business deals, and characters who surface later get little more than a resume-style introduction.

Although Zygmont claims in his prologue that the story of the microchip is "our revolution," he rarely opens up the narrative wide enough to understand the cultural implications and context of the statement. But in the end, the reader is at least left with a "look how far we’ve come," feeling — and has gained some insight into a technological revolution that is so big we can’t even see it.