A dropped valley named for chip silicon in 1971
Silicon Valley labels the southern San Francisco Bay's Santa Clara corridor as a global tech engine. Trade journalist Don Hoefler put the phrase on Electronic News covers dated 11 January 1971, nodding to silicon transistors rather than scenic geology.
Hoefler picked up the phrase at lunch with visiting marketing staff, but it was already in circulation: a Palo Alto firm's advertisement used it in May 1970, and it may have started with Pentagon contacts who dealt with local contractors. Before the chips, this was the Valley of Heart's Delight, the world's biggest fruit-growing and packing region into the 1960s, with 39 canneries. The towns sit on an alluvial plain in a graben, a block of land that sank between roughly parallel earthquake faults.
The roots are military and academic. Charles Herrold began the country's first regularly scheduled radio broadcasts in San Jose in 1909, and that year Stanford graduate Cyril Elwell founded the Federal Telegraph Corporation in Palo Alto, which built a global radio network and won a Navy contract in 1912. From 1933 Moffett Field housed the airship USS Macon, attracting suppliers that stayed on when NACA, forerunner of NASA, took over parts of the base.
Stanford was the catalyst. Frederick Terman, engineering dean from 1946, urged staff and students to launch companies, and in 1951 he set up Stanford Industrial Park, leasing university land to firms including Hewlett-Packard, Varian and Lockheed. Add abundant venture money, light regulation, defence budgets and a regional culture more collaborative than East Coast engineering, and the silicon integrated circuit, the microprocessor and the microcomputer all emerged here.
Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Palo Alto and Menlo Park usually claim the birthplace title, alongside San Jose, Cupertino and others. In 2015 the San Jose metro ranked third in the world for GDP per head, after Zurich and Oslo, and by mid-2021 some 47 per cent of its homes were worth a million dollars or more. The region hosts more than 30 Fortune 1000 headquarters, the Bay Area draws a third of American venture capital, and the name now means both a patch of Santa Clara County and the whole Bay's tech industry, though by 2023 that industry was spreading more widely.
Source: Silicon Valley
