Home › Technology & Building › Technology & Invention
William Hewlett
1913–2001 · 88 years
The dyslexic engineer whose shirt pocket killed the slide rule
He could not read the way the other students read. Hewlett's dyslexia went undiagnosed through his whole education, and he got past it by listening — he took almost no lecture notes at Stanford, decided in the moment what was worth keeping, and repeated it to himself until it stuck. He was born in Ann Arbor in 1913, where his father taught medicine at the University of Michigan. The family moved to San Francisco three years later, and his father died of a brain tumor in 1925. Stanford took him in 1930 partly as a courtesy to that dead father, who had taught at its medical school. The reading trouble, he said later, pushed him toward things he could reason out rather than read about.
The founding takes a sentence: a Palo Alto garage, a partnership dated January 1, 1939, a coin toss for whose name came first. What they had to sell was his graduate thesis. The audio oscillator produced a clean tone at any frequency an engineer needed for testing sound equipment, and the trick was an incandescent lamp wired into the feedback loop. As the lamp warmed it resisted more, damping the circuit before it could distort. The lamp cost pennies, and the instrument undersold the competition. Disney bought eight for Fantasia. The war took him into the Army Signal Corps.
Around 1970 he asked HP's engineers for a shirt-pocket version of the company's desk-sized scientific calculator, and used his own shirt pocket as the specification. Market research told him it would not sell. Its best guess was 50,000 units over the life of the product. He pushed it through anyway. The HP-35 shipped in 1972 at 395 dollars and did logarithms, exponents and trigonometry in a case 5.8 inches long — everything a slide rule did, faster, and without squinting at a scale. HP sold 100,000 in the first year and more than 300,000 before retiring it in 1975. Engineering students stopped buying slide rules almost immediately, colleges dropped the courses that taught them, and an instrument three centuries old was gone from the profession inside four years.
In 1976 a young HP engineer named Steve Wozniak took his own personal computer design to his employer, and HP turned it down — five times, by Wozniak's account. The machine went to Apple instead, and the early Apple computers were built from HP parts under a release from the company. HP made instruments, and Hewlett's reported comment was that you win some and you lose some. What survives him is mostly infrastructure rather than legend: the Hewlett Foundation, started with his wife Flora in 1966 and now one of the largest in the country, and a National Medal of Science in 1983. He died of heart failure in Palo Alto on January 12, 2001.
Lifespan
William Hewlett's life against the full span of the corpus.
Notable works
-
HP 200A audio oscillator
invention
HP's first product. A small lamp in the feedback loop held the output steady and the price down 1939 -
Variable Frequency Oscillation Generator (US Patent 2,268,872)
patent
Filed in 1939, granted in 1942 — the circuit itself 1942 -
Hewlett-Packard Company
company
A partnership dated January 1, 1939, worked out of a Palo Alto garage 1939 -
HP-35 pocket calculator
invention
The first scientific calculator that fit in a shirt pocket. 395 dollars, and the end of the slide rule 1972 -
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
company
Founded with his wife. Now among the largest private foundations in the country 1966
Life in brief
with age at each point- May 20, 1913 aged 0 Born in Ann Arbor, where his father taught medicine at Michigan The family moved to San Francisco in 1916 when his father joined Stanford's medical school.
- 1925 aged ~12 His father dies of a brain tumor Stanford admitted Hewlett about five years later partly as a courtesy to him.
- 1936 aged ~23 Takes a master's in electrical engineering at MIT He went back to Stanford for a further engineering degree in 1939.
- January 1, 1939 aged 25 Hewlett and Packard date their partnership A coin toss settled the order of the names.
- 1939 aged ~26 Disney buys eight audio oscillators for Fantasia The 200B, a variant built to the studio's specification.
- January 6, 1942 aged 28 The oscillator patent issues US Patent 2,268,872, filed in 1939. Hewlett spent the war as an Army Signal Corps officer.
- 1966 aged ~53 Founds the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation with his wife
- 1972 aged ~59 The HP-35 goes on sale at 395 dollars Market research had guessed 50,000 units over the product's whole life. HP sold more than 300,000 by 1975.
- January 12, 2001 aged 87 Dies of heart failure in Palo Alto at 87
Related
Contemporaries
Technology & Building, born within 25 years
Frank Malina 1912–1981Technology & BuildingLed the Caltech student rocket group that became JPL, then left America under investigation and spent a second life as an artist in Paris.
Hedy Lamarr 1914–2000Technology & BuildingActress and inventor who co-developed frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology, the basis for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
Wernher von Braun 1912–1977Technology & BuildingGerman-American aerospace engineer who led the development of the Saturn V rocket that took humans to the Moon.
J. C. R. Licklider 1915–1990Technology & BuildingThe 1960 paper that described interactive computing before it existed, and the ARPA money that produced the ARPANET
Claude Shannon 1916–2001Technology & BuildingMathematician and engineer who founded information theory, the basis of all digital communication.