The foundation of a new era in engineering
1935 – 1944
Members of the Stanford Student Chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers gather for a photo for the Stanford Quad yearbook, 1936. Charles Marx is seated sixth from right. Women were still a significant minority in engineering: the two women pictured are students Mary DeF. Atkins (sixth from left) and Margaret Woolverton (seventh from left), both seniors. | Special Collections & University Archives.
by Andrew Myers
Relations with industry are beneficial to the university and to industry and most helpful to its program of engineering education and research.”
— Samuel B. Morris, 1939
1935 – 1944
As the second decade of the Stanford School of Engineering began, Theodore Hoover was in his final year as dean, and the school was just beginning to recover from the decline in enrollment caused by the Great Depression. In 1936, the school appointed its second dean, Samuel B. Morris. A native Californian and a Stanford alumnus (’11), Morris had served as chief engineer, superintendent, and general manager of the Water Department of Pasadena, California, from 1912 to 1931, when he joined the Stanford faculty as a professor of civil engineering. Morris was the driving force behind the eponymous Samuel B. Morris Dam, the cornerstone of the San Gabriel water supply project.
In his first year as dean, Morris continued the School of Engineering’s focus on humanities as a crucial element of an engineer’s preparation for professional leadership. He liberalized the school’s elective curriculum to prepare engineers for what Dean Hoover had aptly described as “life in an age of technological advances.”(1) Students were required to take six elective courses from outside the School of Engineering in their third and fourth years. Morris also championed the Department of Engineering’s growing research collaborations with industry, noting, “Such relations with industry are beneficial to the university and to industry and most helpful to its program of engineering education and research.”(2)
During Morris’s tenure, which bridged the period between the Great Depression and World War II, course schedules and the curriculum were adapted both to accommodate students who worked during the summer to help pay for schooling and to deal with the outflow of students as the country mobilized for war. In 1943, Morris also oversaw the influx of hundreds of enlisted soldiers as part of the Army Specialized Training Program.
Ideas and Innovations
In 1937, Frederick E. Terman became head of the Department of Electrical Engineering. Like Morris, Terman was a Stanford alum, earning his BA in chemistry in 1920 and his master’s in electrical engineering in 1922; he earned a doctorate from MIT in 1924. After recovering from a year-long, life-threatening battle with tuberculosis, Terman returned to Stanford in 1925 to join the faculty in electrical engineering.(3)
Frederick Terman, 1938. Terman became head of the Department of Electrical Engineering in 1937. He served as dean of the School of Engineering from 1944 to 1958 and as provost of the university from 1955 to 1965. | Special Collections & University Archives.
Terman began a collaboration with William Hansen, a colleague in the Stanford Physics Department. Hansen’s work on radiation fields from antennas led to a joint patent application with Terman for an antenna array, laying the groundwork for an ongoing partnership. In 1937, Hansen collaborated with brothers Russell and Sigurd Varian, with Terman as department head offering support, to invent the revolutionary klystron ultrahigh-frequency vacuum tube, a device that amplified radio waves into the microwave spectrum. The klystron was the foundational technology in the burgeoning microwave industry, particularly in commercial air navigation, satellite communications, high-energy particle accelerators, and other technologies.(4)
Type A klystron, 1937. The klystron was the first significantly powerful source of radio waves in the microwave range. As the foundational technology in the burgeoning microwave industry, it would be used in military radar detection, commercial air navigation, satellite communications, high-energy particle accelerators, and other technologies. | Special Collections & University Archives.
Physics researchers Russell Varian (‘25, MA ‘27) and Sigurd Varian and Stanford physics professor William Hansen collaborated with colleagues in electrical engineering to invent the klystron. Posing with the klystron in 1939 are (clockwise from lower left) Russell H. Varian, Sigurd F. Varian, David L. Webster, William W. Hansen, and John R. Woodyard. | Special Collections & University Archives.
Brothers Russell H. Varian (left) and Sigurd Varian (right) went on to found Varian Associates, one of the earliest high-tech companies in Silicon Valley and the first to lease land from the university in what became the Stanford Industrial Park (renamed Stanford Research Park in 1974). | Special Collections & University Archives.
Associate Professor William Hansen tests a unit of the klystron in 1939. The klystron was based on his earlier invention, the “rhumbatron.” | Special Collections & University Archives.
Terman worked to attract funding, build up research facilities, and initiate research in ionospheric physics and electron-tube optics.(5) The success of the klystron project at Stanford led to important applications both in military radar defense and in postwar developments. These included the founding of the private company Varian Associates and the establishment of Stanford’s Microwave Laboratory (renamed the E.L. Ginzton Laboratory in 1976 for Edward Ginzton, a graduate student of Terman who led key aspects of klystron measurement and circuit development and was subsequently appointed professor of both applied physics and electrical engineering at Stanford).(6) Terman’s vision and strategic leadership not only advanced Stanford Engineering but also contributed to the progress of technology on a national scale.(7)
With the klystron, Terman began the school’s decades-long tradition of inventions emerging from academia and making a successful transfer to the corporate world. Varian Associates became the first resident of the new Stanford Industrial Park and a progenitor of Silicon Valley start-ups long before the term “Silicon Valley” even existed. The collaboration between engineering and physics that produced the klystron led to the creation of the High Energy Physics Laboratory (HEPL; now the W.W. Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory), Stanford’s first independent research laboratory—a prime example of Stanford Engineering’s leadership in interdisciplinary research decades before the concept came into vogue at university campuses around the globe.
In 1939, the Varian brothers’ success was followed by the introduction of the Model 200A precision audio oscillator, the first low-cost method of measuring audio frequencies, which was developed by two School of Engineering graduate students, William Hewlett and David Packard. Hewlett and Packard had been motivated to create the Model 200A during a lecture by Terman, who read from a 1934 paper by Bell Laboratories’ H.S. Black on distortion reduction techniques. Hewlett was so inspired that he committed his master’s thesis to the concept.(8)
That same year, at Terman’s urging, the young engineers pitched the Model 200A to the Walt Disney Company, which was producing the animated film Fantasia with a soundtrack of beloved classical music. The Model 200A provided the technological foundation for Disney’s “Fantasound” high-fidelity audio reproduction system, and the Hewlett-Packard Company, named for its founders, was off and running. In subsequent decades, its technological strides would make the company a household name.
William Hewlett and David Packard (seated), 1939. As graduate students in the School of Engineering, they developed the first precision audio oscillator, a low-cost method of measuring audio frequencies. The device became the foundation for their company, known around the world today as HP. | Courtesy Hewlett-Packard Corporate Archives.
William Hewlett and David Packard working together in their shop, circa 1942. | Special Collections & University Archives.
Still in the early years of a legendary tenure, Terman would later become dean of the School of Engineering (1944–1958) and provost of Stanford University (1955–1965). He would be proclaimed a “Father of Sili- con Valley” for urging innovative Stanford students like Hewlett and Packard not only to develop new technologies but also to commercialize them by founding start-up companies.(9) In the decades to come, his initiatives and influence would define him as a leading force in the birth of Silicon Valley.(10)
The success of the klystron and the Model 200A, and the companies resulting from those innovations, forced the School of Engineering into an unanticipated reckoning with its own creativity and business acumen. In 1938, Stanford published the university’s first policy governing the patenting of discoveries and inventions produced on campus using university facilities and resources.(11) This practice—technology license transfer from university lab to corporate boardroom—would not become standard elsewhere for several more decades. The Stanford School of Engineering laid the early foundations of entrepreneurialism—an alloy of technological innovation and business acumen—that still stands today.
Born in a Stanford Engineering Classroom: HP
While many think that William Hewlett and David Packard started their now world famous company in a Palo Alto garage, the place Hewlett-Packard really got started was in a Stanford Engineering classroom. Fred Terman, then a professor of electrical engineering, had been keeping an eye on the young Packard, a fine engineering student as well as a six-foot-five letterman in basketball, football, and track. In the spring of 1933, Terman invited Packard to stop by his office for a chat.
I was amazed to find that he knew a great deal about me,” Packard later recalled. “He knew my interests and abilities in athletics; he knew what courses I had taken and my grades. He had even looked up my high school record and my scores on the entrance exams.”(12)
— David Packard
Packard was exactly the kind of young leader the school most wanted to cultivate. Terman asked the rising senior if he was up for the challenge of becoming the first undergraduate to take Terman’s graduate course in radio engineering, then the forefront of electronics. In that moment, Packard believed, Hewlett-Packard was born.
Most electronics companies at the time, Terman advised Packard, had been “built by people without much education.” In the fall of 1933, while Packard helped lead the Cardinal to the Rose Bowl, he also put together the kernel of HP with Hewlett, including Barney Oliver and Edward Porter as part of the early management team. Unlike their competitors, Packard and crew would place education and technical innovation at the center of their company.
It didn’t hurt that a local banker at Palo Alto National was persuaded to give young Packard a loan in part because he remembered the entrepreneur’s success on the football field. Or that Terman, working for the government during World War II, often steered contracts toward HP. But all the help in the world wouldn’t have amounted to much without that first meeting of minds in a Stanford classroom in 1933.
—Charles Petersen
Harold Hohbach Historian at the Silicon Valley Archives,
Stanford University
Gathering Clouds
In the decade or so between the advent of human flight and World War I, then known simply as “The Great War,” Stanford faculty worked in the vanguard of aviation and aeronautical engineering. By the late 1920s, Professors William Frederick Durand and Everett Parker Lesley had built their wind tunnel in the Daniel Guggenheim Experimental Laboratory of Aerodynamic and Aeronautic Research with funds from the Guggenheim Foundation. But by the late 1930s, Durand and Lesley had retired, and the Guggenheim grant had expired. Yet aviation was at the cusp of a great transition as World War II loomed. As Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the Department of Mechanical Engineering took in the Guggenheim Lab. Research relationships with the federal government were burgeoning; the Civil Aeronautics Authority, precursor to the Federal Aviation Administration, selected Stanford as one of several centers nationwide to train civilians in aviation.(13)
Meanwhile, in electrical engineering, an extensive reimagining of the junior- and senior-level curriculum began. Traditional senior-level classes in electrical circuits and machinery were moved to the end of the junior year to accommodate the addition of electives in communication in the senior year, a shift that reflected the growing influence of radio broadcasting nationwide. The rearrangement made for a “more uniform division of this work between the junior and senior years,” Terman wrote in the university’s 1939 annual report.(14) By enabling this training earlier, the newly developed elective senior-level courses “in this important field” of communication made it possible to raise the level of instruction for graduate students.
Professor Arthur B. Domonoske, at right, 1939. Domonoske, who joined Stanford in 1927 to become head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, published about the principles of aircraft engine design. | Special Collections & University Archives.
The academic year of 1939–1940 began with an exploratory committee charged with considering the possibility of moving the Department of Mining Engineering out of the School of Engineering altogether, to combine it with the Department of Geology to form a Stanford School of Geology and Mining. The authors of the report to the president of the university noted that the two departments shared numerous interests, and many students demanded education in both disciplines. However, the committee recommended that the two departments remain separate because of the divergence of their engineering and scientific aims. “For that reason, it would be undesirable to combine them too closely,” the committee wrote; but it suggested considerable upgrades to the physical facilities of both departments.(15) Changes for these departments lay ahead, but only after the war’s end.
With Germany’s aggressiveness in Europe in mind, the federal government appealed to research universities nationwide to bolster the defense effort. The Stanford School of Engineering, particularly the Guggenheim Lab, was among the leaders in that effort. Dean Morris was appointed chairman of a university-wide committee charged with facilitating the expansion of relationships with the federal government to “give the fullest possible service if called upon.”(16)
In 1941, preceding the attack on Pearl Harbor, Washington frequently called on Stanford to support defense activities, asking for help not only from the School of Engineering but also from the departments of physics and chemistry and the School of Medicine, seeking any experts who might give the country an edge in the coming conflict. The Field Artillery Unit and the Ordnance Unit of the Stanford ROTC were pressed into service to train students for military service, and the School of Engineering expanded its role in the Civilian Pilot Training Program under the Civil Aeronautics Administration.
In March that year, months ahead of the country’s entry into the war in December, Stanford President Ray Lyman Wilbur wrote to all university faculty: “The National Selective Service law . . . will probably affect directly nearly all the men now enrolled in our colleges and universities. It is important that they complete as much of their education as soon as possible in order to be of greater value in national service. . . . Each individual is of value to the country in proportion to his or her educational attainments.”(17)
For the first time, the School of Engineering offered summer courses to enable students to complete a typical twelve-quarter engineering curriculum in just three years. Dean Morris touted important research activities in the School of Engineering—especially in the Guggenheim Lab, the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and the Department of Electrical Engineering—but could not detail any in particular for fear of compromising national security secrets. He could only assert that such research “is going on in ever increasing volume. . . . This will become a more important factor in the year 1941–42, and increasingly until the European war is over.”(18)
The School of Engineering continued to gear itself to the flow of world events “in which the engineer is playing an ever-increasing part.” Engineers were necessary “to carry on . . . highly mechanized warfare.”(19) Despite the fact that many students were permitted to defer military service to complete their engineering degrees, the call to serve affected both undergraduate and graduate enrollments. Students were not the only ones enlisting: as of August 1942, eight school faculty were on leave to the military; five were commissioned officers in the Army and Navy, and three were involved in research or technical engagements specifically related to the war. Terman was among them, departing in 1942 to lead a new, top-secret Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard. Two other faculty left for roles in industry, while another two in the Naval Reserve were retained only because of the “importance to the war effort of instruction and research being carried on by them.”(20)
In 1942, the School of Engineering conferred 157 degrees, a slight increase from 136 the previous year. But the impact of the war on school enrollment was undeniable: “Unless there is adequate protection by selective service or even subsidy to engineering students,” wrote Dean Morris to President Wilbur, “we can expect the number of Bachelors’ degrees to diminish and the graduate degrees to fall off almost completely.”(21) By academic year 1944–1945, the number of degrees granted fell below 100 for the first time in years, with only 96 conferred, and prospects dimming for an influx of new students. “With deferment no longer granted to undergraduate or graduate engineering students by Selective Service, the numbers graduating from now until the end of the war will be greatly reduced,” wrote Morris in August 1944.(22) The war continued to rage on two fronts as the second decade of the Stanford School of Engineering drew to a close.
The following month, Morris stepped down from his role as dean to return to Los Angeles as chief engineer for the municipal power system. He recommended as his successor Fred Terman, whose work had already set in motion a new era for both the School of Engineering and the world.
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