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Blank worked as an engineer at Babcock & Wilcox in Barberton, Ohio from 1950 to 1951, making large steam boilers for the power industry.
He then moved to Goodyear Aircraft, where he worked from 1951 to 1952 on a wide variety of research and design projects including aircraft propulsion, air ship fabrics, parachutes, and submarines.
Because his wife Ethel wanted to move back to New York, they returned there in 1952.
After their return, Blank found a job in manufacturing engineering at Western Electric in Kearny, New Jersey where he worked from 1952 to 1956.
At Western Electric he worked on No.
4 toll crossbar switching equipment, used in the first dialing systems for connecting calls automatically without a human long-distance operator.
One of the pieces of equipment involved was a card translator with an array of germanium photo transistors that routed calls in the switching system.
Blank also worked as a troubleshooter for a plating room, where he gained practical experience in metal finishing and the use of acids and chemicals.
Two of the people Blank worked with at Western Electric were Dean Knapic and Eugene Kleiner.
Knapic was approached by William Shockley to form an engineering group at the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory division of Beckman Instruments, in California.
Knapic recommended Blank and Kleiner, who were interviewed by Shockley in a restaurant at Newark Airport, between flights.
In April 1956, Blank joined Shockley Semiconductor, followed a couple of months later by Kleiner.
Blank was a Senior Staff Engineer from 1956 to 1957.
The Blanks lived initially in Palo Alto, California, moving to Los Altos Hills, California in 1966.
One of Blank's first assignments at Shockley was to build a crystal grower.
Shockley had a number of ideas about how to build a crystal grower so as to eliminate contamination from oxygen in the quartz, but the resulting equipment was elaborate and had several problems.
Blank eventually built a conventional crystal grower based on the Czochralski process instead.
Diffusion furnaces also had to be built, because existing laboratory furnaces did not meet the requirements of semiconductor production.
They were too small, not well enough controlled, and not capable of being used for long periods of time.
Vacuum evaporators for evaporating metals also needed to be more robust and readily controlled.
Blank worked at Shockley Semiconductor until he and others, later dubbed the "traitorous eight", left to form the influential Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation.
Blank indicated that he personally had not had problems with Shockley, but that Shockley's treatment of others was disturbing.
Management difficulties accelerated after Shockley won the Nobel Prize:
In August 1957 Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce and Sheldon Roberts reached an agreement with Sherman Fairchild of Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation.
On September 18, 1957 they formed Fairchild Semiconductor.
Julius Blank found the company's first home, a 14,000 square foot building at 844 Charleston Road, between Palo Alto and Mountain View.
Little more than a shell, it lacked both plumbing and electricity.
Kleiner and Blank were in charge of transforming the empty building into usable spaces for production, research and offices.
In addition to mundane requirements like sewer and water, the work spaces required extra electrical power, air conditioning to afford some level of climate control during processing, and piping and venting of gases.
Blank's experience during the war and at Western Electric was helpful in dealing with these physical requirements.
As they were readying the building itself, the founders were also ordering desks, lab benches and scientific equipment, and starting to build specialized equipment that they couldn't order: crystal growers, diffusion furnaces, vacuum evaporators, and optical lithography equipment for mask-making.
Everyone worked toward the goal of getting the business underway.
The group's initial research had led to a breakthrough, the design of the silicon computer chip.
Much of the responsibility for learning how to mass-produce silicon chips, and building the machinery needed to do it, fell to Julius Blank and Eugene Kleiner as the only engineers in the group.
At Fairchild, they were responsible for setting up the initial machine shop and assembly areas.
What they were doing was fundamentally new: no one built the equipment that they needed.
Blank and Kleiner were in charge of designing "the first assembly line for the basic building blocks of the electronic world", silicon chips, "from the ground up".
"A brilliant mechanical engineer", Blank designed everything from furnaces and crystal growers to optical alignment and assembly equipment.
Later on, as the semiconductor industry developed, it became easier to order equipment and materials.
However, there continued to be an ongoing tension, trying to find robust equipment that could produce at high capacity.
As the company expanded, Blank's role changed.
He became responsible for establishing manufacturing facilities for the company in Hong Kong and other countries.
Blank was aware of the challenges of starting up a business in another country, both socially and physically.
Fairchild Semiconductor became a leader of the semiconductor industry.
At Fairchild, Blank was part of the team that established a "model for entrepreneurs for the rest of [the 20th] century": stock options, no job titles and open working relationships.
The incubator of Silicon Valley, Fairchild was directly or indirectly involved in the creation of dozens of corporations such as AMD and Intel.
In 1969, Blank decided to leave Fairchild and become a consultant to new startup companies.
He was the last of the original eight founding members to leave Fairchild.
In 1978, Blank co-founded Xicor, where he was a member of its Board of Directors.
The company's NOVRAM computer chip, a type of non-volatile memory, was designed so that systems could retain and save data in the event of power failure.
In 2004, Xicor was acquired by Intersil Corp. for approximately US$529 million.
In May, 2011, the California Historical Society in San Francisco gave the Legends of California Award to Blank, 85, and other founders of Fairchild Semiconductor.
In 2011, Blank lived in a retirement center across the street from the old Fairchild headquarters at 844 Charleston Road in Palo Alto, where he used to have his office.
The site is now a California Historical Landmark.
Blank died on September 17, 2011 in Los Altos Hills, California.
His wife, Ethel, an art curator, had died previously in 2008 after nearly 60 years of marriage.
He was survived by two sons, Jeffrey and David, and two grandsons.
Carcosa
Carcosa is a fictional city in Ambrose Bierce's short story "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" (1886).
The ancient and mysterious city is barely described and is viewed only in hindsight (after its destruction) by a character who once lived there.
Its name may be derived from the medieval city of Carcassonne in southern France, whose Latin name was "Carcaso."
American writer Robert W. Chambers borrowed the name "Carcosa" for his stories, inspiring generations of authors to similarly use Carcosa in their own works.
The city was later used more extensively in Robert W. Chambers' book of horror short stories published in 1895, titled "The King in Yellow".
Chambers had read Bierce's work and borrowed a few additional names from his work, including Hali and Hastur.
In Chambers' stories, and within the apocryphal play titled "The King in Yellow", which is mentioned several times within them, the city of Carcosa is a mysterious, ancient, and possibly cursed place.
The most precise description of its location is the shores of Lake Hali, in the star cluster Hyades, either on another planet, or in another universe.
For instance:
"Lake Hali" is a misty lake found near the city of Hastur.
In the fictional play "The King in Yellow" (obliquely described by author Robert W. Chambers in the collection of short stories of the same title), the mysterious cities of Alar and Carcosa stand beside the lake.
As with Carcosa, it is referenced in the Cthulhu Mythos stories of H.P.
Lovecraft and the authors who followed him.
The name Hali originated in Ambrose Bierce's "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" (1886) in which Hali is the author of a quote which prefaces the story.
The narrator of the story implies that the person named Hali is now dead (at least in the timeline of the story).
Several other nearly undescribed places are alluded to in Chambers' writing, among them Hastur, Yhtill, and Aldebaran.
"Aldebaran" may refer to the star Aldebaran, likely as it is also associated with the mention of the Hyades star cluster, with which it shares space in the night sky.
The Yellow Sign, described as a symbol, not of any human script, is supposed to originate from the same place as Carcosa.
One other name associated is "Demhe" and its "cloudy depths" − this has never been explained either by Chambers or any famous pastiche-writer and so we do not know what or who exactly "Demhe" is.
Marion Zimmer Bradley (and Diana L. Paxton since Bradley's death) also used these names in her Darkover series.
Later writers, including H. P. Lovecraft and his many admirers, became great fans of Chambers' work and incorporated the name of Carcosa into their own stories, set in the Cthulhu Mythos.
"The King in Yellow" and Carcosa have inspired many modern authors, including Karl Edward Wagner ("The River of Night's Dreaming"), Joseph S. Pulver ("Carl Lee & Cassilda"), Lin Carter, James Blish, Michael Cisco ("He Will Be There"), Ann K. Schwader, Robert M. Price, Galad Elflandsson, Simon Strantzas ("Beyond the Banks of the River Seine"), Charles Stross (in the Laundry Files series), Anders Fager and S. M. Stirling (in the Emberverse series).
Joseph S. Pulver has written nearly 30 tales and poems that are based on and/or include Carcosa, The King in Yellow, or other elements from Robert W. Chambers.
Pulver also edited an anthology "A Season in Carcosa" of new tales based upon The King in Yellow, released by Miskatonic River Press in 2012.
John Scott Tynes contributed to the mythology of Chambers' Carcosa in a series of novellas, "Broadalbin," "Ambrose," and "Sosostris," and essays in issue 1 of "The Unspeakable Oath" and in "Delta Green".
In Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's "The Illuminatus!
Trilogy," Carcosa is connected with an ancient civilization in the Gobi Desert, destroyed when the Illuminati arrived on Earth via flying saucers from the planet Vulcan.
In maps of the world of George R. R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire," a city named Carcosa is labeled on the easternmost edge of the map along the coast of a large lake, near other magical cities such as Asshai.
In "The World of Ice and Fire", it is mentioned that a sorcerer lord lives there who claims to be the sixty-ninth Yellow Emperor, from a dynasty fallen for a thousand years.
In the short story "Dinner in Carcosa," Western Canadian author Allan Williams re-imagines Carcosa as an abandoned Alberta prairie town with still-active insurance policies held by an ominous firm called "Hastur & Associates."
The story revolves around a chance encounter between a young insurance adjuster and the Ambrosovich family.
In the satirical novel "Kamus of Kadizhar: The Black Hole of Carcosa" by John Shirley (St. Martin's Press, 1988), Carcosa is the name of a planet whose weird black hole physics figures in the story.
In David Drake's Lord of the Isles series, Carcosa is the name of the ancient capital of the old kingdom, which collapsed a thousand years before the events of the series.
In S.M.
Stirling's Emberverse series, Carcosa is the name of a South Pacific city inhabited by evil people led by the Yellow Raja and the Pallid Mask.
In Lawrence Watt-Evans's The Lords of Dûs series, a character known as the Forgotten King, who dresses in yellow rags, reveals that he was exiled from Carcosa.
In writer Alan Moore's "Neonomicon", drawn by artist Jacen Burrowes, the character Johnny Carcosa is the key to a mystical Lovecraftian universe.
In the HBO original series "True Detective", 'Carcosa' is presented as a man-made temple.
Located in the back woods of Louisiana, the temple serves as a place of ritualistic sexual abuse of children and child murder organized by a group of wealthy Louisiana politicians and church leaders.
The main characters, Rust Cohle and Marty Hart, storm the temple in the final episode of the season, where they confront a serial killer, who is the most active member of the cult.
It is understood that the cult worships the "Yellow King", to whom an effigy is dedicated in the main chamber of 'Carcosa'.
The series hints at a larger conspiracy which continues beyond the show, which is in line with Lovecraftian horror, as is a vision experienced by one character that underscores Lovecraftian themes like cosmic indifference.