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.