| The Palo Alto History Project |
| Stanford Research Park Page Mill Road |
| Stanford Research Park: The Engine of Silicon Valley You don’t hear about “The Eastern Establishment” so much anymore. But there was a time when to be taken seriously in business, politics and most other fields, you pretty much had to be a product of the east. It seemed that all the power players, big money men and members of the famed “Old Boys’ Club” went to Harvard, Yale or one of the other east coast powerhouses. California just wasn’t the big leagues. Maybe it was because the Golden State was the home for Hollywood romances or because the weather was more suitable for the Beach Boys than bigwigs in three-piece suits --- but for whatever reason, California had trouble getting its due respect. And this could be rather frustrating for a school with a growing reputation like Stanford University. While being called the “Harvard of the west” certainly earned Stanford some respect in the post-war years, it still had to settle for a kind of second class citizenship. This bothered Stanford engineering Professor Frederick Terman. After all, even his protégés Bill Hewlett and David Packard headed out east to MIT and General Electric after studying at Stanford. “In those days,” Terman would later say, “a serious young engineer had to go back east to put spit and polish on his education.'' But unsatisfied with this arrangement, Terman began to consider how Stanford might further a kind of western intellectual center that could rival the eminence of eastern hotspots. He envisioned a meeting of academia and industry that would prove prophetic. Actually, Terman would make it prove prophetic. During the 1950s, Frederick Terman would play the pivotal role in establishing that entrepreneurial partnership with Stanford University that set off a now world-famous techie boom. The innovative center was called the Stanford Industrial Park and it would become the heartbeat of what came to be known as Silicon Valley. Frederick Terman, himself, was only at Stanford because he got sick. Although he grew up here --- his father Lewis was the Stanford psychology professor who invented the IQ test --- Terman earned his Ph.D. at M.I.T. and was expecting to return to Cambridge as an assistant professor when he came down with tuberculosis while summer vacationing back home. Two doctors declared his case hopeless as he spent the next year with sandbags on his stomach playing with ham radios and drafting his first book on radio engineering. As Terman’s condition gradually improved, he was offered a half-time teaching job at Stanford in 1925. Getting out of bed for just the two hours a day it took to go to class, Terman began to rise through the ranks of academia as his health also advanced. Terman’s career at Stanford was remarkable. In his early days at the university he made the engineering department one of the best in the nation. An avid inventor, Terman filed 36 patents between 1930 and 1947 and was elected president of the Institute of Radio Engineers in 1940—the first person west of Pittsburgh to achieve the honor. During World War II he directed a staff of more than 850 at the Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard University, which had the crucial responsibility for developing the jammers and aluminum chaff used to confuse enemy radar. And of course, he lured Bill & Dave back to Palo Alto and helped them get a billion dollar company off the ground. Still, it was his work in establishing the Stanford Industrial Park that would make him the “father of Silicon Valley.” Of Course, while Terman may have seen the Stanford Industrial Park as a means to rival the Eastern Establishment in electronics, the university itself was actually more interested in the money. After a post-war downturn in Stanford’s endowment fund, the university was looking for a way to make some extra cash. While Leland Stanford’s will precluded the university from selling off their great excesses of land, there was no reason they could not lease it to interested parties. So under the direction of financially-savvy business manager Alf Brandin, Stanford began to pursue two profitable projects: a shopping center on land to the north of the university and an industrial park on land to the south. Still, it would take the influence of Frederick Terman to make the Stanford Industrial Park a place to be. Calling the park “our secret weapon,” Terman begin to convince companies to come to Palo Alto and set up shop at what would be the first university-owned industrial park in the world. First aboard was Varian Associates which obtained a park lease in 1951. Terman then convinced Hewlett-Packard to head out to Page Mill Road, where they remain to this day. Soon, a flood of other corporations would make Stanford Industrial Park one of the most prestigious addresses on the West Coast --- and eventually give the Peninsula a collection of big name companies to rival any conglomeration back east. General Electric, Eastman Kodak, Lockheed Martin and hundreds of others joined Varian and HP, transforming the old “Garden of Heart’s Delight” into the ultra-modern Silicon Valley. After a name change in the 1970s, newly christened Stanford Research Park had to adjust to the PC explosion of the 1980s and the dot com boom and the bubble burst of the 1990s. But today Terman’s vision of academic and business co-partnership still thrives and an address in Stanford Research Park still looks pretty good on a business card. Looking back on his creation in his declining years, Frederick Terman reflected, ``When we set out to create a community of technical scholars in Silicon Valley, there wasn't much here and the rest of the world looked awfully big. Now a lot of the rest of the world is here.'' And of course, that includes most of those big boys from back east. -Matt Bowling |
| A look at Stanford Research Park in 1985 with Palo Alto Square at lower left. (PAHA) |
| Frederick Terman, the "Father of Silicon Valley." |
| Palo Alto: Then & Now |
| 2008 |
1956 |
| Sources: Palo Alto Times, Palo Alto Weekly, Palo Alto Daily News, Palo Alto Historical Association, Technology in the Garden: Research Parks and Regional Economic by Michael I. Lugar and Harvey A. Goldstein, "Fred Terman, the Father of Silicon Valley by CAROLYN E. TAJNAI. |
| Fred Terman at right shaking hands with David Packard as Bill Hewlet looks on. (PAHA) |
| A view of Stanford Industrial Park in the late 1950s or early 1960s. El Camino Real is visible in the foreground along with the fields that would eventually become Palo Alto Square. (PAHA) |
| Varian Associates was the park's first tenants when it opened in 1953. (PAHA) |
| Varian Associates today. |
| Syntex research buildings in Stanford Industrial Park under construction. (PAHA) |
| Stanford Research Park relies greatly on ties with nearby Stanford University. |
| A look down Hanover Street adjacent to the Lockheed Martin plant. (PAHA) |
| HP Headquarters on Page Mill Road. |
| The groundbreaking at the new Eastman Kodak plant in Stanford Industrial Park in 1953. (PAHA) |
| Hanover Street in 1956 and today. This shot looks east toward El Camino Real and the Bay beyond. The HP plant is at left and Lockheed Martin at right. |
| The first Varian Associates building at the park. (PAHA) |
| The HP Courtyard in 1963. (Stanford University) |
| A map of the El Camino Strip south and the Stanford Research Park |