February 17, 2026: also reading: Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, Walter Isaacson, c. 2022
From the history of Palo Alto as told by Malcolm Harris, c. 2024.
What is all boils down to, from the universe, zooming into "the chip":
- the universe
- the solar system
- earth
- the United States
- California
- Stanford
- US Navy
- radio communications
- WWII
- the man: Vannevar Bush
- the light bulb -- the triode -- the antenna
- the chip: Shockley, Brattain, and Bardeen
- civil rights
p. 114: Stanford, WWII.
Stanford
Presidents of Stanford University:
- Stanford University:
- founder: Leland Stanford
- presidents:
- 1891 - 1913: David Starr Jordan
- 1913 - 1915: John Casper Branner
- 1916 - 1943: Ray Lyman Wilbur
- 1943 - 1948: Donald B. Tresidder*
- 1949 - 1968: J. E. Wallace Sterling
- When Herbert Hoover and Ray Lyman Wilbur went to Washington, they left their friend Robert Swain in charge of the university. So Wilber was president from 1916 - 1943, except for four years when he was in DC with President Herbert Hoover.
Original Post
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Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and The World, Malcolm Harris, c. 2023.
Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and The World, Malcolm Harris, c. 2023.
This book inspired me to re-read the history of California. Along the way, I learned a lot of new words, and a lot of new jargon.
Book for the weekend. Just arrived. Amazon. Published 2023.
Author's bio. Something tells me this will be a history of Palo Alto of which few are aware. LOL.
The
author appears to be a bit farther to the left than Nancy Pelosi, and a
bit crazier than Hunter S Thompson. This should be fun!
Introduction and first few pages of chapter 1: really, really good writing. I'm impressed.
Chapter 1.1
To Whom Time Is Money
Dates:
- 1789: George Washington inaugurated as first US president; beginning of French Revolution/
- '49ers: 1849: gold discovered
- 1859: Nevada, silver discovered
- 1869: Transcontinental Railroad completed
- 1889: North and South Dakota statehood
- 1899 -- three wars --
- Spanish-American war: ends; Treaty of Paris
- Philippine-American war begins
- Second Boer War in South Africa begins
- 1919: end of WWI; Treaty of Versailles signed
- 1969: first man on the moon; Bruce graduates from high school
- 1929: the Great Crash
- 1939: Germans invade Poland; generally considered to be the start of WWII
- 1949: The Third Man released in Britain
- 1989: fall of the Berlin Wall; generally considered the end of the Cold War
- 1999: eve of the "Y2K" problem
Words, phrases:
- Ohlone Indians: San Francisco Bay south to Monterey
- General John C. Fremont
- San Francisco Bay: South Bay
- the short-lived Bear Republic -- p. 12 - 13
- Johann Sutter, p. 19 -- Sacramento Valley, via Vancouver, Hawaii; from Europe
- introduced the concept of time to the Indians; the bell;
- 1848: James Marshall, working for Sutter, found gold
- Andres Castillero; land grant to an ancient cinnabar (mercury ore) mine
Amalgamation / Hg: The molecule mercury (Hg) helps isolate gold by forming an amalgam, a mixture where mercury dissolves gold from crushed ore. After mixing the finely powdered ore with mercury, the amalgam is heated, which vaporizes the mercury and leaves behind the gold. This process, often called amalgamation, was historically used to separate gold from other materials.
The practice of using mercury to isolate gold is not attributed to a single discoverer, as the technique was developed independently in different cultures. The Incas in the Andes used mercury amalgamation to refine gold for centuries before its use in Europe, and the technique was also known in ancient Greece. However, the large-scale industrial use of mercury amalgamation for ore processing began with Bartolomé de Medina in 1554 in Mexico for silver, a process later adapted for gold.
Culture: explanation of how the '49ers affected the Alta California Indians way of life as opposed to the Spanish and the Mexicans.
Placer: "placer" (river bottom sand / sandstone) first mention, p. 17, along with jumping claims
History: the quick history of California statehood; via compromise to balance Texas;
- The Compromise of 1850 was a legislative package that addressed the issue of slavery after California applied for statehood as a free state, which threatened the balance between free and slave states. The compromise admitted California as a free state, established a Texas-New Mexico boundary, and organized the Utah and New Mexico territories under popular sovereignty, while also abolishing the slave trade in Washington, DC, and enacting a stricter Fugitive Slave Act.
- 1850: the Foreign Miners' Tax Act, p. 17.
- Interesting, bottom of page 18 and top of page 19: Louisiana senator Judah P Benjamin. Connects with Fremont.
- The story of how Americans literally took all this land from Mexico without any formal treaty. Of course, that begs the question, how did Spain, and then Mexico, acquire this land in the first place?
- Plantation economy, p. 19.
- Bottom of page 19: capitalist work around the world.
- "The Age of Empire was dead." p. 20.
- "Beginning in the 1840's the whole world became a British colony." -- p. 20.
- British economic system -- need to quote -- genericity -- not in the dictionary -- p. 20. Even Google Gemini cannot answer the question.
- Amadeo Giannini, The Bank of Italy / Bank of America. Story begins on page 33 -- but his story begins a page or two earlier.
Chapter 1.1 completed. An incredible chapter.
Chapter 1.2
The Combine
Leland Stanford
Lelad Stanford: a slacker. Born, 1824, Albany, NY. The fourth of seven sons.
Grandfather, Lyman Stanford, fortune with a shop near a toll-road stop along the Erie Canal.
Eldest brother, Josiah, Jr, first of the sons to go out west; was a forty-niner. Wow. Made him money selling shovels, not panning for gold.
Leland was the last brother to get out to California.
Michigan City --> Michigan Bluff (Placer County). Wiki.
Midway between Sacramento and Reno. The town was founded by gold miners. Mining began in earnest in 1853, and town was shipping $100,000 in gold per month by 1858. Leland Stanford ran a store in the town from 1853 to 1855. After hydraulic mining was banned, the town entered decline. The town is now registered as California Historical Landmark #402.
Leland started a tavern.
Rose to governor for one two-year term.
Moved to Sacramento.
The Associates: Leland Stanford and three fellow shopkeepers. Associates were abstemious.
Luck: Leland was GOP, and Abraham Lincoln had just been elected president.
1859: New-York Tribune founding editor and leading Republican Horace Greeley -- went out to California via Yosemite. Became huge railroad proponent.
Story of the transcontinental railroad.
Sierra Nevadas.
The Gadsen Purchase. Wiki. A bit of land for Arizona / New Mexico from the country of Mexico.
Theodore Judah: railroad engineer from Troy, NY.
The Associates raised a piddly $20,000 to execute Judah's plan.
Leland: governor, 1861 - 1863. Called himself governor for the rest of his life.
Civil wars at that time: China, Mexico, US, and the beginnings of Japan.
1862: Pacific Railway Act -- chartered the Union Pacific to build west from the Missouri River (ultimately from Omaha, NE) and the Central Pacific to build to the east until they met somewhere in the middle.
1864: the Pacific Railway Act of 1864.
1869: Ogden, Utah. Central Pacific meets the Union Pacific. Laid telegraph lines at the same time!
Money from around the world poured into the railroad scheme.
Global financial upset things, 1873.
Railroads folded. Central Pacific survived; owners -- the Associates-controlled railroad subsume the Central, earning the budding monopoly the Combine (combined the Central Pacific with the Southern Pacific).
The Combine was an octopus: timber, communications, wine, mining, large commodity farmers, fruit growers, stage coach lines, and wheat exporters. Frank Norris and the Associates: 1901 novel, The Octopus. Wiki. The Octopus and the Story of California.
Then the story of The Octopus, 1880s fictionalized account, Mussel Slough, an irrigation ditch in California's wheatful Central Valley. Leland Stanford was a very, very bad man. Makes me think of Noah Cross in Chinatown.
Then several pages on joint-stock ownership. Fascinating. Need to read again and again and again.
Sailed .... skipped ahead.
Chapter 1.3
Blood That Trots Young
Horse Power -- The Palo Alto System -- Edward Muybridge (Helios) and the First Movie -- Leland Stanford, Jr. -- Founding Standford University
Will do notes later, perhaps. the subheadings for this chapter gives one a good start on this chapter.
Other names, etc:
- the trotting horse: Electioneer
- Stanford: moves from Nob Hill, San Francisco
- 1876: from Nob Hill to a 650-acre farm, Mayfield Grange in Santa Clara County off the train tracks south of the city.
- Stanford renamed the area Palo Alto for the big tree next to the tracks.
- Leland, Jr, born 1868, p. 65.
- "unsupported transit," p. 71
- Muybridge
- Marey: pp. 71 - 73
- see note re: Muybridge, begins bottom of p. 73.
The School of Sorrow
- the story of Leland DeWitt Stanford, p.79; born in Sacramento in 1868.
- "as a son of nearly peerless wealth" -- p. 80
Leland Stanford: and then he was dead, p. 82. March 13, 1884 -- two weeks before his 16th birthday. Typhoid, Greece --> Italy.
Elder Stanford announces university, 1887.
Two years later, Leland Stanford, dies.
Section II
1900 - 1945
Chapter 2.1
Local Ghosts
Battle for LSJU -- The Almost Certain Murder of **** ****** ***** **** **** ***** -- Earthquake -- Federal Telegraph
Battle for LSJU (Leland Stanford Junior University) -- The Almost Certain Murder of Jane Stanford -- Earthquake Federal Telegraph
1889: Leland Stanford dies.
Stanford University president Jordan vs Jane Lathrop Stanford (p. 89, fourth line). From then on, author used JLS, first use p. 90. Could be wrong but it appears that way.
Other People's Dreams: p. 94. The murder of JLS and the earthquake, 1906. Destroyed much of Stanford's personal and public real property.
1905: Jane Stanford poisoned; survived, January 14; fled to Hawaii; poisoned second time; died, February 18.
1906: earthquake.
The Age of Synergy -- p. 97.
P. 98: "West Coast Met." -- what does that refer to -- google West Coast Metropolitan.
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 wireless 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 with his machine's long range and silent operation. The officials ordered ten of them on the spot, but more important, they developed immediate 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.
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.
What follows is amazing.
ChatGPT reply: transcribed elsewhere.
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Chapter 2.2
Bionomics
Making Men -- Lewis Terman and His Intelligence Quotient -- Finding Genius in California -- The Raisin Ku klux Klan -- The International-Radial-Communist Anarchist Club
Getting started.
Vernon Kellogg. Wiki.
Jordan (school president) and Kellogg were popular professors.
Bionomics: Leland Stanford and Charles Marvin -- history
Eugenics
Essentially horse breeding --> great men (intellectual strength).
White male.
Illinois student Ellwood Patterson Cubberley, p. 102, and then another Hoosier student, Lewis Terman, p. 103.
Alfred Binet "intelligence test," p. 103.
Evolved: a Stanford-Binet test.
Military testing --> school testing --> A-E which evolved to A-F.
Taller students at Stanford --> longer beds needed. Sports, p. 109. Similar to horse breeding. Discover bright students as early as possible (genes won't change) and grab them to give them a head start.
Football: the Stanford man.
"Today the Bay Area teams have left the Ivies far behind, but it wasn't a smooth ride."
Stanford and Berkeley initiated a fierce rivalry, imitating Harvard and Yale on the East Coast.
Pop Warner, p. 110. Wiki.
The Story of Women at Stanford -- long legacy -- start on page 110.
Morphs into story of the Shockleys, starting at bottom of page 111.
Cali Cartels
Begins on page 113.
The story of California agriculture, farm workers, racism, etc. Eye-opening. Need to read again.
The Bombs Are All Around You
Begins on page 123.
Another section that must be re-read.
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Chapter 2.3:
Hooverville
Pages 133 - 180
Herbert Hoover and the Pioneer Class -- Gold Mine Market -- The Neutral American -- Commerce Secretariat -- California Bolsheviks
Herbert Hoover, b. 1874, middle child of WASP settlers, Iowa Quakers.
Hoover and two siblings: orphans when parents died of pneumonia, 1880 and 1884. Hoover, 6 and 10 years of age when his dad died, then mother died.
Shuffled among relatives in Iowa.
Story of how he got to Stanford, p. 134.
Remember, Jane Leland Stanford died 1905. Hoover would have been 31 years of age. Founded 1885; first class, 1891. Hoover then, 17 years of age. Herbert Hoover entered Stanford University in 1891, as part of its very first "Pioneer Class," studying geology and graduating in 1895 before becoming a famous mining engineer, humanitarian, and U.S. President. College then known as Leland Stanford Junior University.
Herbert was really, really good at organizing people, p. 134.
Story of meeting President Benjamin Harrison when the latter visited Stanford, again, p. 134.
Then the story of Herbert Hoover continues.
Iowa. Stanford. Lou Henry.
Mining.
Australia. Sons of Gwalia mine -- gold -- one million dollars under the athletic association treasurer every year for a century.
Brother goes to Stanford; paid for by his older brother, Herbert.
Hoover's gold / Australia / Stanford / London --> Western capital in lumps and drove 20th century economic expansion.
Modern China. The "scramble." The CEMC -- p. 138.
Wow, wow, wow ... my reading of Chinese history has really paid off.
The Boxer Rebellion.
The Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901) was named by Westerners because the uprising was led by a secret society known as the Yihequan (义和拳), which translates directly to "Righteous and Harmonious Fists". Foreigners in China called members of this society "Boxers" because they practiced intense martial arts and calisthenic rituals they believed made them invulnerable to bullets.
Left Bewick, Moreing in 1908 ... he was 34 years old.
His brother eventually became head of Stanford's geology department.
Ray Lyman Wilbur, page 141. Third president of Stanford. A physician and 31st US Secretary of the Interior, serving under President Hoover.
Jordan, who won full control of the university after the convenient murder of Jane Lathrop Stanford .... p. 142.
William Shockley, Sr. -- p. 142.
Hoover was like a vacuum,sucking up precious metals fro around the world and depositing a hefty share back into Palo Alto's giant tax shelter.
WWI.
The CRB: Commission for Relief in Belgium run by Hoover as an independent transnational organization, flying its own flag .... p. 145.
If you want to read the biography of Donald Trump, read the biography of Herbert Hoover. Except Hoover had just one love in his life; one woman, one wife.
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Skip Way Ahead
Fill in missing chapters later
Chapter 2.4
Men with Potential
Blowing Tubes -- De Forest's Triode -- Avionics -- The Varian Brothers and the Rhumbatron -- Fred Terman, Genius Son -- Internment of the California Japanese -- Ernesto Glaarza and the Betrayal of the Popular Front
Section III
1945 - 1975
Chapter 3.1
Space Settlers
Missile Economics -- Real Estate -- Ghettoization of East Palo Alto -- Paul Baran and the Red Scare -- The Cold War University
Chapter 3.2
The Solid State
p. 247 - 280
Hewlett-Packard -- Invention of the Semiconductor -- Shockley and Fairchild -- Advent of Venture Capital -- Hoover in Germany and Japan -- Chips on Ships
This could be one of the best chapters. Read alongside John Orton's The Story of Semiconductors, c. 2004.
Three things:
- the Varian klystron, invented in 1937, UHF communication, wiki;
- Poniatoff's antenna, wiki; very obscure;
- Litton's tube construction, wiki; Stanford alumnus, 1924 / 1925; again, somewhat obscure.
And, perhaps, most important: Terman's leadership of the RRL. Harvard's Radio Research Laboratory, wiki; Frederick E. Terman, wiki; Terman, widely credited (together with William Shockley) as being the father of Silicon Valley, wiki.
From PBS, link here:
Although many scientists contributed along the way, it was three men who really brought the transistor to life, and each played a different role: the thinker, the tinkerer, and the visionary.
John Bardeen was the thinker, a man who could look at an event no one else comprehended and go beyond common understanding to explain it. Walter Brattain was the tinkerer, a builder who could put together any contraption asked. William Shockley was the visionary, a seer who predicted how important the transistor would be long before anyone else.
All three were top-class scientists, and their unique skills brought together in one laboratory created the perfect environment for their grand invention. But their unique perspectives also made them ill fit to continue working together. They joined for a few years of brilliance and then went their separate ways due to a colossal clashing of egos.Shockley believed that since he had given the initial direction the idea for the transistor was wholly his. Shockley began a major campaign with the company's lawyers to patent the transistor exclusively under his own name. He called Bardeen and Brattain separately into his office and explained what he was doing. Brattain shouted at him: "There's more than enough glory in this for everybody!" Bardeen said nothing, but began to fume silently. The rift had begun.
Shockley truly believed the other two had betrayed him, had taken his ideas and received credit where none was due. To get some of his own back, Shockley conceived of a substantially better transistor within a month. That transistor, a junction transistor, was destined to have more commercial success than that first point-contact transistor ever would. As Shockley kept his lab working on his own ideas, he kept Bardeen and Brattain as far removed from the work as possible.
The man: Vannevar Bush, wiki.
Terman, a protégé of Vannevar Bush, and Bush was the man when it came to military contracts.
Bush: newly established Office of Naval Research. Again, Navy.
This chapter is concerned with the technological, commercial, and ultimately geopolitical developments that bridged the gap between de Forest's Federal Telegraph triode and themicroships of Silicon Valley. It's a much shorter distance than you might imagine.
Chapter 3.3
Personal Revolution
Computers as Human Augmentation -- LSD as Human Augmentation -- Bob Kaufman: Black, Communist, Beat -- Ken Kesey and Other CIA Experiments
Chapter 3.4
How to Destroy an Empire
ChiCom Cuts the Paper Tiger in Korea -- Domestic Decolorization -- Rise of the Black Panthers -- Third World of California -- The War in Palo Alto
Section IV
1975 - 2000
Chapter 4.1
California über Alles
Silicon Canneries -- The End of the '70s -- Civic Vigilantism in the Suburbs -- New Walls Everywhere -- "What About Jensen?" -- A Union of Homeowners
It begins: while big cities suffered from the collapse of military Keynesianism after the country's defeat by the Vietnamese national liberation forces, Silicon Valley came into its own.
Offshoring and immigration. -- p. 364.
The effects of the Vietnam War -- particularly the US losing.
p. 365 -- it's not a coincidence that the South Bay maintains the country's largest concentration of Vietnamese immigrants to this day. [Larger number, LA - Long Beach - Anaheim but only 1.9% of population in that region compared to over 5% in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara.
Electronics industry growing; rest of US manufacturing now. Electronics industry needed fewer workers than other manufacturing. Electronics, fast; other manufacturing, slow. Unions hurt after the 1970s due to few workers in legacy manufacturing industry. Electronics industry top heavy in managers who did not join unions and Vietnamese workers in electronics industry did not go on strike.
Amy Newell -- union organizer. Followed in her father's footsteps. Graduated from Stanford.
"Salts" -- workers who get jobs with the ulterior motive of unionizing their coworkers.
Electronics companies if facing strikes / unions, would layoff US workers and offshore to Asia.
Safe workplaces, mostly against pollution in electronic fabs: Robin Baker, Amanda Hawes, and Pat Lamborn. Changed local concern into national concern.
GM - Toyota - NUMMI story.
The End of the '70s
1969 Altamont concert (Grateful Dead -- from Palo Alto wisely declined to play there); Hells Angels; headlined by Rolling Stones.
Earlier: Charles Manson murder spree.
Excellent summary, 1969 to 1970 -- how the union movement changed, p. 372.
Tim Yo, music, "Dead Kennedys."
SNCC, again. We first saw the SNCC back at the1964 Democratic Convention. It's now the 70s. To get us to housing problem, need to go back to Prop 14, 1963. Not in effect; found unconstitutional.
White supremacist John Birch Society. Housing issue. Again, author goes back to Leland Stanford, p. 379, 1963, near bottom of the page.
With housing issues now, Prop 13 in 1978.
Eugenics.
Kingsley Davis.
Paul Ehrlich. Johnny Carson.
Amazing chapter.
Chapter 4.2
War Capitalism
Hoover Institution -- Ronald Reagan's Dirty Harry Situation -- The Office of Technology Licensing and the Privatization of the Cold War University -- Wiring the Asian-American Circuit -- Computers for Dictators -- Iran-Contra Net
Ronald Reagan.
Wow, influence of the Hooverites. Again.
Chapter 4.3
Jobs and Gates
Pong -- Mac and the PC -- De Facto School Segregation and The Production of Mean Nerds
Intel's Gordon Moore completely misread the PC -- p. 439.
Fascinating chapter. As they all are.
Chapter 4.4
Americas Online
San Jose Sharks -- The Tiger Woods Economy -- Cocaine and Cappuccios - Web Yahoos -- Broken Windows -- Pets.com
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