Frederick Terman

Frederick Terman never founded a famous company. He did something with more reach. As a Stanford professor, then dean, then provost, he pushed his students to build their companies near campus and gave them the connections to do it. He also helped invent a new kind of place, the university research park, on land the Stanfords had once used to raise horses. That is why his name comes up whenever people ask how Silicon Valley started.

Our page on Silicon Valley history tells the broad story. This page focuses on Terman himself.

A boy on the Stanford campus

Frederick Emmons Terman was born on June 7, 1900, in English, Indiana. When he was about 10, the family moved to Stanford, where his father, Lewis Terman, joined the psychology faculty. Lewis Terman became famous for the Stanford-Binet intelligence test and a long study of gifted children. He was also a eugenicist, a fact that shaped how Palo Alto remembers the family name.

Lewis believed in progressive education, so Fred did not start formal schooling until about age nine. He made up for it. He earned a Stanford degree in chemistry in 1920 and a master's in electrical engineering in 1922. He then went to MIT, where he finished a doctorate in electrical engineering in 1924 under Vannevar Bush, later the head of the federal wartime research effort.

A near-fatal illness

MIT offered Terman a teaching job. He never took it. In 1924 he came down with a severe case of tuberculosis that kept him in bed for a year and nearly killed him. He recovered in Palo Alto. In 1925 he began teaching electrical engineering part-time at Stanford, then took a full-time appointment.

The illness tied him to home. Instead of building a career in the East, he built one on the campus where he grew up. He married in 1928 and raised three children.

Building radio engineering at Stanford

From 1925 into the early 1940s Terman built Stanford's electronics program almost from scratch. He wrote the textbooks the field used. Radio Engineering appeared in 1932, Measurements in Radio Engineering in 1935 and the Radio Engineers' Handbook in 1943. In 1941 he became president of the Institute of Radio Engineers, the first national president from west of the Mississippi.

He noticed a pattern that bothered him. His best graduates kept taking jobs with big companies back East. Terman thought California could keep them. He made introductions, found them work and sometimes invested his own money in their ventures.

Hewlett, Packard and the Varians

Two of those students were Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. Packard had gone east to work for General Electric. Terman is often credited with helping lure him back to Stanford. In 1938 Packard and his wife Lucile rented the ground floor of a house at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto. Hewlett lived in a shed out back. On January 1, 1939, the two formalized their partnership in the garage. Their first product, the Model 200A audio oscillator, grew out of Hewlett's graduate work. Terman co-wrote technical papers with Hewlett in 1939 and 1940.

The garage is now California Historical Landmark No. 976. Read about it on our HP Garage page and follow the company on our Hewlett-Packard profile.

Terman's circle also included Russell and Sigurd Varian, who built a prototype klystron, a microwave tube, at Stanford in 1937. Their company, Varian Associates, would become the first tenant of the research park. See our Varian page.

The wartime laboratory

World War II pulled Terman away. In 1942 he became director of the Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard, a secret effort to defeat enemy radar. The lab grew to roughly 800 to 850 people, depending on the source. It developed radar jammers, detection receivers and chaff, the strips of foil dropped to confuse radar screens.

The experience gave Terman a close view of how federal research money and large technical teams worked. He brought those lessons back to Stanford.

Dean and provost

Stanford named Terman dean of engineering in 1944. He returned from Harvard to take up the post full time in 1946, the date his National Academy of Sciences memoir uses. He served as dean until 1958 and as provost from 1955 to 1965. He worked closely with Wallace Sterling, Stanford's president from 1949 to 1968.

His strategy is usually summed up in a phrase from his memoir: "steeples of excellence." Rather than spread money thinly, he built small groups of top researchers in promising fields such as electronics. He then let their reputations attract funding, students and more faculty. Federal research contracts poured in. Stanford rose from a respected regional school to a national power in science and engineering. The Science and Engineering Quad on campus shows how far that growth went.

The Stanford Industrial Park

Stanford had plenty of land and could not sell it under its founding grant. Terman saw a way to put it to work. Stanford could lease land on long terms to technology firms, earn income and keep its graduates close. In 1951 the university and the City of Palo Alto created the Stanford Industrial Park along Page Mill Road. The first allocation was 209 acres. The city eventually annexed about 700 acres of Stanford land for the project.

Terman also helped young companies find money. In 1957 he helped negotiate the first funding for Watkins-Johnson, an early venture-backed firm. He later sat on its board. Today the park holds more than 150 companies. Our Stanford Research Park guide covers who is there now.

Legacy and the Terman name

The model had critics. Much of the money behind Stanford's postwar rise came from military contracts. In the late 1960s students protested classified war research on campus. After a nine-day sit-in at the Applied Electronics Laboratory in April 1969, the Faculty Senate banned classified research. Stanford separated from the Stanford Research Institute in 1970. Our page on Palo Alto in the 1960s covers those protests.

Terman retired as provost in 1965. In 1966 he helped plan the Korea Advanced Institute of Science, now KAIST. He died in his sleep in Palo Alto on December 19, 1982. He is often called the father of Silicon Valley, a title sometimes shared with William Shockley, whose story is on our page about Shockley and the semiconductor boom.

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