After Fairchild exercised this right the founders, who no longer held any equity stakes, peeled off to form new firms Most famously, in 1968 Noyce and Moore formed Intel. Several other spin-offs from Fairchild Semiconductor – sometimes called the Fairchildren – led to California’s dominance of the early microelectronics industry.In 1972, Kleiner decided to form a venture-capital firm in partnership with Thomas Perkins, a veteran of Hewlett-Packard. Named the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, the firm began operations in 1957, and within six months it was turning a profit in the new technology of microelectronics.The original agreement with Fairchild enabled him to acquire the founders’ shares for $300,000 apiece if the venture proved successful. It proved very difficult to get start-up funds for the new enterprise. Eventually Kleiner contacted his father’s stockbroker, a man by the name of Arthur Rock – later a pioneer of venture capital, but who then worked for the New York brokerage firm of Hayden, Stone & Co.Rock talked one of his clients, Sherman Fairchild – heir to an IBM fortune and founder of the Fairchild Camera and Instrument Company – into investing $1.5m in the enterprise. Shockley, the Nobel prizewinning inventor of the transistor – later famed for his irascibility and right-wing views – had established the laboratory for the commercial exploitation of the transistor.After a few months, unable to tolerate Shockley’s regimen, Kleiner, along with Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and five others, left to set up on their own Ever after, Shockley called them the “traitorous eight”.

Kleiner served in the US Army during the Second World War, and after demobilisation took advantage of the GI Bill to obtain a degree in mechanical engineering from Brooklyn Polytechnic (now the Polytechnic University of New York).In 1956, following a spell with Western Electric, he was hired along with several other young engineers by William Shockley, who had established Shockley Laboratories in Palo Alto, California. There may be subterranean water, an essential for life; but were there ever beings with whom we might have held a conversation? If there was once life on Mars, how did it arrive there? Where else is it to be found? Would we be advised to look for it?Whatever this good second Beagle discovers, we shall surely find that every answer raises another question. Whether we are alone or not alone in the universe, we still have to discover what kind of creatures we are.. Eugene Kleiner, engineer and venture capitalist: born Vienna 1923; founder, Fairchild Semiconductor 1957; partner, then partner emeritus, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers 1972-2003; married 1947 Rose Wassertheil (died 2001; one son, one daughter); died Los Altos Hills, California 20 November 2003. After pointing out the narrow limits from the Sun in which biological life can hope to survive, Jeans says: “It seems incredible that the universe can have been designed primarily to produce life like our own … surely we might have expected to find a better proportion between the magnitude of the mechanism and the amount of the product …”The old Mars is extinct, gone with the scientific wind like other staples of boys’ stories of old, such as the dinosaurs which survive deep in the Amazon and the Sargasso Sea, where frog people live on old Spanish galleons. The adventure of Mars now lies within the philosophical question: Are we alone? We may hope that Beagle-2 will tell us if there was life of a kind on our nearest neighbour in space.But we are looking from the teeming abundance of our world with its great oceans, to a shrunken world covered in desert.

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom, the Mars of many of ERB’s adventure stories, HG Wells’s vampiric monsters of War of the Worlds, Philip K Dick’s Mars divided up into UN sectors in Martian Time-Slip – all these alluring imaginary worlds have been swept away by science. When I read the Modern Boy article, I knew nothing of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky or the other theoreticians who helped to make space travel real. Tsiolkovsky was the Russian who understood that for space travel you needed liquid propellants.I read, and still venerate,Sir James Jeans, that great populariser of astronomy. In his bookThe Mysterious Universe he raises a question still teasing us: Are we alone in the universe? This is the problem that Beagle-2 hopes to resolve. Even a fossilised single-cell organism would be welcome.How it has all changed. Assuming the British-made Beagle-2 has landed intact on Martian soil – or regolith, as it is properly called – and contact can be made, the search for life there will begin in earnest.