Why he matters
Scottsdale’s postcard economy — dude ranches, the Parada, the Valley Ho — had a second engine that did not photograph well. It was Daniel E. Noble, a Connecticut radio engineer who ran Motorola’s research and in 1949 decided that the company’s future in transistors should be built in the Salt River Valley. The lab and the chip plant went to Phoenix. Scottsdale got the Government Electronics Division, opened on McDowell Road in 1957 in a long modern building by the Valley Ho’s architects, which grew to more than 7,500 jobs and filled the south side with engineers’ ranch houses. By 1970 Motorola was the largest employer in Arizona.
He was, by one account, “hardly a charismatic patriarch”: bald, soft-bellied, happiest talking transistor design. He is also the reason the boomtown of the 1950s chapter had payrolls as well as postcards.
Where to find his mark today
8201 East McDowell Road. The 1957 plant, with its 1970 tower, still stands between Hayden and Granite Reef as General Dynamics Mission Systems.
South Scottsdale’s subdivisions. The city’s own midcentury driving tour credits the plant with the ranch-house neighborhoods that followed it.
The Noble Library at ASU. Opened in Tempe in 1983, the university’s second-largest library.
Seeing it for yourself
The plant is private, but McDowell Road is not: the long horizontal lines of the 1957 building read from the street, the same architectural language as the Hotel Valley Ho that Varney’s firm was finishing the year before. A block west, Los Arcos Mall opened in 1969 to sell to Motorola’s families and died when the corridor aged; SkySong stands there now. The 1957 year page puts the plant’s opening in its year, and the 1983 page tells the harder part of the story, when the solvents the plant had poured into unlined lagoons put the neighborhood on the Superfund list.
The full story
Daniel Earl Noble was born on October 4, 1901, in Naugatuck, Connecticut, and spent the 1920s and 1930s as the sort of engineer who kept inventing the institution around him: the first college radio broadcast station in the country, built at Connecticut Agricultural College in 1922; a professorship; and, in 1938–40, the Connecticut State Police’s two-way FM radio system, the first statewide network of its kind. Motorola hired him in 1940 as director of research. His war work was the SCR-300, the 40-pound backpack FM radio that went ashore at Anzio and became the original “walkie-talkie.”
After the war the government wanted its electronics contractors spread out beyond Chicago, and Noble, who had asthma, wanted dry air. He also wanted to ride horses. In 1949, two years after Bell Labs demonstrated the transistor, he opened Motorola’s solid-state research laboratory in a rented building on North Central Avenue in Phoenix, and within a few years the company had a headquarters on 56th Street and a semiconductor plant at 52nd Street and McDowell that shipped a million 2N176 power transistors by 1957 and was for decades the largest chip plant in the world. Noble’s stated ambition was “to create in the Valley of the Sun one of America’s foremost high-tech centers.” He did.
Scottsdale’s share came in 1957. The Government Electronics Division — radar, military radio, weapons electronics and, later, every piece of Motorola equipment that flew for NASA — opened at 8201 East McDowell Road, on Indian Bend Wash between Hayden and Granite Reef, in a nearly 200,000-square-foot “garden industrial” building by Varney, Sexton, Sydnor, the firm of Edward L. Varney. Two more 200,000-foot additions followed in 1961 and 1965 and a tower in 1970. At its peak the plant employed more than 7,500 people, and the city’s historic-preservation staff are blunt about what that meant: Motorola “stimulated new residential development in this area of Scottsdale and contributed to a high growth rate in Scottsdale’s population.” The engineers bought the Haver and Allied ranch houses of the south side; their children filled the schools the district could not build fast enough.
Noble became vice chairman and chief technical officer in 1970, collected the Edison Medal in 1978, and died on February 16, 1980. The plant’s other legacy surfaced the next year. A 1965 internal memo, reported by Phoenix New Times in 1992, described 30,000 gallons of solvents dumped into unlined lagoons behind the Scottsdale plant in a single year; in 1981 trichloroethylene turned up in Scottsdale and Phoenix drinking-water wells, and in 1983 the Indian Bend Wash area went on the first Superfund list. Motorola sold the Scottsdale business to General Dynamics in August 2001 for $825 million; ON Semiconductor and Freescale descend from the Phoenix lab. The boomtown era is the decade he made possible.