Silicon Valley: From Apricot Orchards to a Trillion-Dollar Tech Machine

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In the early 1950s, Santa Clara County was the Valley of Heart's Delight, home to nearly 40 fruit canneries and the largest fruit packing region in the world. This episode explains how that farmland became Silicon Valley. The first ingredient was the military: Moffett Field, commissioned in 1933 as a Navy blimp base, later drew aeronautics research and contractors like Lockheed. The second was Stanford, where engineering dean Frederick Terman set out to stop his graduates from leaving for the East Coast.

Terman's 1951 Stanford Industrial Park tied companies to campus research, and Hewlett-Packard brought a flatter style of management. Then William Shockley arrived in 1956, betting on silicon over germanium, and proved such a terrible boss that eight of his researchers quit to found Fairchild Semiconductor. From there the story runs through Intel, venture capital on Sand Hill Road, the Homebrew Computer Club, Xerox PARC, and the housing and inequality problems the boom left behind.

• Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor, moved to Mountain View simply to be closer to his sick mother in Palo Alto.
• California's limits on non-compete clauses let engineers leave on Friday and start a rival on Monday, which made the spin-off the valley's standard path to growth.
• Because banks would not lend to engineers with no assets or revenue, venture capital grew up instead, and Silicon Valley Bank formed in 1983 to lend to pre-profit startups.
• Between 2010 and 2015 the region added 400,000 jobs but permitted only 60,000 housing units, and a $96,000 salary now counts as low income in Santa Clara County.
• Less than 1 percent of the valley's population holds 36 percent of its household wealth, which recently passed $1.1 trillion.