Morgan Sparks, who made critical contributions to developing the second-generation transistor, which became a building block of modern electronic devices, died May 3 at his daughter’s home in Fullerton, Calif. He was 91.
The cause was congestive heart failure, his son Gordon said.
Mr. Sparks was born in Pagosa Springs, Colo., where his father owned a hardware store. His quick intelligence led to his skipping 1st and 5th grades. When he was 9, the family moved to Harlingen, Texas, where Mr. Sparks attended a nearby community college for a year, working at a soda counter to pay expenses.
He won a scholarship to Rice University, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemistry. He then earned his doctorate in physical chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1943 as a Rockefeller Foundation fellow.
He next joined Bell Labs, where he first worked on electrical storage experiments involving elements like tantalum and niobium, then called columbium. He was also assigned to wartime projects like developing batteries that could operate in seawater, for electric torpedoes and downed-aviator missions.
Mr. Sparks moved up the management ladder, and in 1972 was sent to New Mexico as president of Sandia National Laboratories, which was then managed by AT&T. In 1981, he retired from the Bell system to be dean of the Robert O. Anderson School of Management at the University of New Mexico.
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