Santa Clara Valley Historical Association

The Arms Race, Space Race and Stanford Industrial Park

Events beginning about 1954 combined to impart critical mass to Peninsula electronics. The ICBM chapter of the arms race, the onset of the space race, the introduction of transistor technology, and moves to Stanford Industrial Park and nearby sites by many companies -- among them several major start-ups -- sent "smokeless" industrial growth surging.

Since World War II ended, the United States and the Soviet Union had been building on German rocket scientists' wartime achievements. In 1954, two developments -- thermonuclear weapons and miniaturized, accurate inertial guidance systems -- made intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) more feasible and more fearsome. America assigned a key strategic role to nuclear submarines carrying solid-propellant intermediate-range missiles.

Lockheed Aircraft moved its Missiles and Space Division (later renamed Company) from Burbank to Sunnyvale in 1956, and set up its research laboratory in Stanford Industrial Park. LMSC employment burgeoned as workers at the plant flanking Moffett Field built the U.S. Navy's Polaris missiles, first tested by 1958 and fired underwater by 1960.

Soviet launches of Earth-orbiting Sputniks in 1957 shocked Americans into frenzied efforts to catch up. Educational reforms began, and federal money poured into Santa Clara Valley science-based industry. In 1958, NASA -- the National Aeronautics and Space Administration -- was created. At Ames, renamed Ames Research Center, NASA took over the old NACA offices and wind tunnels. Its mission broadened beyond aeronautics to such areas as life sciences, space physics, astronomy, material sciences, and space project management.

Hewlett-Packard became the Industrial Park's flagship company in 1956, and David Packard joined the Stanford Board of Trustees and shared with Fred Terman the role of public spokesman for the land-use policy. By 1960 more than 40 companies occupied leased Stanford University land. In 1956 alone, ten companies started in Palo Alto. Many high-tech firms based elsewhere created western branches in the park.

One settler was William Shockley, back in his boyhood home town hoping to cash in on advanced transistors. Sponsored by Beckman Instruments, he formed Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories in 1956, and recruited a team of top-flight young scientists and engineers. Transistors had already begun to replace bulky vacuum tubes in electronic products, promising new reliability and reduced sizes. His proteges joined in celebrating that year when Shockley and his Bell Labs colleagues won the Nobel Prize for inventing the transistor. (For what ensued, please see the next chapter.)

Meanwhile, Ampex Corporation in Redwood City was making fast progress on another front. The company pioneered by Alexander Poniatoff, a Russian emigre, had married German tape-recording technology to its own small-engines skills. Its first big break came in 1947 when crooner Bing Crosby, who liked to pre-record his radio shows rather than perform live, ordered 20 sets. Broadcasters proved their reliability in 1948, and Ampex spurted. By 1955 Ampex marketed the first stereo home music system, and in 1956 a team led by Charles Ginsburg perfected the first videotape recorder. Unlike film, the electromagnetically made videotape needed no processing, and the television industry adopted it rapidly.

At Stanford, physics professor Arthur Schawlow had been working with Charles H. Townes in a study of how to create an optical version of Townes' maser (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation). In 1958, they proposed a method in a published paper. Within a few years, several pioneering lasers (the L is for light amplification) were built, and new industrial operations such as Spectra-Physics of Mountain View and Coherent, Inc., of Palo Alto took wing.

Among 1957's start-ups was Watkins-Johnson Company, co-founded by Stanford electrical engineering professor Dean A. Watkins, inventor of the helitron, a traveling-wave tube, and H. Richard Johnson, who had directed microwave tube research at Hughes Aircraft. W-J made its mark in defense electronics and semiconductor manufacturing equipment.

In 1955, Fred Terman became provost at Stanford, and extended his "steeples of excellence" thinking to fields beyond engineering. The university's run of Nobel laureates echoed this step. Willis Lamb shared the physics prize in 1955 for experimental work that spurred refinements in the quantum theories of electromagnetic phenomena. William Shockley, co-winner in 1956, later joined the faculty. Arthur Kornberg won the medicine prize in 1959, the year he moved to Stanford from Washington University of St. Louis, for discovering how DNA molecules are duplicated in the bacterial cell and for reconstructing the process in test tubes. Robert Hofstadter relocated to Stanford in 1950 and used its linear electron accelerator to measure and explore atomic nuclear structures. He shared the 1961 physics prize.

Hewlett-Packard purchased the Sanborn Company of Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1961, moving into medical instruments and putting its OK on mergers as a way of high-tech business life. Meanwhile, the microelectronics revolution had begun, and the invention of the integrated circuit would propel it headlong into the future.

Read about Fairchild and the Traitorous Eight

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