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While all of these mathematicians were brilliant, none compared with the likes of John VonNeumann and Kurt Goedel who flocked to the East Coast universities (not to mention Albert Einstein). "George" Polya would go on to become the world's expert in heuristics, the rules of thumb that mathematicians use to find solutions, a topic on which he published an influential book, "How to solve it" (1945), originally written in German in Switzerland but rejected by European publishers. After he retired in 1938, he was succeeded by the Austro-Hungarian Jew Gabor Szego, who had fled Europe after the rising of Nazism and in 1940 convinced his friend Gyorgy Polya to join him. Admitted to Stanford despite his lack of formal education, he had to spend a year in Germany (Leipzig) in order to finish his dissertation: German universities had a far better reputation than Stanford, especially in mathematics. The head of the department of Mathematics at Stanford, Hans Blichfeldt, was the son of Danish paesants who immigrated to the USA. The world sent many Europeans (especially Jews) to the USA, but almost all to the universities of the East Coast. Many of these independents who scouted the market for radio communicationsĪnd electronics had started out as ham radio amateurs, some of them at aĪt the time, Stanford was a minor university, and not many scholars of international standing were willing to join its ranks. Litton invented the glass lathe that mechanized the process of making vacuum tubes.Įitel-McCullough (later Eimac) was formed in 1934 in San Bruno by Heintz's employees Bill Eitel and Jack McCullough to develop better vacuum tubes for the amateur or ham radio market (which would become the Armed Forces' favorite tubesĪnother FTC employee, German-born Gerhard Fisher invented the metal detector in 1928,Īnd founded Fisher Research Laboratories in 1931 in his home's garage in Palo Alto. To manufacture tools for vacuum tube manufacturers (the same job he had at FTC). Litton Engineering Laboratories had been founded in 1932īy ham-radio hobbyist, Stanford's student andįTC's manager Charles Litton at his parents' Redwood City home Their own vacuum tubes to compete with RCA, for which they hired radio hobbyists Bill Eitel and Jack McCullough.
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Stanford's student Ralph Heintz, a former radio amateur and employee of EarleĮnnis, had started a business to install short-wave radios on ships and airplanes,Īnd in 1926 founded Heintz & Kaufmann in San Francisco but soon had to start manufacturing Several of them were spin-offs of the early radio companies. It was a step up from Harris Ryan's philosophy of encouraging cooperationĬyril Elwell's Federal Telegraph Corporation (FTC) moved east, a vibrant industry He viewed the university as an incubator of business plans. He encouraged them to start businesses in theīay Area. After all, Stanford had perfected a number of engineering technologies that could potentially be of general interest (one being the resistance-capacity oscillator built by Bill Hewlett in 1935).Ĭoming from the East Coast. Terman encouraged his students to start their own businesses rather than wait for jobs to be offered to them. The Bay Area offered precious few opportunities for employment, and during the Great Depression that started in 1929 virtually none. Terman didn't just perfect the art of radio engineering. Within two years the young apprentice had become a visionary on his own,įostering the new science at the border between Generation that had been raised in the Bay Area, a step forward from the
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Terman was the son of a Stanford professor, so he represented a highly educated Joined Stanford University to work at Ryan's pioneering Purchase the book These are excerpts from Piero Scaruffi's bookīy Piero Scaruffi Stanford and Electrical EngineeringĪ pivotal event in the history of the Bay Area's high-tech industry took place in 1925:įrederick Terman (a ham radio fan who had also studied at the MIT in Boston with A History of Silicon Valley A History of Silicon Valley Table of Contents