The Father of Silicon Valley: Frederick Terman
From my book, CHARGED BODIES. PEOPLE, POWER AND PARADOXES THAT LAUNCHED SILICON VALLEY
When it opened in 1891, Stanford University was anxious to prove Leland Stanford’s vow that his school would be “the Harvard of the West.” The Harvard of the East, and many in between, found this risible.
And so Leland Stanford, one of the four founders of the Southern Pacific RR, and one of the richest and most despised men in America then, opened his deep pockets and made some remarkable, unconventional faculty hires to kickstart his academic memorial to his beloved, recently deceased son, Leland Junior.
One of these hires was Lewis M. Terman (1877–1956) an early pioneer in educational psychology from Indiana.
Terman then immediately set to work in the early 20th Century, to create a version of a French Intelligence test for the United States, renaming it the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scale, still in use today.
Lewis had a son, Frederick Terman (1900–1982). And while Stanford University offered an excellent undergraduate education from its earliest days, exceptional students like Frederick had to go East if they wanted a graduate degree in the hope they would be hired by an established firms in the East.
Fred completed his doctorate at MIT in 1925, and returned to Palo Alto for the summer, expecting to go East in the fall to start a job at General Electric.
Instead, he was afflicted with a medical condition that required him to spend his days in bed with weights on his chest. He remained in Palo Alto for most of the rest of his life.
Over the next 15 years at Stanford, he designed a course on electronics. During that time, he wrote a book called “Radio Engineering” (as electronic engineering was called then). It soon became the standard college text on the subject throughout the country.
Professor Terman also introduced two of his students, William Hewlett and David Packard, to each other. And managed to get Stanford to invest $500 in two enterprising brothers, Russell and Sigurd Varian.
In what would become a hallmark of Stanford graduates in future years, he encouraged his students to form their own companies and he personally invested in many of them. His goal was to make it so that promising students in the West did not have to go East to find suitable work as he had faced.
During World War II Professor Terman directed a staff of more than 850 scientists and engineers at the Radio Research Lab at Harvard, where his contribution was the invention of “chaff,” aluminum strips that confused enemy radar.
He returned to Stanford after the war, and in the late 1940s he set out to establish at Stanford “a community of technical scholars.”
And so the Stanford Research Park came to be which over time would house such firms as Hewlett-Packard, Eastman Kodak, General Electric, NeXT Computer, Xerox PARC, and Facebook.
Maybe one reason that Fred Terman could think outside the box was that growing up in the Midwest, before his father moved the family to Palo Alto, he was not formally educated. The father, Lewis, let his son explore the Indiana countryside on his own and learn from his own observations and measurements.
I spoke to Frederick Terman on Thanksgiving weekend, 1982, requesting an interview for my book CHARGED BODIES. He said he was feeling poorly and to call in two weeks.
Two weeks later all the electronic trade pubs announced the death of “The Father of Silicon Valley.”
(Before he died, Terman narrated a long autobiography, now in the Stanford library, from which this interview is drawn verbatim.)
When ‘Charged Bodies’ came out in 1985, I was invited by Business Development Groups from Seattle to San Diego to come and advise them on how to make their city the next ‘hot’ location — the new Silicon Forest or Silicon Desert…
The only honest advice I could offer was to start now for a payoff decades later, with no idea of what you will wind with.
Watching Messer’s Binet and Simon develop their IQ test in 1905, who could have imagined that less than a century later companies like Google and Facebook, and concepts like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual Reality (VR), would upend every notion we have of intelligence, sentience, conscience, and consciousness? What’s next?
© 2024, Thomas Mahon
