Frederick Emmon Terman was known as “The Father of Silicon Valley.” But even a nickname like that fails to capture his contributions to the electronics industry. Under his leadership, Stanford University evolved from a respected university to a world-class institution. His work in radar countermeasures in World War II saved countless lives. Radio Engineering, which he revised and expanded in three additional editions, is a cornerstone of electronics scholarship. Yet this Father of Silicon Valley was a caring father at home as well.
“As a family, we always ate dinner together,” said his son Lewis Terman, a Research Emeritus at IBM and a former president of IEEE. “He came back around 5:30 from the office. He would do something in the study. We had dinner from 6 to 7. He would rest from 7 to 7:30, and then he’d be back working on the books. But I could interrupt him at any time.”
Go Cardinals!
While Fred Terman’s family was very important to him, he also had a lifelong devotion to Stanford University, and the Termans and the school have enjoyed a very long association. Fred’s father Lewis Terman, who invented the Stanford-Binet IQ test, was the chair of the psychology department there from 1922 to 1945. Fred earned his undergraduate degree in chemistry and his master’s degree in electrical engineering there in 1920 and 1922, respectively.
After earning his ScD in electrical engineering under Vannevar Bush at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1925, he returned to Stanford to join the faculty. He was named the head of the Electrical Engineering Department in 1937, Dean of Engineering after World War II, and provost of the university in 1955, retiring at the age of 65 in 1965. Even then, he continued to consult for the university, and the school honored him with the Frederick Emmons Terman Engineering Center in 1977 and Stanford’s Uncommon Man Award in 1978.
“He was proud that the Terman name was going up on a building,” said his son Lewis. “There was a t-shirt of a map of the Stanford campus and on it was the Terman Engineering Center. When I was wearing it one time, he said, ‘What’s that?’ He asked us to buy him one, which we did.”
While Fred Terman was dedicated to Stanford during the early years of his teaching career, in 1942 he answered his country’s wartime call and led the secret Radio Research Laboratory (RRL) at Harvard University. According to Terman biographer C. Stewart Gillmor, postwar analysts claimed the more than 150 radar countermeasures developed there saved approximately 800 Allied bombers and their crews.
“I think he was very well aware that this was saving lives,” Lewis said. “That part of it was very important to him. The German radar, around ’43 or so, was really formidable. It was probably equal to ours, maybe not quite as good. They had it set up around Germany in waves. The Germans didn’t have a lot of fighter planes, so they had to send them up where they thought the attacks were coming. When what was called chaff was dropped, it would look like there were thousands of planes coming, so they didn’t know where to send fighters up, and that made a big difference.”
Once the war was over, though, it was time for Fred Terman to initiate his plan to bring the school to the forefront of engineering education, as his old mentor Vannevar Bush was directing war-related research funding to American schools.
“He definitely felt that there was a game change after the Second World War, and the game change was that he knew there was going to be government money to sponsor research. He knew some people in the industry. Hewlett and Packard were getting started, and there were a number of others. And he said there were really three elements here,” Lewis said.
“There is the government money, there’s the university, and the industry. He wanted a tight tie together between industry and the university with the government money supporting education of the students who would then go into the industry. That was the model he was working on that he thought had really great opportunities to do great things.”
And so Silicon Valley was born.
The Father of Silicon Valley
While the electronics industry had been centered on the East Coast, Terman felt there was an opportunity to attract established companies and engineers, as well as inspire new ones, in California. In 1951, he developed the Stanford Industrial Park on land owned by the university on the campus in Palo Alto, Calif. Varian Associates was the first company to sign a lease, followed by Terman’s former students Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. Instead of taking all the credit, though, Terman attributed the complex’s success to three factors.
“One was the California climate. You bring people out from Bell Labs in New Jersey or Boston or wherever in February and it’s 30 or 40 degrees warmer, and, by the way, February is after the rains have fallen in California so now the hills are a beautiful green. It’s a gorgeous time. And they say, ‘This is heaven. Why am I in Boston or working for AT&T or Bell Laboratories in New Jersey?’” Lewis said.
“The second thing, he would say, was Bill Shockley, the future Nobel Prize winner from Bell Labs, who came out and started a company in Palo Alto. Basically, he was not a good technical or people manager. His employees thought he was going in the wrong direction. He was hard to get along with, so they left to form Fairchild Semiconductor, and then Fairchild people started Intel, and that created this culture of startups out there, that people would move around, starting a new company, and being successful,” Lewis said.