The past few years have seen a number of books about the rise of Silicon Valley as a center for social and industrial networking: Think The Man Behind the Microchip or The Google Story. MIT Press’ Making Silicon Valley is meatier than its contemporaries. Dense and replete with footnotes, it’s an expert book written for experts—readers who already know Robert Noyce from Gordon Moore. For them, it’s a detailed and nuanced discussion of how and why Silicon Valley emerged as a center of manufacturing, product engineering, and management.
Scholars and amateurs alike have credited Silicon Valley’s transformation to its longtime role as a Department of Defense supplier. The author, historian Christophe Lécuyer, agrees, in part. “But the military was also a tough customer,” he explains. “The Department of Defense sought to control its suppliers’ manufacturing lines and gain rights to their intellectual property. ... Many firms found it so risky to work for the Department of Defense that they sought to reduce their dependence on it, and in the 1960s and the early 1970s they moved into commercial markets. In short, the military sustained the formation and growth of Silicon Valley, but at the same time it forced the firms to open up new markets for their products in the civilian sector.”
Lécuyer also challenges the view that Silicon Valley is a cut-and-dried case of collaboration between universities (especially Stanford) and industry. It is true that Stanford-trained physicists and engineers poured into the local firms, but the town-gown dependence was mutual and very complex: University instructors drew on local technologies to develop innovative research and teaching programs, for example.
Each of the chapters in Making Silicon Valley tells of a pivotal company or companies in order to illustrate larger lessons. The first chapter, “Defiant West,” for instance, describes Eitel-McCullough, a power tube company that held sway in the 1930s and 1940s. Founded by two radio amateurs, Eitel-McCullough drew naturally on the Valley’s core of amateur radio enthusiasts. The final chapter looks at Fairchild Semiconductor, Amelco, Intel, Intersil, and National Semiconductor.
And the future? The author ventures a qualified prediction that applies to other locales as well. “Manufacturing districts grow and thrive only so long as they remain communities of learning, practice, and collaboration,” he concludes.
Christophe Lécuyer is a historian at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, a national history center in Philadelphia concerned with the chemical and molecular sciences and industries.
- Martha Lagace