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Sunday, December 7, 2025
Silicon Valley -- The History -- How My Search Started -- The Origin Of The Blog -- Posted December 7, 2025
The AI prompt:
In the 2023 softcover edition of Malcolm Harris' "The History of Palo Alto, p. 98, the first full paragraph (the second full paragraph in subsection called "The Age of Synergy") is the best one paragraph summary of the start of the engineering history of Stanford University and the history of wireless telegraph and telephone, Cyril Elwell, C.D. Marx, the TFC, and the first transmission between California and Hawaii. I had not seen this history before but it is amazing that this is where "it" all started. It could have been almost anything else but it was 1909, Stanford, and wireless telegraph.
ChatGPT's reply:
It is an extraordinary moment once you see how all the threads line up — and it’s easy to miss because the canonical histories of Silicon Valley usually start later, with Shockley in the 1950s or the “Traitorous Eight.” Harris is one of the very few who pushes the origin story back to the actual hinge: 1909, Stanford’s engineering department, and a handful of people who decided to bet on wireless at exactly the right moment.
A few things that make that paragraph so unusually powerful:
1. The “accident” of timing — 1909
Marconi had just completed transatlantic signaling, Poulsen arc technology was emerging, and the U.S. still had no dominant wireless standard. Everything was up for grabs. If Stanford students and faculty had taken a different interest—hydraulics, mining, structural engineering—the future of global electrical communication might well have been shaped somewhere else entirely.
2. Cyril Elwell as the hinge figure
Elwell is one of those “invisible founders” of Silicon Valley.
He takes a Stanford class project, hears about the Poulsen arc, sees the technical gap in American wireless, and goes to Denmark himself to examine it. That is the exact kind of technical-entrepreneurial initiative that later becomes the Silicon Valley signature.
3. Prof. C.D. Marx as technical catalyst
Marx doesn’t get enough credit. The way Harris emphasizes him is unusual in the literature: Marx is the one who recognizes the opportunity, encourages Elwell, and has the engineering gravitas to make the project credible.
4. The TFC (Federal Telegraph Company) as the first Silicon Valley-style startup
The TFC predates Hewlett-Packard by decades but has all the patterns:
• a Stanford technical breakthrough
• outside investors
• a technology-driven market opportunity
• young engineers moving fast in a new industry
They built the world’s most powerful continuous-wave transmitters and created the first large-scale American wireless network.
5. The first California–Hawaii transmission
This is where the story becomes genuinely epic.
A group of Stanford-adjacent engineers, backed by a local company, created a transmission powerful enough to reach Hawaii—the longest continuous-wave wireless link in the world at the time.
Harris is correct to treat this as the true beginning of what would become:
• de Forest’s adoption of continuous-wave amplification
• the vacuum-tube revolution
• AT&T’s long-distance radio telephony
• and ultimately the Bell Labs diaspora that shaped 20th-century electronics
It really is the “ur-moment” of Silicon Valley: a group of young engineers who believed that world-scale technical problems could be solved with local ingenuity and a little money.
Silicon Valley -- 1909 -- The Spark -- Posted December 7, 2025
First full paragraph p. 98 is the best one paragraph summary of the start of Palo Alto and Stanford University.
In 1909, recent Stanford graduate Cyril Elwell turned to [President of Stanford] Jordan and the civil engineering department head, C. D. Marx, to help him start a West Coast wirelss telegraph and telephone company based on a license Elwell acquired to use French transmission technology. The men jumped at the opportunity, and Jordan invested $500 of hismoney and wrangled more San Francisco capital. In 1911, the Federal Telegraph Company (FTC) completed the first transmission between California and Hawaii. Stanford integrated its first tech start-up with the school's facilities, giving FTC access ot the campus's high voltage laboratory for testing in exchange for some donated equipment. Elwell had the foresight to take his transmitter to Washington, where he wowed navy officials wiht his machine's long rane and silentoperation. The official sordered ten of them on the spot, but more important, they developed imediate brand loyalty, signing up FTC for incrasingly big projects whether they matched the firm's existing capabilities or not. When America entered World War I, contracts and jobs flooded into Palo Alto,where FTC built a new, larger factory. Over the course of a decade, the rural univerity town became a regional center for the new radio industry.
THE LINEAGE: 1909 STANFORD → MODERN SILICON VALLEY
Below is the sequence in 10 steps, each linking to the next with real technical, institutional, and personnel continuity.
⸻
1. 1909 — Stanford Engineering’s Wireless Group
Key figures: Cyril Elwell, Prof. C.D. Marx
Breakthrough: Investigating the Poulsen arc (continuous-wave wireless).
Why it matters:
This is the first time Stanford engineers enter the frontier of global electrical communication. Elwell realizes that the U.S. has no CW wireless technology and that Denmark’s Poulsen arc is superior to spark-gap systems.
This is the spark.
⸻
2. 1910 — Cyril Elwell forms the Federal Telegraph Company (FTC/TFC)
Location: Palo Alto/SF Bay Area
Innovation: Imports and industrializes the Poulsen arc; builds the most powerful radio transmitters in the world.
Significance:
• First major wireless company on the West Coast
• First long-distance CW transmissions in the world (California → Hawaii)
• Creates a cluster of high-level radio engineers in the Bay Area
This is effectively Silicon Valley startup #1.
⸻
3. 1911–1913 — Lee de Forest joins FTC
Why this matters:
de Forest (inventor of the Audion triode) works for FTC and realizes that continuous-wave systems require amplification. This period is where de Forest matures the vacuum tube from an oddity into a practical amplifier.
Technical leap:
CW (from Stanford) + de Forest’s triode amplifier = the foundation of all radio, broadcasting, radar, and early computing.
This is the birth of the electronics era.
⸻
4. 1915–1920 — AT&T, vacuum tubes, and long-distance telephony
AT&T sees what FTC and de Forest are doing and fully adopts the triode amplifier.
Key breakthroughs:
• Transcontinental voice telephony
• First radio telephone service
• Large-scale tube manufacturing
• Institutional research culture
This phase births Bell Labs.
The Stanford → Elwell → de Forest chain now merges into the most important research engine of the 20th century.
⸻
5. 1920s–1940s — Bell Labs builds the electronic world
Bell Labs becomes the epicenter of:
• Radio engineering
• Radar
• Microwave networks
• Early digital switching
• Information theory
• Semiconductors (intensifying in the 1930s–40s)
Hundreds of engineers trained here migrate outward — the first Bell diaspora.
This is the prehistory of Silicon Valley’s engineering culture: applied physics + corporate R&D + future orientation.
⸻
6. 1947 — Bell Labs invents the transistor
Key figures: Bardeen, Brattain, Shockley
Shockley directs the semiconductor group. This moment creates:
• the semiconductor industry
• the idea of solid-state physics as a commercial frontier
• the future of computing, digital logic, and integrated circuits
This invention is directly downstream of:
Stanford → Elwell → FTC → de Forest → AT&T amplifiers → Bell Labs
⸻
7. 1953–1955 — William Shockley returns to Palo Alto
Shockley leaves Bell Labs and founds Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View.
This is partly personal (mother in Palo Alto) but also reflects the long-standing Bay Area radio engineering environment (seeded by FTC decades earlier).
Shockley brings:
• transistor physics
• semiconductor process engineering
• Bell Labs culture of innovation
This is the first semiconductor lab in what becomes Silicon Valley.
⸻
8. 1957 — The Traitorous Eight leave Shockley → Fairchild Semiconductor
They bring:
• planar process
• silicon transistors
• the foundations of the integrated circuit
• the culture of spinouts
Fairchild becomes “Silicon Valley Zero.”
From Fairchild come:
• Intel
• AMD
• National Semiconductor
• dozens of spinoffs
The region transforms from radio → microwave → semiconductor → computer electronics.
⸻
9. 1960s–1980s — The Semiconductor Expansion
The Fairchild and Intel diaspora snowballs into:
• microprocessors
• memory chips
• personal computers
• networking equipment
• workstation computing
• graphics hardware
Stanford’s engineering school becomes deeply intertwined with local industry (Terman, HP, and federal defense funding play major roles).
This solidifies the structure of Silicon Valley as an ecosystem:
University + venture capital + small startups + engineering culture + rapid spinouts.
⸻
10. 1990s–2020s — The Modern Valley: Internet, Mobile, AI
Direct lineage:
• Stanford students found Yahoo, Google, Snapchat, Instagram
• Semiconductor and hardware heritage → Nvidia, Apple Silicon
• Wireless communication heritage → Qualcomm, WiFi, LTE, 5G
• Bell Labs ideas → digital signal processing, fiber optics, packet switching
• FTC’s foundational wireless ideas → modern radio, WiFi, Bluetooth, satellite internet
Everything from GPUs to cloud computing to smartphones sits downstream of the 1909 decision by a few Stanford engineers to explore wireless telegraphy.
⸻
THE CHAIN IN A SINGLE LINE
1909 Stanford wireless experiment →
Federal Telegraph Company →
de Forest + triode amplification →
AT&T long-distance networks →
Bell Labs research culture →
Transistor →
Shockley returns to Palo Alto →
Fairchild Semiconductor →
Intel + the Valley spinoff network →
Modern Silicon Valley
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