Santa Clara Valley Historical Association

As 1913 dawned, Federal Telegraph Company was off to a great start. It had the best technology of the day, a capable chief engineer in Cyril Elwell, and an outstanding research team led by Lee de Forest. And it was able to hire the cream of Stanford's electrical engineering graduates. But the company was due to experience problems that became common in Silicon Valley later on -- defections, spinoffs and money troubles. Even so, it was upward bound.

De Forest soon left to sell his audion improvements, to which Federal had only "shop rights." They were bought by American Telephone and Telegraph, whose engineers had been unable to develop repeaters to boost long-distance calls beyond 900 miles. Elwell, meanwhile, had lost financial control of the firm to promoters whose manipulations embarrassed him and Professor Wing as directors representing the Stanford investors. He joined a British company in 1913.

Besides the research team disbanding, Federal lost two Danes who had come over to install the Stockton-Sacramento circuit, engineer Peter V. Jensen and mechanic C. Albertus, as well as the first American electrical engineer Elwell had hired, E.S. Pridham, a talented Stanford graduate. The three quit to develop a loudspeaker, and the moving-coil principle they used in work at Napa and Oakland led to formation of a successful company, Magnavox. Such speakers were to be used at public assemblages and in millions of radio receivers.

Federal still had plenty of talent. Leonard Fuller, a Cornell graduate with wide-ranging experience, and Harold Elliott took the lead as Federal began developing U.S. Navy communications. Roland Marx helped perfect the giant arcs. Elliott later developed a radio broadcast receiver for mass production, and many radio pushbutton tuning devices. After the United States entered World War I in 1917, Federal ballooned to 300 employees, housed in a plant on El Camino Real south of University Avenue. Near the end of the war Federal built a giant station near Bordeaux, France, with James Arthur Miller the principal engineer. Its arcs were workhorses at all major American naval bases.

During the war, the government ordered the few widely scattered civilian broadcasters, including Doc Herrold, to shut down. Herrold turned to training military operators.

After Armistice Day in 1918, a new technological era began. Arc transmitters were being outmoded by improved tubes. Herrold, for one, had to junk the broadcast equipment he had invented and replace it at an exacting cost.

Although government work slacked off as peace settled in, radio was due for great expansion. Federal carried on its long lines and shore-to-ship traffic, and also developed new products. Frederick Kolster, who had invented the radio direction-finder in 1913, worked as Federal's chief research engineer from 1921 to 1931. Kolster produced a radio compass and radio receivers and did experiments with big parabolic directional antennas.

In 1921, Federal built a transmitting station in the Palo Alto baylands, employing a 626-foot mast designed with the help of Professor Wing. The Marsh Station was known by the radio call letters KWT (later KFS). Mackay Radio and Telegraph Company, soon to become a unit of International Telephone and Telegraph Company, bought the station in 1927 to use for point-to-point and ship-to-shore communications.

The Marsh Station switched from arcs to more efficient vacuum-tube oscillators in 1935 -- a conversion marking the start of shortwave radio. The mast stood until 1960. Federal's transition from arcs to tubes spanned the years 1927 to 1934. A key figure in that era was engineer Charles V. Litton, a Stanford graduate who became fascinated by tube-blowing as a teenager.

In 1931 Federal Telegraph's manufacturing operations were moved to New Jersey after company officials decided Palo Alto was too far away from sources of supplies, skilled labor, and key markets. ITT eventually swallowed the company. Among the Federal employees who decided not to go East was Charlie Litton. Instead, he started his own company in Redwood City, where his tube-developing skill was a boon to remaining Peninsula radio operations. Another who stayed behind, Gerhard R. Fisher, developed the M-scope, a detector of metal and water as deep as 20 feet underground.

Frederick Emmons Terman, the son of famed Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman, also worked at Federal Telegraph briefly in the course of taking chemistry and electrical engineering degrees at Stanford. Then Terman went on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to earn a Ph.D. under Vannevar Bush. Terman was slated to teach at MIT, but while home at Stanford for the summer came down with tuberculosis. In 1927 Harris J. Ryan offered Terman a half-time position at Stanford teaching radio engineering courses. After fully recovering, Terman stayed at Stanford to run a new lab. Before long he had written the leading textbook on radio engineering, an earlier name for electronics.

A few other facts about the 1912-32 era foreshadowed later epochs. Brothers Russell and Sigurd Varian, Palo Altans as boys, had moved to Halcyon, south of San Luis Obispo. To enroll at Stanford to study physics, Russell Varian walked the 200 miles to the campus. Meanwhile, another professor's son who spent his boyhood in Palo Alto from 1913 to 1922 was a science-struck fellow named William Shockley.

The year 1931 brought another development that was destined to take the area into outer space: Bay Area people raised more than $476,000 to purchase and sell for $1 to the U.S. government the land for what became Moffett Field, initially a naval air station for dirigibles.

Despite the Depression and Federal's departure, there was light at the end of the tunnel.

Listen to the Story about the Founding of Federal Telegraph

Read about the Inventions by the Varian Brothers and Hewlett & Packard

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