Santa Clara Valley Historical Association

Nazi Germany's shock troops, employing blitzkrieg tactics, had overrun most of Western Europe. Japan's forces, meanwhile, were rampaging through large parts of Asia. Most Americans believed the United States would have to fight.

In 1940, the British Royal Air Force and the German Luftwaffe were locked in the aerial battle of Britain. Despite the cruel punishment its people and cities were taking, Britain had a secret edge. It had developed radar, and the advent of the klystron -- light enough to be put aboard aircraft -- would later make the British system more workable. It arrived too late for employment in the air defense of Britain, but in time to help quell the menace of Nazi submarines. This technology symbolized the new science-based weapons the war was bringing to the fore, and it greatly aided Britain in beating off the U-boat assaults.

Under President Franklin Roosevelt's leadership, the United States supplied war materials to Britain and also to the Soviet Union after Germany turned on that former ally. America's scientists and engineers were mustered for an all-out effort to develop new weapons.

In December 1941, Japan bombed U.S. forces at Pearl Harbor with devastating effect, and attacked American and British bases in the Far East. Within days Congress declared the United States at war with Japan, Germany, and Italy.

Companies along the San Francisco peninsula quickly shifted from a preparedness to a war footing. Eitel-McCullough and Litton Engineering Laboratories geared up to produce vacuum tubes in unprecedented quantities. Kaar Engineering became a leading builder of two-way radios. Dalmo Victor developed military airborne radar equipment. Lenkurt built microwave telephone systems. In San Jose, Food Machinery and Chemical Corp., long a fabricator of agricultural spray pumps and cannery machinery, shifted operations to become a leading producer of tracked military vehicles.

Fred Terman at Stanford answered the call of his old MIT mentor, Vannevar Bush, to head the top-secret Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard University, eventually leading a corps of 800 scientists and engineers. The Army Signal Corps ordered Bill Hewlett to active duty again, this time for the duration. Dave Packard managed their company's defense production after 1942, in the first plant Hewlett-Packard built on Page Mill Road.

Terman's lab personnel devised jamming devices, particularly a radar countermeasure known as chaff, and developed tunable receivers for detecting and analyzing radar signals. Some of the related manufacturing was assigned to HP, which also made proximity fuses that had only to be shot near, not strike, an enemy tank or plane to score a hit. These fuses gave the Allies an edge in both the air war and tank clashes like the Battle of the Bulge. The sophisticated radar countermeasures HP worked on were not completed by the war's end in August 1945, but they were ready when the Cold War began soon afterward. Atomic weapons dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki hastened Japan's surrender without the necessity to assault her homeland -- an operation deemed likely to cause up to a million more U.S. casualties.

Clearly America's gamble on science-based weapons had paid off by helping the Allies to win the war and, despite the terrible costs of the conflict in lives and treasure, shortening its duration and reducing casualties.

While doing war work in the East, Terman, Hansen, the Varian brothers, Edward Ginzton and others learned from personal experience how Harvard and MIT managed their relations with Washington and how defense production firms such as Sperry operated. They acquired a taste for large-scale, project-oriented science. Stanford University had not played such a role in the long, grinding years of war. Many of its faculty had scattered, although one who remained on campus, physics Professor Paul Kirkpatrick, had developed the X-ray microscope in 1945. When peace finally came, it brought eagerness to reorganize for a new era -- along with turbulence and shortages.

Terman was named dean of engineering in 1944, many months before he could return West. When he finally did come home, he had important new concepts in mind. He foresaw a rising tide of U.S. government support for science and technology, owing to their wartime successes. And he was convinced that his own field, electronics, was due to become even more essential in modern civilization. The Peninsula's World War II role in microwave tube production for radio and radar clearly was destined for further expansion, after a rocky readjustment to peacetime conditions.

An early signal of a fresh outlook on campus was the founding of Stanford Research Institute in 1946. SRI was created to do applied and contract research in conjunction with the university, with leading California businesses and industries among its sponsors. High hopes for this not-for-profit enterprise were not misplaced, for among SRI's accomplishments in subsequent years were such quantum jumps as magnetic ink character recognition (1955), ink-jet printing (1961), optical disk recording (1963), the mouse computer input device (1964), and the acoustic coupler/modem (1965). Companies hungry to develop these better mousetraps beat a path to SRI's doors in Menlo Park.

Read about the Postwar Era and University Research

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