Texas Instruments Incorporated

David Wenner is a retired businessman and consultant who curated the rare physics manuscript library that would eventually become the Wenner Collection at the Niels Bohr Library. In this interview, Wenner recounts his childhood in Florida and describes his early interests in sports and academics. He describes his interest in pursuing a liberal arts education as an undergraduate at Yale, and he discusses his graduate work in computer science at Purdue. Wenner discusses his professional experiences at Texas Instruments and his long career in consulting at McKinsey & Company. He explains how he became involved with the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara and how an interest in reading physics books grew into a full time pursuit curating what would become a singular library of rare physics manuscripts. Wenner describes how he built the collection and the various considerations that led to him deciding to work with AIP and to create the Wenner Collection. He describes the process that went into his book History of Physics, and he discusses his current interest collecting manuscripts relating to climate change. At the end of the interview, Wenner reflects on ongoing questions raised by cosmology and quantum theory.

In this interview Robert Doering discusses topics such as: his family background and childhood; his undergraduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Philip Morrison; Jack Rapaport; nuclear physics; doing his graduate work at Michigan State University; Sherwood Haynes; quantum mechanics taught by Mort Gordon; Aaron Galonsky; working at the cyclotron laboratory; George Bertsch; teaching at the University of Virginia; low-energy heavy-ion collisions; switching to industrial physics research; beginning work at Texas Instruments (TI); working with semiconductors; Don Redwine; Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA); George Heilmeier; Semiconductor Research Corporation; SEMATECH; Moore's Law; complementary metal oxide semiconductors (CMOS); Birch Bayh and Robert Dole; Morris Chang; research and development changes throughout his career.