The Institute - June 2018 - 8

The first employees of the Federal
Telegraph Co. in 1909, when the
company's factory was still housed in a
large metal shed in Palo Alto, Calif.

The Birth of Silicon Valley:
Radio Led the Way
Long before computing, engineers and hobbyists were
transforming communications B Y P A U L W E S L I N G

8

TH E IN STITUTE JUN E 2018

that would revolutionize the
semiconductor industry. But
the seeds for what became
Silicon Valley were actually
sown 50 years earlier.
FRU I T FU L B EGI N N I N GS

In the late 1800s, California's
Santa Clara Valley, 80 kilometers south of San Francisco and anchored by San
Jose, was known as the
Valley of Heart's Delight. The
region got the nickname
because of its blossoming
fruit trees and abundance
of agriculture. Shipments
of its apricots, cherries, and
prunes to the Midwest and
East Coast-along with the
gold still being mined in the
Sierra foothills-brought
wealth to the region. Steamships from the Hawaiian
Islands and Asia headed for
San Francisco's seaport.
But San Francisco was
relatively unknown compared with other U.S. cities

such as Boston, Chicago, and
New York.
That began to change
in 1909, when Stanford
engineering graduate Cyril
Elwell sought a better design
to replace the noisy radio
transmitters of the day. He
licensed the Poulsen arc
design for transmitters from
Denmark. It could send
not only Morse code but
also voice and music, a big
advantage over transmitters
of the time. With what we'd
now call angel funding from
Stanford's president, David
Starr Jordan, and several
professors and friends, Elwell
formed the Federal Telegraph
Co., in Palo Alto.
He built more powerful
versions of his original transmitter and by 1912 was able
to send messages to Honolulu
and receive them as well.
The sinking of the RMS
Titanic in 1912 brought focus
to radio as a potential life-

saving technology. Although
the radio operator on the ship
sent out emergency messages
that night, the operator on the
nearby SS Californian had left
his station and gone to bed.
Later that year, U.S. federal
laws were changed to require
shipping companies to have
operators monitor radio
signals around the clock.
The U.S. Navy liked the
technology developed by
Federal Telegraph for ship-toship and ship-to-shore communications and installed the
radio system on its vessels.
By the end of World
War I, Federal Telegraph had
installed million-watt systems
in Panama, the Philippines,
and Spain, as well as Arlington,
Va., Los Angeles, and Portland,
Ore., to support U.S. Navy
and commercial shipping
companies. Federal Telegraph
continued to increase the size
and power of its transmitters,
and its revenue grew.

RAD I O EN TERTAI N M EN T

Another Stanford engineering student, Charles "Doc"
Herrold, started a small
radio company in San Francisco, but it was destroyed
in the 1906 earthquake. He
moved to San Jose and in
1909 founded the College of
Wireless and Engineering to
teach radio arts to aspiring
hobbyists and operators.
His Wednesday evening
"San Jose Calling" program,
launched that year, was
the first regularly scheduled radio broadcast in the
United States.
Herrold's wife, Sybil,
would play music and broadcast it over the station, which
eventually grew into San
Francisco's KCBS. ◆
Life Fellow Paul Wesling is an
IEEE Distinguished Speaker.
He is also a member of the
IEEE Silicon Valley Technology
History Committee.
THEINSTITUTE.IEEE.ORG

PERHAM COLLECTION OF EARLY ELECTRONICS

S

IL I C O N VA LLE Y -
an area that encompasses San Francisco
and its extended
suburbs to the south,
including San Jose-is commonly known as the tech capital of the world. When most
people think of the valley, they
probably think of semiconductors, personal computers,
and software. But it was a hub
for innovation long before the
rise of personal computing.
Some consider IEEE Fellow William Shockley's silicon
transistor company, Shockley
Semiconductor Laboratory,
in Mountain View, to be the
start of Silicon Valley's story.
Shockley, a Nobel laureate
who had grown up in Palo
Alto, left Bell Labs in 1956
to establish the laboratory.
The following year, several
Shockley employees, known
as the traitorous eight, left to
form Fairchild Semiconductor, a company in Palo Alto
http://www.ethw.org/William_Shockley http://sites.ieee.org/sv-techhist/ http://sites.ieee.org/sv-techhist/ http://theinstitute.ieee.org
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