Bugos on Lecuyer, _Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930-1970_

[eh.net-review at eh.net]

Published by EH.NET (February 2008)

Christophe Lecuyer, _Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth 
of High Tech, 1930-1970_. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. x + 393 pp. 
$40 (cloth), ISBN: 0-262-12281-2.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Glenn Bugos, Moment LLC.


In this remarkable introduction to the early history of Silicon 
Valley, Christophe Lecuyer weaves a rich tale around the centrality 
of manufacturing -- sometimes mass manufacturing, but more often 
batch manufacturing to precision and reliability. He argues that 
manufacturing expertise diffused through the Valley through tacit 
knowledge and engineers in motion between firms. Planar technology 
for manufacturing integrated circuits in the late 1960s, he 
concludes, represented the pinnacle of manufacturing in Silicon 
Valley.

Lecuyer has multiple goals for this book. He seeks to define Silicon 
Valley as an industrial district, akin to the Marshallian industrial 
districts that economic historians have begun to explore. Also, he 
integrates into his story the many extant, divergent strands of 
Silicon Valley historiography. Into his manufacturing-driven 
narrative, we see the trends other historians have emphasized -- 
military funding, the shake-out following the McNamara consolidation, 
the role of Stanford University in generating expertise, and the 
importance of workplace culture.

His chapters are structured around firm histories, beginning in their 
start-up years. These are concise histories of the early years of 
Litton, Fairchild, Varian, and Intel. These firms reflect broader 
trends in their industry and, Lecuyer shows, their founders thought 
hard about an ideal of Silicon Valley culture.

The first chapter discusses the power tube industry in the 1930s and 
1940s, focusing on Eitel-McCullough in the context of the region's 
amateur radio community. Eitel-McCullough's manufacturing prowess 
positioned them to become the largest manufacturer of vacuum tubes 
for radar during World War II. Lecuyer does a great job describing 
these pre-silicon electronics technologies.

Litton Industries, powered by hard-charging entrepreneur Charlie 
Litton, is the focus of the next chapter on microwave tubes and 
magnetrons in the post-war period. The third chapter looks at Varian 
Associates and the manufacture of klystrons, a type of microwave tube 
used in defense applications. Perhaps most notable about Varian is 
the explicit idealization of an engineering republic -- of a 
cooperative approach to engineering that remained a fixture of 
Silicon Valley start-up culture.

Fairchild Semiconductor in the 1950s and 1960s adopted the same 
structure and work culture of the earlier vacuum tube makers, but 
moved it into an entirely different material and technology -- 
silicon semiconductors. High frequency silicon transistors were 
needed for guidance and control systems for missiles and aircraft. As 
reliability grew paramount, Fairchild developed a new manufacturing 
technology, leading to the planar process and the integrated circuit.

Chapter 5 looks not at one firm, but rather at the previously 
highlighted firms in their transition from military to commercial 
markets, battered by macro-economic forces in the wake of the 
McNamara procurement reforms of the early 1960s. Eitel merged with 
Varian, which itself diversified into instrumentation and medical 
equipment. Fairchild created new customers for its integrated 
circuits, and moved from a precision manufacturing model to a mass 
manufacturing model. Litton surrendered to the cyclical nature of its 
business yet sought to manage it by becoming a defense conglomerate.

Lecuyer ends with a short chapter on Apple Computer and how it 
shifted these manufacturing ideas into a new generation of personal 
computing technology. His notes and sources are also fascinating 
reading, reflecting the richness of primary materials now available 
on Silicon Valley firms. Lecuyer started this book as a graduate 
student in the history of science and technology at Stanford 
University, and is now an economic policy analyst with the University 
of California.

What about the book that Lecuyer did not write? This book is limited 
in time. It's the story of the Valley in the late 1940s, 1950s and 
1960s, when the leading industrial sector was fairly well defined 
around tubes and silicon. The explosive growth in the Valley came 
after this period, when personal computers, software and 
internetworking soared as industries in the 1980s and 1990s, 
supplemented by biotechnology and medical devices. Yet Lecuyer 
expertly shows how the preconditions for these later industries 
emerged years earlier. More importantly, even within his limited time 
frame, Lecuyer shows how the concept of "generations" is important in 
understanding the Valley. Silicon Valley has never been about just 
silicon. New types of technologies constantly appear, and follow 
similar cycles of boom and bust, only to be replaced by the next 
generation of technology.

Furthermore, this is good, but not great business history in that he 
says little about the rampant innovation in firm structure and 
financing. A constant refrain is frustration, or glee, in getting 
stock options, with little discussion of where stock options came 
from. Still, Lecuyer has a good ear for the importance of customers, 
and emphasizes the role of marketing and sales people in defining new 
markets for products. For example, Fairchild wrote "operational 
notes" that hesitant customers could use to manufacture consumer 
products around the new silicon chips: what he calls "educating 
consumers rather than occupying their space" (298).

He neglects broader trends that enabled the rapid growth of 
electronics manufacturing. The machinery industry that emerged in The 
Valley of Heart's Delight, as the agricultural pre-history of Silicon 
Valley is known, trained a labor force able to build plants around 
clean, batch processing. The tilt-up architecture that flourished in 
the Valley enabled constant reconfiguration of laboratory and 
fabrication space. Lecuyer does discuss Hewlett Packard as an 
instrumentation company, but says little on the importance of test 
and measurement precision to other Valley manufacturers. And Lecuyer 
does discuss Lockheed Missiles and Space, the largest employer in the 
Valley in the 1960s, but only incidental to his narrative.

This book should become, nonetheless, the new starting point for 
those seeking to emulate Silicon Valley in their regions. What can 
they learn? The Valley pioneers truly cared about being able to make 
the first of anything. Office space was less important than lab space 
and fab space. Silicon Valley enjoyed less a culture of conspicuous 
consumption, and more a culture of conspicuous production.


Glenn Bugos is historian with Moment LLC, a corporate history 
consultancy based in Silicon Valley.

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