Fred Terman at Stanford: Building a Discipline, a University, and Silicon Valley, C. Stewart Gillmor , Stanford U. Press, Stanford, CA, 2004. $70.00 (642 pp.). ISBN 0-8047-4914-0
The closer you get to Stanford University, the more you hear that Frederick Terman was the “father of Silicon Valley.” Stanford can be truly proud of the many achievements of this electrical engineer who became one of its most accomplished administrators after World War II, building what was already a strong university—albeit regarded by many as somewhat of a country club—into an intellectual powerhouse now recognized as one of the leading academic institutions in the world. Along the way, he encouraged close interaction between industry and academe, an intercourse that almost all universities studiously avoided during the 1950s and 1960s. The resulting exchanges of people and ideas did much to foster the growth of high-tech industry in the Santa Clara Valley, which was until the late 1960s much better known for its apricot orchards than for semiconductor manufacturers.
In Fred Terman at Stanford: Building a Discipline, a University, and Silicon Valley, C. Stewart Gillmor, a historian of science at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, has written what will be regarded as the definitive biography of Terman. It is so thoroughly researched and so richly detailed that I cannot imagine anyone attempting another. After having glanced through the Terman archives at Stanford while conducting research for articles and a book on semiconductor history, I know what a vein of gold Gillmor has mined. And I can attest to the care and thoughtfulness with which he has used the material.
Terman was born at the dawn of the 20th century and grew up the son of Lewis Terman, a now-famous psychologist who pioneered the measurement of intelligence and the development of the Stanford—Binét IQ tests. Early in young Fred’s life, while he studied at Palo Alto schools and played on campus streets, he became absorbed with the notion that quality could be measured and quantified. As Gillmor recounts, the idea was to remain with him the rest of his life, shaping his approach to building Stanford and Silicon Valley.
But instead of following in his father’s intellectual footsteps, Terman turned to engineering when he matriculated at Stanford during World War I. As an early ham-radio enthusiast, he drifted naturally into the emerging discipline of electrical engineering and did well at it. So well, in fact, that in 1922 he headed east to MIT for graduate work in the field, becoming Vannevar Bush’s very first doctoral student.
That apprenticeship, and a well-deserved reputation as one of the nation’s best radio engineers, helped plug Terman into the leadership of the US scientists and engineers who, under Bush, rose to meet the technological challenges of World War II. From 1942 to 1945, he directed Harvard’s Radio Research Laboratory (just upriver from the famed MIT Radiation Laboratory) and oversaw the development of such radar countermeasures as jamming and chaff. It was a career-molding experience for him.
Terman found himself among a select, privileged group of what historians have come to call “master builders”—scientists and engineers who had served their country during the war, grasped its organizational lessons, and formed extensive networks of trusting government and military contacts to turn to during the postwar years. He also was among the first to understand that universities would have an important research role to play in the military—industrial complex that was emerging during the ensuing cold war. As Stanford’s dean of engineering from 1946 to 1959 and provost from 1955 to 1965, Terman drew upon his extensive contacts and funding sources to build what he called “steeples of excellence” in fields such as electrical engineering, physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine. The Microwave Laboratory, a joint effort of the physics and electrical engineering departments, was established shortly after the war during Terman’s tenure as dean. As provost, he oversaw the construction of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, which was the focus of much conflict among Stanford physicists in the early 1960s but the locus of three Nobel Prize—winning experiments during the next decade.
Gillmor is less thorough in discussing Terman’s central role in the formation of Silicon Valley, which the author treats in several sections sprinkled throughout the latter chapters of the book. It was a huge role that deserved its own chapter. In the 1930s, Terman convinced his Stanford graduate students William Hewlett and David Packard to remain in the Bay Area and start their own electronics firm, in which he invested $500, rather than take jobs in big, established companies on the East-Coast. Terman also played a large part in the formation of the Stanford Industrial Park, where Hewlett—Packard, Varian Associates—another entrepreneurial Stanford spinoff—and other technology-intensive companies set up operations during the 1950s.
Terman deserves much of the credit for the high-technology character of the park and the rest of Silicon Valley, which he saw as a natural, synergistic complement to Stanford’s research activities in science and engineering. Except for MIT and Stanford, most universities at the time kept industry at arm’s length. Yet Terman recognized that nearby entrepreneurial, high-tech companies could take the products of Stanford research to the commercial marketplace—and that the principals of these successful companies would, later in life, reward the university richly with generous contributions.
My greatest criticism of Fred Terman at Stanford is that Gillmor does not step back enough from the many interesting details of Terman’s highly productive life to offer readers a broader analysis of his impacts beyond Stanford. We also don’t get much feel for the historical context of the cold war amidst which all the steeple building was taking place. We see too many trees and not enough forest.
But those are small flaws in an otherwise fine book, and other historians such as Robert Kargon, Stuart Leslie, and Rebecca Lowen have already addressed these issues in depth. Gillmor has gone beyond their work to give us an engaging portrait of the farseeing, hard-working engineer who “proved himself a master builder of a career, a profession, a university, and a regional economy.”
