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Frederick Terman

1900–1982 · 82 years

The Stanford dean who leased the land Silicon Valley grew on

Portrait of Frederick Terman — Ric Teague — 1955 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

He was raised inside an argument about who is worth investing in. His father, Lewis Terman, brought the IQ test to America, ran the long-running Stanford study of gifted children, and was a prominent eugenicist. Frederick kept the useful half of that inheritance — a conviction that a few exceptional people repay concentrated resources — and left the rest. He took a chemistry degree at Stanford in 1920 and a master's in electrical engineering in 1922, then went east to MIT for a doctorate under Vannevar Bush. MIT offered him an instructorship in 1924. Severe tuberculosis put him in bed for a year first, and he came home to Palo Alto to recover. He never left again.

The method was specific. He told his graduate students to start companies where they stood rather than take jobs back east, and backed it — 538 dollars and a loan he helped arrange started Hewlett-Packard. As dean and then provost he concentrated Stanford's money on a few fields instead of spreading it, and used his standing from running an 850-person radar countermeasures laboratory at Harvard to pull in federal research contracts. In 1951 he created the Stanford Industrial Park, leasing university land to technology firms. That lease was the first of its kind and the part everyone else copied.

The title father of Silicon Valley does not survive close reading, and historians have argued for 40 years about how much of it he earns. A radio industry already sat around Palo Alto before he was dean, built on Federal Telegraph and the shipboard-transmitter trade. Cold War defense spending, not Terman, paid for most of what came next. William Shockley brought the transistor west in 1956 for reasons of his own, and the eight men who walked out on him founded Fairchild Semiconductor, from which most of the chip industry descends. Terman also tried to reproduce the model in New Jersey and elsewhere, and it did not take. Some read that as evidence the conditions mattered more than the plan. Others answer that nobody else held the land, the federal contracts and the students in one hand.

What actually taught a generation was the book. Radio Engineering appeared in 1932 and stayed the standard text in its field into the 1960s, through four editions, the last retitled Electronic and Radio Engineering — engineers who never set foot in California learned the subject from Terman. He died in Palo Alto on December 19, 1982, in his sleep, at 82. Stanford opened the Terman Engineering Center in 1977 and tore it down in 2011, in the ordinary way of campus buildings. The family name proved less durable elsewhere: in 2018 the Palo Alto school board voted to strip Terman from the local middle school, named for both Termans, because of his father's eugenics.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Frederick Terman's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Radio Engineering book
Four editions, the last retitled Electronic and Radio Engineering 1932
Measurements in Radio Engineering book
Built out of the student laboratory he assembled at Stanford 1935
Radio Engineers' Handbook book
Single-authored, and finished while he was running a wartime laboratory 1943
Radio Research Laboratory other
Harvard-based radar countermeasures lab he directed, staff of more than 800 1942
Stanford Industrial Park other
Now Stanford Research Park — the first university research park in the world 1951
Electronic Measurements book
Written with Joseph M. Pettit 1952

Life in brief

with age at each point

1924 aged ~24 Takes a doctorate in electrical engineering at MIT under Vannevar Bush Bush later proposed what became the National Science Foundation.
1924 aged ~24 Severe tuberculosis puts him in bed for a year and nearly kills him MIT had offered him an instructorship. He convalesced in Palo Alto, taught part-time at Stanford in 1925, and stayed.
1932 aged ~32 Publishes Radio Engineering The royalties funded the program he was building. It stayed the leading text in the field into the 1960s.
1938 aged ~38 Two of his students start work in a rented Palo Alto garage Hewlett and Packard began with 538 dollars of capital. Terman had told them to build the company where they were.
1942 aged ~42 Takes charge of the Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard Jammers, tunable search receivers and chaff, against German radar-directed anti-aircraft fire.
1946 aged ~46 Returns to campus as dean of engineering The appointment dates to 1944, while he was still running the Harvard laboratory. He spent the deanship courting federal research money and concentrating it on a few departments.
1951 aged ~51 Creates the Stanford Industrial Park 209 acres of university land leased to technology firms. Varian Associates moved in first, in 1953.
1955 aged ~55 Becomes provost of Stanford He held the office until 1965 and used it to expand science, statistics and engineering.
December 19, 1982 aged 82 Dies in Palo Alto at 82