A period of transformation
1955 – 1964
The Stanford “Dish” radio telescope under construction in the Stanford foothills, 1961. | Stanford News Service. See complete caption below
by Andrew Myers
There was something special about the IBM 650, something that has provided the inspiration for much of my life’s work.
— Donald Kunth
1955 – 1964
As the School of Engineering’s fourth decade opened, Fred Terman was in his tenth year as dean. In 1955, he was named provost of Stanford, the university’s second highest position. Terman held both jobs for three years before shifting solely to his role as provost. In 1958, Joseph Pettit, a professor of electrical engineering, was named dean. During Pettit’s fourteen years in that position, the school experienced meteoric growth in scope, scale, and reputation. By the late 1960s, Stanford would be among the top producers of engineering PhDs in the nation.(1)
The fourth decade was a period of transformation as much for the School of Engineering as it was for the world. New technologies and new disciplines yielded breakthroughs from jet and rocket propulsion to computer science, atomic energy, and solid-state electronics. Fields that had scarcely existed a decade earlier now welcomed skilled engineers by the score. Stanford stood ready to lead.
New directions in funding
A profound shift in sources and amounts of funding took place during this period. In Fred Terman’s first year as dean, 1946, total government commissions had been $127,599—for the entire university. A decade later, Department of Defense contracts alone brought in $4.5 million, a number that would triple by the mid-1960s. Stanford landed third among the list of university defense contractors.(2)
In addition to abundant federal spending, the School of Engineering diversified into private philanthropic funding. In 1959, the Ford Foundation donated $25 million for “urgent problems in engineering education,” but with a catch: Stanford would need to raise $3 for every $1 awarded, bringing the total amount to $100 million. This became one of the largest unrestricted grants in the history of higher education at the time.(3)
In 1960, that same grant helped to form the university’s first Department of Chemical Engineering under chair David Malcom Mason.(4) The Ford Foundation also made a separate grant of $3.4 million to the School of Engineering to study plasma dynamics, solid mechanics, and engineering-economic systems.(5) Considerable as it was, however, private philanthropy was still no match for the federal government. In 1960, federal contracts composed 40 percent of the entire university’s operating budget.(6)
Dedication of the Computation Center at Polya Hall, 1963, when computer science was still part of the Department of Mathematics. The IBM 7090 or the Burroughs B5000 may be the machines pictured here. | Special Collections & University Archives.
New tools on campus
In January 1956, Stanford welcomed an IBM 650 mainframe computer to the Electronics Research Lab and offered its first courses in digital and analog computing. Together, the departments of industrial engineering, electrical engineering, statistics, and mathematics developed a graduate program in data processing and scientific computations.(7) The IBM 650, occupying what was then the only air-conditioned building on campus, would become the subject of college lore. “There was something special about the IBM 650, something that has provided the inspiration for much of my life’s work. Somehow this machine is powerful in spite of its severe limitations. Somehow it is friendly in spite of its primitive man-machine interface,” wrote one of the computer’s earliest acolytes, legendary programmer and computer science professor Donald Knuth, in his autobiography.(8)
Meanwhile, in the Department of Mathematics, situated in the School of Humanities and Sciences, a new discipline known as computer science took shape. George Forsythe, later referred to as the “Martin Luther of the Computer Reformation,” became the first faculty member at Stanford to focus on computer science.(9) Forsythe foresaw a field headed in new directions that would bring it closer to engineering with every passing year. By 1965, the nascent division had transitioned to become one of the first departments of computer science in the nation. It would move to the School of Engineering in 1985.
In 1955, Ronald Bracewell arrived on campus to begin his exploratory work in radio astronomy,(10) as did the school’s first solid-state specialist, John Linvill, who would quickly “transistorize” the electrical engineering curriculum.(11) In an opportune coincidence for Linvill and for the School of Engineering, William Shockley, coinventor of the semiconductor transistor while at Bell Labs, settled in Palo Alto in late 1955 and founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. Terman appointed him as a lecturer,(12) and the following year he would share the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain, who had been his colleagues at Bell Labs.(13)
Left to right: Stanford electrical engineers John Linvill and James Gibbons, with Gerald Pearson of Bell Labs, March 1958. Gibbons, who would later become dean of the School of Engineering, holds a four-layer Shockley diode, the first semiconductor device ever made at Stanford—and presumably at any university. Gibbons had been taught to build semiconductor devices by William Shockley. Pearson, who had coinvented the solar cell battery while at Bell Labs, joined the Stanford electrical engineering faculty in 1960. | Courtesy James Gibbons.
Ronald Bracewell in 1959, standing in front of the Stanford Radio Astronomy Observatory, which he designed and built. Also known as Heliopolis, the Observatory was made up of thirty-two 10-foot-diameter parabolic antennas arranged in a cross. Together they measured solar activity and the sun’s temperature. The algorithms Bracewell developed to recreate images from scans were later used in computer-assisted tomography (CAT) scans for medical diagnosis. The array was demolished in 2006. | Special Collections & University Archives.
Linvill made a critical strategic decision to shift the focus of the solid-state engineering program from circuit design to the design and fabrication of semiconductor devices.(14) More importantly, Linvill and Terman carved out a unique relationship with the mercurial Shockley, with a novel time-share arrangement for James Gibbons, one of Linvill’s graduate students and a future dean of the School of Engineering. Gibbons would spend half his time working at Shockley Semiconductor and half teaching and researching at Stanford. Gibbons recreated Shockley’s lab at Stanford, and there, in March 1958, the university’s first silicon device—a four-layer Shockley diode—was manufactured, making Stanford perhaps the first university in the United States to fabricate silicon components.(15)
Shockley would eventually be appointed professor in 1963 but, though he was once considered among the most important scientists of the twentieth century,(16) he squandered his legacy by focusing on eugenicist theories on race and intelligence.(17)
Under Bracewell’s guidance, construction began in 1959 on a radar telescope that would train thirty-two 10-foot-diameter parabolic antennas at the sun’s surface and employ them in unison—acting as one big antenna—to map temperature variations. Unlike the passive radio receivers that predated it, Bracewell’s telescope had a million-watt transmitter to bounce radar signals off the moon, Venus, and other nearby planetary objects. Among other endeavors, he used his two-way radar telescope to provide highly accurate measurements of cosmic distances, to study the surfaces of the moon and planets, and to understand how solar disturbances affect weather and communications on Earth.(18)
Sometime in 1956, physics professor Robert Hofstadter suggested that Stanford build a linear particle accelerator many times more powerful than its predecessor, the High Energy Physics Lab’s Mark III.(19) The new accelerator, dubbed “The Monster” and later known simply as “Project M,” would need to stretch 2 miles through the hills behind campus. In 1957, the university submitted a successful proposal to the federal government and began construction of what would become the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). The price tag for that single facility was $100 million—equal to more than $1 billion today. Edward Ginzton, professor of electrical engineering and of applied physics, helped direct the massive undertaking, as he had with the Mark III and the klystron before it.
The space age
The field of flight, fueled by the advent of jet and rocket engines in World War II, was also changing rapidly in this period. In September 1957, the School of Engineering established the Division of Aeronautics in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Walter Vincenti, known for his study of high-speed aerodynamics and his later work on heat shields for spacecraft, was appointed as the division’s first professor. Nicholas Hoff, an expert in strong, lightweight aircraft structures, was named executive head.(20)
Just a month later, the Russians launched the world’s first satellite into orbit. The Space Age had begun. The division of aeronautics had been functioning like a department, Dean Pettit noted to Provost Terman, who approved Pettit’s request to formalize the Department of Aeronautics in 1959.(21) The field was evolving rapidly, with high-speed flight and access to space having increasing influence on modern culture. To reflect the expanding potential of the Space Age, the name was changed in 1961 to the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the first department at Stanford explicitly dedicated to interdisciplinary research.(22)
The Stanford “Dish” radio telescope under construction in the Stanford foothills, 1961. A 70-ton, 150-foot steel and aluminum parabolic antenna with a surface spanning nearly half an acre, it was designed and built by the Stanford Research Institute for the U.S. government with support from the U.S. Air Force Office of Aerospace Research and the Defense Support Agency. In the 1940s, a group of Stanford’s electrical engineers––including Robert A. Helliwell, Laurence A. Manning, and O. G. Villard, Jr.—had tested the idea that radio signals bounced off meteor trails. As faculty, they formed the core of Stanford’s Radio Science Laboratory, later joined by professors Ronald Bracewell, Allen M. Peterson, and others. More than a decade later, the Dish enabled vastly expanded studies of scattering effects in Earth’s ionosphere and was used to detect Soviet radar by capturing radio signals that bounced off the moon. The Dish is still used today for satellite calibrations, spacecraft command and telemetry, and radio astronomy measurements. | Stanford News Service.
The spirit of invention
In the 1960s, with the Space Race in full stride and America eager to put a man on the moon, the possibilities of space seemed boundless. Stanford Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg, a geneticist, teamed with Elliott Levinthal, a mechanical engineer, to build the “multivator,” an instrument designed to conduct biological experiments to test for life on distant planets.(23) Lederberg and Levinthal hoped the multivator would be aboard the first Mars lander mission planned for 1966, but that mission never materialized. Nearly a decade later, however, when the Viking Lander headed for Mars in 1975, it included a modified version of their model.(24)
That spirit of innovation was again on display in 1964 when John Linvill introduced the Optacon, a reading machine able to translate printed pages into a vibrating array of pins, creating a form of “electronic Braille” that could be read with the fingertips. Joining Linvill that day to help demonstrate the Optacon was Candace Linvill, the inventor’s twelve-year-old daughter, who was blind.(25)
The Stanford Industrial Park
Map of the park, showing the growth of Varian Associates, Hewlett-Packard, Fairchild, Xerox, and other businesses, August 17, 1962. | Special Collections & University Archives.
The Stanford Industrial Park opened in 1953 with the completion of its first building, constructed by Varian Associates, and became a model for regional industrial parks around the world. Known today as the Stanford Research Park, it remains Stanford University’s earliest, most direct, and most profitable contribution to the Silicon Valley landscape.
Increasing university-industry interactions was a high priority for School of Engineering Dean Terman and others at Stanford during the 1950s. In 1952, Stanford made public its desire to find more clients willing to locate “shiny-faced plants like laboratories and pharmaceutical manufacturers,” as a writer for Business Week put it, on a 40-acre parcel of land off the main campus.(27)
The success of the Varian initiative moved Terman to oppose prevailing tendencies in the University’s master plan for campus land development. In 1954, Terman wrote of the master plan that “there is, in fact, already strong evidence that the area allocated for light industrial use may be too small.” If Stanford were to assume its rightful place as the “great intellectual center of the West,” it should think bigger, he argued. When he became provost in 1955, he used his influence to see that the Industrial Park acquired more tenants and industrial leases of the sort he favored: “high-technology” clients like Varian Associates.(28)
Map of the park, showing the growth of Varian Associates, Hewlett-Packard, Fairchild, Xerox, and other businesses, August 17, 1962. | Special Collections & University Archives.
Another such company was Hewlett-Packard, founded by Terman’s former students William Hewlett and David Packard. The symbol of HP’s success was the opening of a new 170,000-square-foot plant in the Stanford Industrial Park in 1958. Architects from the firm Ehrlich-Rominger created what Western Electronic News called an “ultramodern” complex, built for energy efficiency and earthquake resistance.(29) Steel, glass, and reinforced concrete sprawled down terraced hills overlooking the northern end of the Santa Clara Valley. Inside the plant, innovative practices enhanced employees’ comfort and productivity. The Industrial Park symbolized Stanford’s role in the growth of a new kind of American industry when it was featured at the International Exposition in Brussels later that year and on the itineraries of dignitaries such as France’s president Charles de Gaulle, who visited in 1960.
— Henry Lowood
Harold C. Hohbach Curator for History of Science & Technology
Collections and Head, Silicon Valley Archives
The administrative organization of the School of Engineering was growing as well. In 1955, the School of Engineering elevated industrial engineering to a department. In 1960, the metallurgy program, which had been moved out of the School of Engineering in the 1940s, was brought back to the School of Engineering to create one of the country’s first materials science departments, soon to be among the top-ranked programs in the country.(30)
By the time he had founded the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) in 1962, professor John McCarthy had long since coined the term “artificial intelligence.” McCarthy, a giant in early AI, wanted to design computers that could simulate human thought31 with applications in robotics, expert systems, speech understanding, and cognitive science. He developed the programming language Lisp, an acronym for list processing; played computer chess by telegraph against Russian opponents; and invented computer time-sharing, which allowed multiple users to access a single computer system simultaneously,(32) foreshadowing the advent of cloud computing decades later. SAIL became highly influential across Silicon Valley. Over time, its intellectual progeny would take influential roles at Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon, among many other companies, and a remarkable eighteen of its members would win the A.M. Turing Award, often described today as the “Nobel Prize of computer science,” granted by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
Buoyed by new funding streams, the School of Engineering established the Environmental Engineering and Science (EES) program in 1962, when Rolf Eliassen came to campus, bringing with him former MIT colleague Perry McCarty. The two would institute a novel approach to research that brought together engineers and scientists from various disciplines, each of whom could develop a unique interdisciplinary curriculum defined by their backgrounds and goals, to improve water science and engineering.(33)
In 1958, plans were made for the Harris J. Ryan High-Voltage Laboratory, a Stanford institution since 1926, to add a 10-kilowatt nuclear “teaching reactor” fueled by uranium on loan from the Atomic Energy Commission.(34)
The Engineering Laboratories with old clock tower (left) and Engineering Corner, 1960. | Special Collections & University Archives.
Nuclear reactor in Stanford’s Nuclear Technology Laboratory, in the former Harris J. Ryan High-Voltage Laboratory, 1961. The 10-kilowatt teaching reactor was on loan from the Atomic Energy Commission. | Stanford News Service.
Engineering professor George Leppert (right) and graduate student Gary Vliet take measurements in Stanford’s subcritical nuclear assembly, 1958. The apparatus, which operated like a reactor but could not sustain a chain reaction, was located in Stanford’s Nuclear Technology Laboratory. The nuclear engineering program, led by Professor Leppert, was developed in the Mechanical Engineering Department in 1955. | Stanford News Service.
Facilities upgrades
With ever more contracts, faculty, and students flowing in, it was clear the School of Engineering was rapidly outgrowing its physical spaces. First Terman and then Pettit laid out plans for a new science quad. They opted for a 30-acre parcel across Lomita Mall expressly designed to promote “cross-fertilization” among scientific fields. The new quad would eventually total fourteen buildings, much of it financed through earnings from government contracts and faculty research, particularly the klystron.(36) The klystron proved to be a wise investment for Stanford: Just $100 in seed money and the use of a small laboratory space returned royalties of more than $2.5 million over the life of the patent, funding three campus buildings and hundreds of thousands of dollars in research funding.(37)
Provost Frederick E. Terman (left), former dean of the School of Engineering, and Dean Joseph M. Pettit with Mrs. Thomas F. Peterson, 1963. The Thomas F. Peterson Engineering Laboratory—named in memory of her late husband, whose support made the facility possible—was dedicated in May 1963. | Stanford News Service.
By the mid-1960s, the Stanford School of Engineering shared a place among the top engineering education institutions in the nation, if not the world. Stanford Engineering ranked third in the United States in graduate degrees conferred in 1961–1962: 302 master’s degrees, 33 engineer’s degrees, and 75 doctorates.(38)That leadership was reflected in the starting salaries graduates reported during the mid-1960s, with Stanford Engineering’s averages well above the national averages.(39)
Despite its sweeping scale of change and innovation, Stanford Engineering’s fourth decade was but a foundation for the advances and innovations—in campus growth, semiconductors, computers, radar telescopes, and beyond—that were all yet to come.
Explore more decades
The Terman Era
Decade 3
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Be a part of the celebration
As we celebrate the school’s Centennial anniversary, we invite you to mark this milestone by sharing one of your favorite memories of Stanford Engineering. We’d love to hear from you and will be re-sharing selected memories in a variety of ways both publicly and privately throughout the year. Please note: not all submissions will be shared publicly.