Silicon Valley: How Stanford, science, and war made tech history
New videos DAILY: https://bigth.ink
Join Big Think Edge for exclusive video lessons from top thinkers and doers: https://bigth.ink/Edge
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the first part of the 20th century, Silicon Valley wasn't known as the "Silicon Valley." It was the "Santa Clara Valley." It was an agricultural region, best known for being the "Prune Capital of America.

In terms of getting its start, Sherman Fairchild created Fairchild Semiconductor in the area because he had inherited a lot of money from IBM stock. In this way, IBM is sort of granddaddy of all computer companies because of this.

Remaking another Silicon Valley in the world would be tough — but not impossible. The region has become what it is today because it succeeded in a certain kind of time.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MARGARET O'MARA

Margaret O’Mara is the author of "The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America." She is a professor of history at the University of Washington, where she writes and teaches about the history of U.S. politics, the growth of the high-tech economy, and the connections between the two.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIPT:

MARGARET O'MARA:The first part of the 20th century, Silicon Valley wasn't known as Silicon Valley. It was the Santa Clara Valley. It was a agricultural region. It was best known for being the prune capital of America. It was where the fruit was grown, and canned, and harvested. So it really was off to the side of the main action. Where the real turning point for the Valley was the 1940s, World War II. It was the turning point for California and the Pacific West. The Pacific Theater brought thousands of servicemen streaming through ports like San Francisco. It built up the military installations up and down the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as up and down the West Coast. And then after the war, this continued with the Cold War and a great deal of military activity.

California getting a huge amount of this spending, of military spending, that Dwight Eisenhower later memorably labeled the military-industrial complex. And California was one of its capitals. So in the middle of all this is this little university, Stanford, which had been founded in the 1890s by a railroad baron and his wife. Stanford is an unusual place. Unlike the colleges of the Ivy League, which were founded in colonial times to educate future clergymen and lawyers-- kind of liberal arts institutions, Stanford was started with a very practical mission in mind. In its founding grant it says, to the effect, "Bring something useful into the world." And so Stanford always had a technical bent. The sciences and engineering were always a focus.

And as the government kind of ramped up this unprecedented spending on engineering, on science as America entered the nuclear age, the leaders of Stanford, notably its dean of engineering, an electrical engineer named Fred Terman, recognized there was, as Terman put it, a wonderful opportunity that Stanford could take advantage of. Terman had spent World War II in Boston. He was working for the government. Working as part of the many, many thousands of academics, scientists, and engineers who had gone to work for the Office of Wartime Research and Development, which was run by Terman's graduate mentor from MIT, a guy named Vinnie [? Verbush. ?] and Terman realized that everything was going to change for the sciences, that there was this big opportunity. And for Stanford, a place where he had grown up-- he was a faculty kid. His father had been a professor there, too. Palo Alto was home. He wrote to a friend during the war, "Stanford has this opportunity to become like Harvard, if we take advantage of this.

Or it could just kind of be a place like Dartmouth, which is respected, but not important to the national conversation." I don't know how people at Dartmouth would feel about that, but he was being a little-- there was a little bit snark there. So Terman comes back. And partnering with the then-president of the university, Wallace Sterling, who was a historian, I like to always add, they really remade Stanford's whole curriculum to beef up the physics department to create whole programs that were designed to work with industry, with these new defense industries that are growing up in California and in the Bay Area. And to really tailor programs so that they are training undergraduates and graduates in the sciences and engineering to go out and go into this work of these new electronics companies that are booming in this post-war period. It was something that no other university has done really, before or since. And that's one thing that set the Valley apart...

For the full transcript, check out https://bigthink.com/videos/silicon-v...