Fred Terman at Stanford: Building a Discipline, a University, and Silicon Valley - Hardcover

Gillmor, C. Stewart

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804749140 ISBN 13: 9780804749145

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Fred Terman was an outstanding American engineer, teacher, entrepreneur, and manager. Terman was also deeply devoted to his students, to engineering, and to Stanford University. This biography focuses on the weave of personality and place across time-it examines Terman as a Stanford faculty child growing up at an ambitious little regional university; as a young electrical engineering professor in the heady 1920s and the doldrums of the Depression; as an engineering manager and educator in the midst of large-scale wartime research projects and the postwar rise of Big Science and Big Engineering; as a university administrator on the razor's edge of great expectations and fragile budgets; and, finally, as a senior statesman of engineering education. The first doctoral student of Vannevar Bush at M.I.T., Terman was himself a prodigious teacher and adviser to many, including William Hewlett and David Packard. Terman was widely hailed as the magnet that drew talent together into what became known as Silicon Valley.

Throughout his life, Fred Terman was constant in his belief that quality could be quantified, and he was adamant that a university's success must, in the end, be measured by the success of its students. Fred Terman's formula for success, both in life and for his university, was fairly simple: hard work and persistence, systematic dedication to clearly articulated goals, accountability, and not settling for mediocre work in yourself or in others.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

C. Stewart Gillmor is Professor of History and Science at Wesleyan University.

C. Stewart Gillmor is Professor of History and Science at Wesleyan University.

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Fred Terman was an outstanding American engineer, teacher, entrepreneur, and manager. Terman was also deeply devoted to his students, to engineering, and to Stanford University. This biography focuses on the weave of personality and place across time—it examines Terman as a Stanford faculty child growing up at an ambitious little regional university; as a young electrical engineering professor in the heady 1920s and the doldrums of the Depression; as an engineering manager and educator in the midst of large-scale wartime research projects and the postwar rise of Big Science and Big Engineering; as a university administrator on the razor’s edge of great expectations and fragile budgets; and, finally, as a senior statesman of engineering education. The first doctoral student of Vannevar Bush at M.I.T., Terman was himself a prodigious teacher and adviser to many, including William Hewlett and David Packard. Terman was widely hailed as the magnet that drew talent together into what became known as Silicon Valley.
Throughout his life, Fred Terman was constant in his belief that quality could be quantified, and he was adamant that a university’s success must, in the end, be measured by the success of its students. Fred Terman’s formula for success, both in life and for his university, was fairly simple: hard work and persistence, systematic dedication to clearly articulated goals, accountability, and not settling for mediocre work in yourself or in others.

Aus dem Klappentext

Fred Terman was an outstanding American engineer, teacher, entrepreneur, and manager. Terman was also deeply devoted to his students, to engineering, and to Stanford University. This biography focuses on the weave of personality and place across time it examines Terman as a Stanford faculty child growing up at an ambitious little regional university; as a young electrical engineering professor in the heady 1920s and the doldrums of the Depression; as an engineering manager and educator in the midst of large-scale wartime research projects and the postwar rise of Big Science and Big Engineering; as a university administrator on the razor s edge of great expectations and fragile budgets; and, finally, as a senior statesman of engineering education. The first doctoral student of Vannevar Bush at M.I.T., Terman was himself a prodigious teacher and adviser to many, including William Hewlett and David Packard. Terman was widely hailed as the magnet that drew talent together into what became known as Silicon Valley.
Throughout his life, Fred Terman was constant in his belief that quality could be quantified, and he was adamant that a university s success must, in the end, be measured by the success of its students. Fred Terman s formula for success, both in life and for his university, was fairly simple: hard work and persistence, systematic dedication to clearly articulated goals, accountability, and not settling for mediocre work in yourself or in others.

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Fred Terman at Stanford

Building a Discipline, a University, and Silicon ValleyBy C. STEWART GILLMOR

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2004 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-4914-5

Contents

Foreword, Richard Atkinson............................................................................viiPreface...............................................................................................xiIntroduction: Building a Discipline, a University, and Silicon Valley.................................11. California Boy, 1900-1924..........................................................................112. The Stanford Professor, 1925-1937..................................................................703. Building Radio and Electronics, 1937-1941..........................................................1314. The Radio War, 1941-1946...........................................................................1865. Jump-starting Engineering at Stanford, 1942-1949...................................................2536. From Building a Discipline to Building a University, 1949-1959.....................................3007. Raising Steeples at Stanford, 1958-1965............................................................3488. "If I Had My Life to Live Over Again, I Would Play the Same Record," 1965-1982.....................436Epilogue: Building, Momentum, Waves, and Networks.....................................................498APPENDICESA. Fred Terman's Salary, 1925-1965....................................................................507B. U.S. Patents of Fred Terman, 1930-1947.............................................................508C. Amateur ("Ham") Radio Operators at the Radio Research Laboratory...................................510D. Stanford in the Rankings...........................................................................513Notes.................................................................................................519Bibliography..........................................................................................595

Chapter One

California Boy

1900-1924

Fred Terman was born in Indiana in the first year of the twentieth century, but until he was ten, his childhood associations were more with family than with place. The Terman family would move many times, around Indiana, to Massachusetts, and on to California, as Fred's father's academic career rose in higher education and the emergent field of psychology. By 1910, however, the Termans had taken root, settling down on the Stanford University campus. Lewis Terman's experience as an increasingly influential campus figure, as well as his academic interest in the quantification of human intelligence and potential, would strongly influence his son's perspective of the academic world.

Young Terman was gifted at his studies, both at Palo Alto High School and as a Stanford undergraduate during the turbulent years surrounding World War I. Fred completed a difficult and unusually broad undergraduate curriculum in engineering and chemistry, and he filled his summers with study or related technical work. Ambitious and driven as he was as a student, however, he also participated in sports and other activities, and he long treasured friendships and associations that he made at this time.

Fred's graduate work in electrical engineering at Stanford was a means rather than an end, for he would not go straight into industry like most of his classmates but was determined to follow his father into academia. His engineering mentor, Harris J. Ryan, like his father, encouraged Fred to study for his doctoral degree at MIT, the premier technical institution in the country. The influence of three MIT men-Arthur Kennelly, Norbert Wiener, and especially Vannevar Bush (who would play a key role in wartime and postwar scientific research)-would be long lasting.

Returning home to California in 1924, Fred was stricken with a bout of tuberculosis, a Terman family shadow. The months spent recuperating, however, would allow him to think about his future and where he could best make his mark. Balancing offers from both Stanford and MIT, he chose to return to his alma mater. He also chose to return to his first technical love, the rapidly growing field of radio and electronics.

Out of Indiana

Frederick Emmons Terman was born in Indiana in 1900, the first child and only son of Indiana-born schoolteachers. Both sides of Fred Terman's family fell squarely into the pioneering milieu of early nineteenth-century America-a distinctly protestant mix of Scots, northern Irish, Welsh, "Pennsylvania Dutch" (German), and French Huguenots, who, along with rural English families, had immigrated to the middle and southern colonies in the eighteenth century. Working the land, Terman's ancestors had farmed, married, and moved ever further west, into Kentucky, Ohio, and on to Indiana.

Fred's father, Lewis Terman, would have a particularly strong influence on his only son, not simply as a father but as an intellectual immersed in the study and encouragement of gifted children, and as a career academic. Young Fred Terman's own memories of Indiana would be few, but those of life as a faculty child were enduring. Before he was four, Fred was off on a family adventure, following his father's academic career briefly to Massachusetts, then on to California. By the time he was six, he was in the midst of Southern California's land boom; at ten, he was a part of Stanford University's campus community. Aside from several sojourns to Massachusetts, Stanford would be his home for the remainder of Fred's life.

Fred's father, Lewis Terman, had made a concerted effort to move beyond the confining influences of rural Midwestern life. Lewis was, in fact, somewhat astonished that what he saw as his own unremarkable, almost bleakly ordinary ancestry could produce a child like himself, that is, a bookish and unathletic boy, who craved intellectual companionship rather than the robust life of a farm child. Yet Lewis Terman's own family clearly represented many of the values he would impress on his son: an ambitious, industrious, and solidly prosperous family, they had been willing to confront the challenges of new territory and new lives. While promoting self-sufficiency among their children, they also respected intellectual curiosity and allowed Lewis, the eleventh of fourteen children, to find his own sense of accomplishment.

Lewis Madison Terman had been born on January 15, 1877, the first son to survive in twelve years, into the large family of James William Terman, a prosperous farmer, and Martha Parthenia Cutsinger, the well-educated daughter of an equally comfortable farming family. The Terman's farm, near Franklin, in Johnson County, Indiana, was located about seventeen miles southeast of Indianapolis. James Terman was an avid reader. His library of some two hundred books, including an Encyclopedia Britannica, was comparatively large for such a farming community, and he subscribed to numerous newspapers and periodicals.

A lively, affectionate, and industrious family, the Terman's older children played an important role in minding the younger ones. Lewis was especially attached to his eldest brother John, fourteen years his senior. John shared with Lewis his love of reading, his interest in music, and his ambition to move away from farming to teach.

Post-Civil War America placed a new emphasis on self-improvement, but most Americans still...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804749140
• ISBN 13: 9780804749145
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 672
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande