Santa Clara Valley Historical Association

The Depression held the United States in a paralyzing grip, crimping industrial operations and pinching funding for costly academic research. It was a time to learn, apply brainpower, and make do in the laboratory at minimal cost.

Federal Telegraph's move East had closed the Palo Alto-Stanford area's major production plant, but it left behind some engineers and skilled workers who chose to stay in the West. At the university, Fred Terman was firmly entrenched as the leading U.S. academic man in radio engineering. Even before becoming Electrical Engineering department head in 1937, Terman encouraged his students to start businesses. He took them to San Francisco to visit places like Heintz & Kaufman's radio plant and Philo Farnsworth's television development workshop.

John Kaar began developing mobile radio communication from his Menlo Park garage, later moving Kaar Engineering to Palo Alto. First he equipped the dogcatcher with a mobile radio. Then, with Terman's advice, Kaar installed a police-fire network linking Palo Alto and nearby towns. Messages went from base to vehicles in the field at first, but soon became two-way.

Leonard Fuller, Federal's ex-chief, headed electrical engineering at the University of California. He arranged for Federal to give Berkeley a leftover 80-ton, 1000-kilowatt arc generator. With it, atom-smashing pioneer Ernest O. Lawrence built his first successful cyclotron.

In 1934, Eitel-McCullough began fabricating vacuum tubes in San Carlos, enlarging a Bay Area tube production cluster dating back to 1916-20. Charles V. Litton, another ex-Federal star, set up Litton Electronics in Redwood City to produce custom vacuum tubes and tube-making machinery. Litton patented some multigrid tubes in which oscillations occurred and assigned the patents to Stanford.

At Physics Corner on campus, William W. Hansen, Russell Varian's former roommate, was new on the faculty. Hansen hankered to do nuclear research, but the money shortage kept him from using X-ray tubes and the Ryan High Voltage Laboratory. Using resonance techniques instead, he developed a cavity resonator to accelerate electrons. The copper container could be made to act as an excellent radio-frequency circuit, capable of developing extremely high voltages with modest power input. He called it a rumbatron.

Rus Varian, meanwhile, had worked for a time as a chemist assisting Philo Farnsworth, and then in the East. His younger brother, Sigurd, a former Pan American World Airways pilot in Latin America, persuaded Rus to come home to Halcyon and set up a lab. Sig envisioned an aircraft navigation and detection system to save pilots' lives in darkness or storms. Hearing about Hansen's rumbatron, Rus Varian wrote him to say it might fit their needs. So a collaboration began that brought the Varians to Stanford. They got physics lab space plus $100 a year for materials in exchange for half of any eventual patent earnings.

In their collaboration, Rus Varian generated ideas, Bill Hansen sifted out the promising ones, and Sig Varian built prototypes. By mid-1937, Russell had proposed a way to make the rumbatron an oscillator or amplifier that modulated streams of electrons into powerful waves. Sigurd sought such pulses of high-frequency energy to bounce off aircraft, ships, or ground features -- the principle of radar. Soon they had a new electron tube. They named it the klystron.

The invention excited the Sperry Gyroscope Company of New York. Sperry licensed the klystron patents and, for an extra $1,000, the patent rights Charles Litton had given Stanford. Litton insisted that the money go to the engineering school for research on electronic tubes. Fred Terman allocated it to graduate student support, specifically for David Packard, one of "Terman's boys" who had been working on vacuum tubes at General Electric in Schenectady, N.Y.

Packard and a radio lab buddy, William R. Hewlett, encouraged by Terman, had talked about starting a company after graduating in 1934, but GE's offer of a job took Packard East. After completing graduate work at MIT, Hewlett returned to Stanford and continued his research in the radio lab. By mid-1938, Packard was back in Palo Alto with the intent of "making a run for it" in business with Hewlett. In a small garage behind the flat Dave and Lucile Packard rented at 367 Addison Avenue, the two friends began to explore product ideas, including one for a continuously variable broadcast turning condenser suggested by Terman. It was here they perfected their idea of an improved audio oscillator, the HP Model 200A -- the basis for the partnership they established formally on January 1, 1939.

When the chief sound engineer for Walt Disney Studios got wind of the 200A, it was through his interest and request for modifications that Disney Studios placed Hewlett-Packard's first big order -- for eight "Model 200B" audio oscillators for sound production of the movie Fantasia. The oscillators were modestly priced at $71.50 each.

Another propitious event of the era was a decision by the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics to set up NACA's second field laboratory on the West Coast. At Ames Research Center adjoining Moffett Field, ground was broken late in 1939. Its initial research facilities, including several wind tunnels, were dedicated in the spring of 1940.

At Stanford, meanwhile, the klystron stepped up microwave research. Terman directed Edward Ginzton and other electrical engineering graduate students to assist Hansen in klystron improvement, for which Sperry had given Stanford $10,000. Before relocating with his physics team to Sperry's Long Island facility, Hansen taught a special class on the klystron for Terman's graduate students, creating a new generation of trained microwave engineers and preparing them for war work.

Read about WWII and Science-Based Weapons

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