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Humble origins -

The story of Silicon Valley begins 250 years ago. A Spanish priest, Father Junipero Serra, oversaw the construction of a series of missions in what was then called "New Spain"—present-day California. One of these was called Mission Santa Clara, located in a valley and the first to be named after a female saint, a decision inspired by the area's beauty and agricultural bounty.

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Mission Santa Clara -

Founded in 1777, Mission Santa Clara was built by the Franciscans. In 1850, when California became a state, it was taken over by the Jesuits. A college built on the mission site in 1851 evolved into Santa Clara University.

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Leland Stanford (1824–1893) -

The arrival in Santa Clara of the hugely successful entrepreneur Leland Stanford marked the beginning of a new chapter in the Silicon Valley story.

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Founding of Stanford University -

Seeking a blissful retreat, Stanford and his wife Jane purchased property in the Santa Clara Valley. But their happiness was short lived. Tragedy struck when their only child died at the age of 15. To honor his memory, the Stanfords founded a new university: Stanford University.

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Key academic and research institutions -

This new seat of learning would play a major role in the development of the culture of collaboration among high-tech companies. Indeed, as the region's key academic and research institutions, Stanford University and Santa Clara University continue to play a key role in the evolution and ongoing success of Silicon Valley.

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Development of Santa Clara Valley -

Meanwhile, Santa Clara Valley for the most part escaped major development. By the early 1930s, just a few residential properties and a migratory labor camp textured this bucolic corner of California. But advances in communications technology were about to change all that.

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Advances in communications technology -

As early as 1909, Charles Herrold—the "Father of Broadcasting"—had established the first radio station in the United States with regularly scheduled programming in San Jose. Later, Stanford graduate Cyril Elwell founded the Federal Telegraph Corporation (FTC) in Palo Alto.

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Groundbreaking inventions -

In 1913, a scientist at the FTC, Lee Deforest, unveiled the first vacuum tube amplifier and oscillator, a device capable of amplifying a signal such that it could be transmitted over long distance. This enabled the FTC to create the world's first global radio communication system.

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Moffett Field -

The San Francisco Bay Area had long been a major site of United States Navy research and technology. In 1933, Air Base Sunnyvale was commissioned by the US government to house the airship USS Macon in a huge hanger known as Hanger One (pictured). The naval air station was later renamed Moffett Field. The land around the airport, plus the cities of Sunnyvale and Mountain View, attracted a number of technological firms looking to serve the US Navy. Suddenly, Santa Clara Valley was the place to do business in.

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"Birthplace of Silicon Valley" -

All the time, Stanford and Santa Clara graduates were breaking new ground in the fields of communications technology. In 1939, William Hewlett and David Packard patented an audio oscillator, forming the foundation for the Hewlett-Packard company. Both were former students of Frederick Terman, the dean of the school of engineering who established the Stanford Research Park. The former home and garage of Hewlett and Packard in Palo Alto where the company first started in 1938 is now a California landmark and designated as the "Birthplace of Silicon Valley."

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Nobel-winning work -

In the late 1940s, William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain invented the first working transistor at Bell Labs in New Jersey. The three scientists were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work.

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Fathers of Silicon Valley -

After his Nobel award, William Shockley moved from New Jersey to Mountain View, California, to start his own company, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. Shockley believed that silicon was the better material for making transistors. Both Frederick Terman and William Shockley are often called "the father of Silicon Valley."

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Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory -

A display of sculptures of giant transistors and diodes near the original location of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory stand as a tribute to Shockley's pioneering research.

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Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation -

Within a year, a group of dissatisfied engineers resigned en masse from Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to join with Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation to establish rival start-up, Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, in nearby Santa Clara.

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Dominant role -

Fairchild Semiconductor effectively laid the groundwork for Silicon Valley's dominance in the technology sector. Fairchild employees would later go on to start many other companies, including Intel and AMD. Pictured is Gordon Moore who, together with Robert Noyce, founded Intel.

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Influence of venture capital firms -

All this tech needed funding, and lots of it! One man, Eugene Kleiner, left Fairchild Semiconductors to form Kleiner Perkins, a venture capital firm. The company based itself on Sand Hill Road and went on to fund 900 companies, including Amazon, Google, Skype, Spotify, SnapChat,  Electronic Arts, Netscape, and Twitter. Pictured left to right are the co-founders: Eugene Kleiner, Thomas Perkins, Frank J. Caulfield, and Brook Byers.

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Sand Hill Road -

Sand Hill Road today has the highest density of venture capital firms in the world.

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Birth of the internet -

In 1969, the ARPANET computer network was established with four nodes, including one at Stanford University. ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) was established by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense. The program was headed by Larry Roberts, who produced this early diagram of how a nationwide computer network might look. ARPANET technology became the technical foundation of the internet.

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'Silicon Valley, U.S.A.' -

In 1971, American journalist Don Hoefler coined the term "Silicon Valley" for the first time in print. Hoefler was compiling a three-part report on the rise of technological development in the region for Electronic News. The published article was titled 'Silicon Valley, U.S.A.'

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Arrival of Steve Jobs -

The 1970s saw the rise of computer culture, with Atari, Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle all founded within the decade. One young student who secured a summer job on the assembly line at HP was Steve Jobs.

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Founding of Apple -

Steve Jobs, together with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, would cofound Apple Computer, Inc. in 1976. Jobs and Wozniak are pictured here in the mid-'70s.

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The Apple Computer 1 -

The Apple-1 personal computer was unveiled the same year. Just four years later, on December 12, 1980, Apple launched its IPO... and made around 300 employees instant millionaires!

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Birthplace of Apple Computers -

Steve Jobs' and Steve Wozniak's technical wizardry and extraordinary vision lie at the very heart of Silicon Valley's enduring mystique. The house with a garage where they both developed the Apple computer concept still stands, at 2066 Crist Drive in Los Altos, California: the birthplace of Apple computers.

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PayPal Mafia -

Commercial use of the internet became practical and grew slowly throughout the early 1990s. Netscape, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, PayPal, and Netflix were all established throughout the 1990s. It was also during this period that the PayPal Mafia emerged, a group of former PayPal employees and founders, among them David Sacks and Elon Musk (pictured), who went on to create additional technology companies based in Silicon Valley, such as Tesla, Inc., LinkedIn, and YouTube.

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Lucky location -

This building at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto was the former home of Google, Logitech, PayPal, and other large tech companies during their infancy. The premises has since become a "lucky" location for new start-ups.

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Silicon Valley today -

Silicon Valley today covers an area of 1,854 sq miles (4, 801 sq km) and is home to about three million people.

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High-tech concentration -

Silicon Valley is home to some 2,000 tech companies—the highest concentration in the world. Furthermore, around 200 of the 500 largest companies in the world by revenue are based here, according to Fortune Global 500. Pictured is Apple Park in Cupertino.

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Money, money, money -

Silicon Valleys tech companies currently account for 45% of all venture capital invested in the United States. Pictured is the Googleplex corporate headquarters in Mountain View.

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Employment statistics -

Silicon Valley tech companies have 34% of their employees in production, 32% in computer and math roles, and 11% in management. Pictured is the Meta Platforms headquarters in Menlo Park, home of Facebook.

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NASA research hub -

Moffett Field, meanwhile, is now the location of Ames Research Center, a major NASA research hub. At last estimate, NASA Ames had over US$3 billion in capital equipment, 2,300 research personnel, and an $860 million annual budget.

Sources: (History Cooperative) (Medium) (Investopedia) (Britannica) (The Business Journals) (Fortune)

See also: NASA inventions we use everyday

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