Hidden in plain sight
The secret history of silicon valley
Steve Black
While searching for some history on one of companies I worked for, I found Steve Black's web pages: Hidden in Plain Sight: The Secret History of Silicon Valley. It is a fascinating, well written, twelve web page long, 100 year history of electronics on the lower San Francisco Peninsula. He has video of a lecture he gave and includes the 133 slides from the talk. He also has an extensive bibliography.
When you are trying to develop something, meet performance requirements, and satisfy contract schedules, you don't have time to think about the larger picture of why it is being done and why someone might want it. That was my experience. Getting a low standing wave ratio match with a ridge wage guide coupler on the traveling wave tube, overshadowed any thought of how it might be used. Steve Black has changed that for me 57 years latter.
I have excerpted some paragraphs from his web site and some of his references that related directly to me and the companies I worked for.
(Some of the excerpts appear here as continuous, but are separated in the original. Will try to correct that later. Better yet, read the original!)
When you are trying to develop something, meet performance requirements, and satisfy contract schedules, you don't have time to think about the larger picture of why it is being done and why someone might want it. That was my experience. Getting a low standing wave ratio match with a ridge wage guide coupler on the traveling wave tube, overshadowed any thought of how it might be used. Steve Black has changed that for me 57 years latter.
I have excerpted some paragraphs from his web site and some of his references that related directly to me and the companies I worked for.
(Some of the excerpts appear here as continuous, but are separated in the original. Will try to correct that later. Better yet, read the original!)
Part V: Happy 100th Birthday Silicon Valley
The Facts: Vacuum Tube Valley – Our 100th Anniversary
To my surprise, I discovered that yes, Silicon Valley did start in a garage in Palo Alto, but it didn’t start in the Hewlett Packard garage. The first electronics company in Silicon Valley was Federal Telegraph, a tube company started in 1909 in Palo Alto as Poulsen Wireless. (This October is the 100th anniversary of Silicon Valley, unnoticed and unmentioned by anyone.) By 1912, Lee Deforest working at Federal Telegraph would invent the Triode, (a tube amplifier) and would go on to become the Steve Jobs of his day – visionary, charismatic and controversial.
* Federal Telegraph and Lee Deforest in Palo Alto are the first major events in what would become Silicon Valley. We need to reset our Silicon Valley birthday calendars to here.
By 1937, when Bill Hewlett and David Packard left Stanford to start HP, the agricultural fields outside of Stanford had already become “Vacuum Tube Valley.” HP was a supplier of electronic test equipment and joined a small but thriving valley electronics industry with companies like Litton and Eitel and McCollough.
For many years there was an antenna in the salt flats at the end of Embacadero Road near the Palo Alto Airport. I believe that it was owned by Federal Telegraph. The antenna was several hundred feet tall, but none of the airplanes hit it? I think the many of the tube folks knew that vacuum tubes started in Palo Alto.
The link above led me to Eitel and McCollough led me to the IEEE Global History Network and its excerpts on Eimac shown below.
The link above led me to Eitel and McCollough led me to the IEEE Global History Network and its excerpts on Eimac shown below.
In 1932 two radio amateurs, Jack McCullough (W6CHE) and Bill Eitel (W6UF), decided to build high power transmitters to work some of the 20 meter overseas stations being heard in California. They found to their dismay that the expensive transmitting tube they purchased refused to work at 1,000 volts and that was all the high voltage their power supply would provide for them. ... They decided they could build a better tube themselves that would work at low voltage. They borrowed a modest sum and in 1934 started a company with only three people.
"Eimac - GHN: IEEE Global History Network." $site. March 01, 2015. $publisher, Web. March 01, 2015. <http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Eimac>
Number three in the biographies of EIMAC personnel was:
George Badger (1925 - 2009), W6TC, ex W6RXW was another standout engineer. Born February 22, 1925, he grew up in Berkeley, California where he attended University High School before being drafted into the Army in 1943. He was one of the earlier graduate engineers to be hired, ca. 1951, and worked on all manner of projects, like running the laboratory facility that attempted to adapt the Lawrence color-TV picture tube for production. Eimac was making Black and White picture tubes for RCA Victor at their Salt Lake City plant at the time). He headed up an important competitive “save” from RCA in the late ‘50s. He also got one of the media-industry awards, an Oscar I think, for development of the klystrode. After George’s retirement, he ran the marketing operation for Svetlana America, and when that folded, he moved to Econco. He was employed in the tube business until his death 14 November 2009.
George was one of my
room mates in college and we were both members of the UC Amateur Radio Club. He was my best man at our wedding.
We saw each other periodically. I remember two stories he told. The first was that he was involved in a second company that refurbished TV picture tubes, were sold at a discount to new tubes. When EIMAC decided to manufacture TV picture tubes, George had to tell Eitel that he was in competition with them, and was afraid that he would loose his job. Eitel said not to worry.
The second story. He described a klystron he was designing. with a rectangular cavity coupler. The tube was working well, then they started to tune it to a higher frequency by moving a plunger that was one wall of the cavity. As the plunger was moved in the cavity went from being longer that it wide, to square, to being shorter than its width. This caused the electric field mode to switch, the coupling loop to not interact with the field, and the tube output insulator to crack and the vacuum lost. He redesigned so that it was always longer than wide.
We saw each other periodically. I remember two stories he told. The first was that he was involved in a second company that refurbished TV picture tubes, were sold at a discount to new tubes. When EIMAC decided to manufacture TV picture tubes, George had to tell Eitel that he was in competition with them, and was afraid that he would loose his job. Eitel said not to worry.
The second story. He described a klystron he was designing. with a rectangular cavity coupler. The tube was working well, then they started to tune it to a higher frequency by moving a plunger that was one wall of the cavity. As the plunger was moved in the cavity went from being longer that it wide, to square, to being shorter than its width. This caused the electric field mode to switch, the coupling loop to not interact with the field, and the tube output insulator to crack and the vacuum lost. He redesigned so that it was always longer than wide.
Part VII: We Fought a War You Never Heard Of
Stanford Leads in Electronic Intelligence and Electronic Warfare
In the 1950’s Stanford Engineering Research Lab (ERL) made major contributions to electronic intelligence and electronic warfare. Its basic research focused on three areas: microwave receiving and transmitting tubes, radar detection and deception techniques and understanding the earth’s ionosphere.
Stanford became one of the leading research centers in advancing the state of microwave tubes including the klystron which could provide high-power microwave in pulses, magnetrons which could provide continuous wave microwave power, and backward wave oscillators and traveling wave tubes – both electronically tunable microwave tubes.
The General Electric Microwave Laboratory deigned and built klystrons and traveling wave tubes.
Part VIII: The Rise of Entrepreneurship
The Rise of “Microwave Valley” Stanford Tube Spinouts
A technician in Stanford’s ERL tube shop, Ray Stewart, thought he could build these Backward Wave Oscillators commercially, and left to start Stewart Engineering in Scotts Valley near Santa Cruz. The company had more orders from the military than it could handle. (Stewart would sell his company to Watkins Johnson, one of the most financially successful of the Stanford microwave tube spinoffs. More about Watkins-Johnson in the next post.) Stewart joined a growing list of other microwave startups beginning to populate the valley.
One of the early microwave spinouts from Stanford was built around a microwave power tube called the Klystron, invented by Terman’s students Russell and Sigurd Varian and William Hansen. In 1948 the Varian brothers along with Stanford professors Edward Ginzton and Marvin Chodorow founded Varian Corporation in Palo Alto to produce klystrons for military applications. (Fred Terman and David Packard of HP joined Varian’s board.) While the Klystrons of the 1950’s had too narrow and bandwidth and were too large for airborne use, they could be scaled up to generate megawatts of power and were used to power the U.S. ground-based Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) radars (and the Stanford Linear Accelerator.)
The GE Microwave Laboratory bid on the contract for the Klystrons to be used in the linear accelerator, but lost to Varian Associated. Years later, Varian bought the GE Microwave Laboratory. The Laboratory building on California Avenue now is completely gone.
Edward Ginston was the professor for the laboratory course in microwave theory. I remember it to be from noon to 6 pm, once a week, with a report to be turned in the next week. It was exactly what I needed for my work at GE. I cannot remember if Marvin Chodorow was on of my instructors, but he was certainly well known.
Edward Ginston was the professor for the laboratory course in microwave theory. I remember it to be from noon to 6 pm, once a week, with a report to be turned in the next week. It was exactly what I needed for my work at GE. I cannot remember if Marvin Chodorow was on of my instructors, but he was certainly well known.
Part IX: Entrepreneurship in Microwave Valley
The Rise of “Microwave Valley” – More Stanford Tube Startups
The Traveling Wave Tube generated another series of startups from Stanford’s Electronics Research Laboratory. R. A. Huggins, a research associate at the Stanford’s Engineering Research Lab, left in 1948 to start Huggins Laboratories in Palo Alto and put the first commercially manufactured traveling wave tube on the market. With a boost from military R&D contracts, Huggins Labs continued to expand, diversifying into backward-wave oscillators, low-noise TWTs, and electrostatic focused tubes. (In the 1970’s Huggins Labs sold to an east coast company, Microwave Associates (which became M/A-COM.)
Stanley Kaisel, a research associate at the Stanford ERL tube laboratory, left to join Litton’s startup. He left Litton in 1959 and started Microwave Electronics Corporation (MEC) to make low power, low noise TWTs. He sold the company to Teledyne in 1965.
GE built and tested one of the high power TWTs that Stan Kaisel designed. It had a quartz envelope with a helical grove in the quartz to prevent some spurious mode. Very difficult for the glass blowers, but worked well as I remember. I was the test engineer. Some funny stories - ask me.
Fred Schumacher from GE was an early employee at MEC, maybe number two? See the GE TWT paper.
Fred Schumacher from GE was an early employee at MEC, maybe number two? See the GE TWT paper.
Part X: Stanford Crosses the Rubicon
Show and Tell – The Stanford ELINT and Electronic Warfare Contractors Meeting
During a typical year, the Applied Electronics Lab would host classified visits from military labs and defense contractors. By early 1950’s Stanford started holding a two day meeting for contractors and the military.
The 1955 attendee list gives you a feeling of the “who’s who” of the military/industrial establishment: RCA, GE, Motorola, AIL, Bendix, Convair, Mepar, Crosley, Westinghouse, McDonnell Aircraft, Douglas Aircraft, Boeing, Lockheed, Hughes Aircraft, North American, Bell Aircraft, Glen Martin, Ryan Aeronautics, Farnsworth, Sperry, Litton, Polarad, Hallicrafters, Varian, Emerson, Dumont, Maxson, Collins Radio. Other universities doing classified ELINT and Electronic Warfare work attended including University of Michigan, Georgia Institute of Technology and Cornell. Over a hundred government contractors reviewed Stanford’s work on tubes and systems.
Stanford Industrial Park – Microwave Valley Booms
By the early 1950’s many of the corporations that attended the yearly Stanford Electronic Warfare conferences would establish research labs centered around Stanford for just this reason – to learn from Stanford’s basic and applied research and get a piece of the ELINT and Electronic Warfare contracting pie.
Stanford Industrial Park was the first technology office park set up to house local and out of state microwave and electronics startups. First occupied in 1953 it would include Varian, Watkins Johnson, Admiral, HP, General Electric, Kodak, Lockheed. Other east coast companies which established branches in Microwave valley in the 1950’s included IBM, Sylvania, Philco, Zenith and ITT.
The Future is Clear – Microwave Valley Forever
By 1956 Fred Terman had every right to be pleased with what he had helped build in the last ten years in and around Stanford. The Stanford Electronics Lab was now the center of ELINT and Electronic Warfare.
Startups were sprouting all over Microwave Valley delivering microwave tubes and complete military systems, slowiy replacing the orchards and fruit trees. Granger Associates was a 1956 startup founded by Bill Ayer, a graduate student in the Applied Electronics Radioscience Lab, and John Granger, a former RRL researcher, building ELINT and Electronic Warfare systems (the Granger jammer was carried on the U-2.) Four years later Ayer and another Granger engineer would leave Granger and found one of the preeminent electronic warfare and ELINT companies: Applied Technology.
The future of the valley was clear – microwaves.
Charles Birdsall and George Trotter were on the 1995 attendee list from GE. I purchased George's home built ham transmitter while we were still living in Mt, View. I believe Birdsall was incharge of the GE division I was assigned to.
GE was the second company after Varian Associates in Stanford Industrial Park on California Avenue near El Camino Real. My first task at the Microwave Laboratory was to build the building (with help).
Also worked for Zenith.
Also worked at Applied Technology. The other Granger engineer was Dr. John Grisby. Dr. John had a Beach Barron aircraft at the Palo Alto Airport. We went to a conference in El Paso in the Barron. The first product was a radar warning receiver that saved may pilots lives in Vietnam.
GE was the second company after Varian Associates in Stanford Industrial Park on California Avenue near El Camino Real. My first task at the Microwave Laboratory was to build the building (with help).
Also worked for Zenith.
Also worked at Applied Technology. The other Granger engineer was Dr. John Grisby. Dr. John had a Beach Barron aircraft at the Palo Alto Airport. We went to a conference in El Paso in the Barron. The first product was a radar warning receiver that saved may pilots lives in Vietnam.
Part 13: Lockheed-the Startup with Nuclear Missiles
Zero to 28,000 people – We Become “Defense Valley”
By 1965 Hewlett Packard, the test and instrumentation company, had grown ten-fold. From 900 people in 1956 it now employed 9,000. Clearly it must have been the dominant company in the valley? Or perhaps it was Fairchild, the direct descendant of Shockley Semiconductor, now the dominant semiconductor supplier in the valley (80% of its first years business coming from military systems) with ~10,000 people?
Nope, it was the Lockheed Missiles Division, which had zero employees in 1956, now in 1965 had 28,000 employees in Sunnyvale. The best and the brightest were coming from across the country to the valley south of San Francisco
I worked for Lockheed twice. The first time as a sheet metal trainee in the hangars at Burbank Airport. It was a summer job. I got the job because Jim Hobson was the personnel manager at Locheed and lived in the same department complex in West LA as we did. Jim later was the US Secretary of Labor and then the Ambassador to Japan.
I kept all the paperwork, so when I started at Lockheed in Sunnyvale, they gave me the same employee number 30 years later. I was famous the first day for a few hours. All of the personnel rosters were by employee number and I was the most senior of the 28,000 people at the top of the list.
I kept all the paperwork, so when I started at Lockheed in Sunnyvale, they gave me the same employee number 30 years later. I was famous the first day for a few hours. All of the personnel rosters were by employee number and I was the most senior of the 28,000 people at the top of the list.
Part 15: Agena – The Secret Space Truck, Ferret’s and Stanford
Stanford and Ferrets
Just across the freeway from Lockheed’s secret CORONA assembly plant in Palo Alto, James de Broekert was at Stanford Applied Electronics Laboratory. This was the Lab founded by Fred Terman from his WWII work in Electronic Warfare.
Ferret Entrepreneur
After student riots in April 1969 at Stanford shut down the Applied Electronics Laboratory, James de Broekert left Stanford. He was a co-founder of three Silicon Valley military intelligence companies: Argo Systems, Signal Science, and Advent Systems,
In 2000 the National Reconnaissance Office recognized James de Broekert as a “pioneer” for his role in the “establishment of the discipline of national space reconnaissance.”
I worked for Argo Systems also. Argo was purchased as a wholly owned division by Boeing Aircraft, and I was commuting to Seattle weekly at the end. James de Broekert had left before I was hired.