Because even the mythos of Silicon Valley’s origins is incorrect, and this has led all the attempts to copy it to be similarly wrongheaded. For example, every single answer on this page about Silicon Valley’s origins is missing key details. Most stor…

By the time I was growing up here, I was nearly drowning in tech entrepreneurs: http://www.the-elevator.com/_blog/Blogs/post/Valley_Boy/

And although the innovation story goes further back, I do miss the smell of fruit blossoms in the spring we had in the 70s and 80s.

The whole business about systematically using circuit analysis with nodal and mesh analysis had never appeared in an English-language engineering textbook before Terman’s.

Prior to that it was a far more ad hoc affair to design or understand electronic circuits – strictly electronic circuits without vacuum tubes was so simply one seldom really needed a systematic means. The non-linear features of vacuum tubes probably changed that.

One of the benefits of collecting “antique” engineering books ravenously.

Another piece of trivial: the road that is the side-entrance (during business hours) to Agilent Corporation HQ in Santa Clara is named “Terman Lane” after Terman. Agilent, of course, was once Hewlett-Packard’s Test & Measurement, Chemical, Components and Medical organizations. The first, T&M was the “original” HP business core which was founded at Terman’s encouragement by his students Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett in “The Garage” on Addison Avenue. The HP and Agilent credit union is called “Addison Avenue”. I’ll stop channeling James Burke now.

There is a earlier phase *prior to Vacuum Tubes* in Santa Clara Valley tech history as well involving Federal Telegraph and “Federal-Poulsen Arc Converter” radio transmitter. Poulsen Wireless Telephone and Telegraph Company was founded in Palo Alto in 1909. Poulsen Wireless was later bought by Federal Telegraph of San Francisco.

http://siliconvalleyhistorical.org/home/wireless_radio_inventors_and_stanford_university

http://www.telegraph-office.com/pages/Federal_Telegraph_Relay.html

I guess you could call it the “Continuous Wave Radio” technology period. The arc converter basically used the negative resistance of the an electric arc to cancel the positive resistance of an LC network thereby causing it to oscillate in a pure narrow-band CW frequency (aka Q-tuning). In contrast, spark gaps are broad-band radio “noise” sources – the idea of discrete radio channels was impossible spark gaps because of this. This is why there are FCC restrictions on the operation of spark gap radios today.

Vacuum tubes were still very fragile in the 1920s and had only very low power capacity. Reliable high power tubes didn’t arrive until well into the 1930s though a few very expensive broadcast tubes started to appear in the late 1920s. Most of the ability to create a radio industry in the 1920s was due to the accident of ionospheric radio propagation.

An interesting phenomena of the 1920s that illustrates the fragility and cost of vacuum tubes is the “Reflex Receiver” design methodology. This is an innovative but slightly bizarre design technique common to the 1920s and 1930s that conserved the number of vacuum tubes required for a radio receiver. This involved carefully filtering and re-routing the signal path back through the a single or reduced number vacuum tubes several times to perform RF amplification, detection and AF amplification. There are serious negative trade-off costs with using reflex designs but compared to the economic costs of each vacuum tube, it was a justified trade-off. The contrast between the necessity to use reflex designs with modern integrated circuits active device use (billions of transistors) is nothing short of stunning.

The most extreme case (and my personal favorite) was by Armstrong who managed to create a full single conversion superheterodyne receiver all using a single vacuum tube! Armstrong was a god! Unfortunately like Tesla and Farnsworth, he was more idealistic engineer than cut-throat businessman and was badly abused by Wall Street types (nothing changes, does it). Telsa had his bully in Edison and RCA. Armstrong had his bully in Sarnoff and RCA. Farnsworth was also bullied to an early death by Sarnoff and RCA.

Armstrong invented regeneration, super-regeneration and superheterodyne as receiver design classes – which until software-defined radios (SDRs) came along that was the whole ball of wax and even SDRs simply re-implement the same classes digitally. He also invented FM radio along with some of the early FM discriminator (detector) designs.

Broadcast radio in the 1920s was medium wave (as AM is today) but didn’t need to propagate very far – but for “broadcast” that was all that was needed or desired for the most part. Intercontinental radio was CW only (morse code) and all used spark gaps, alternators and arc converters through out the 1920s. The first intercontinental radio using tubes required moving to the lower short wave bands which give crazy long-range propagation at very low power levels which fit adequately with vacuum tube performance in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Vacuum tubes were the classic “disruptive technology” to these earlier technologies but required the luck of short wave ionospheric propagation to get their foot in the door. The 1920s for vacuum tubes was very much similar to the 1970s for microcomputers. Commercial adoption happened in the 1930s just as the IBM PC and Mac created commercial adoption in the 1980s.

steve

http://ipc-lis.mit.edu/globalization/Silicon%20Valley.pdf

The history of the Valley ab ovo. Basically, everything you are talking about in your post. Up until today I was under impression that it was a common knowledge.

It may be that this stuff was only discussed in Engineering, or even Computer Science, but it is definitely part of the lore in those groups. You might even find some good sources at Stanford proper on the subject (in the library, and maybe even primary sources from Terman himself if you want to really dig in).

scott