Silicon Valley is a place where almost every startup and programmer dreams of working. It is not on the geographical map, but it is one of the largest centers for the development of global innovative technologies. “They built innovative companies that became huge tech corporations, and that’s because where everyone else saw risk, they saw opportunity,” said venture capitalist Tom Perkins about the Valley’s pioneers.
Silicon Valley is a leading global center of high-tech companies located in the southwestern state of California. The largest cities in the Silicon Valley are San Francisco, San Jose, San Mateo, Polo Alto, Fremont, Santa Cruz, Scotts Valley, Livermore, and Pleasanton. Stanford University has become a kind of intellectual center of the Valley, which annually enrolls about 7,000 undergraduate and 8,000 graduate students.
Nowadays, leading manufacturers of microprocessors, software, mobile devices, biotechnology, etc. work here. And it all started in the mid-nineteenth century, when the first research laboratories for shipbuilding, both military and commercial, were built on this territory. It should be added that the US Navy contributed to the formation of the Valley: in 1933, the Navy acquired Moffett Field, a plot of land in Sunnyvale to service military airships. Later, the area became the center of the aerospace industry. During World War II, radars and artillery developments were produced here.
One of the “fathers” of Silicon Valley is physicist William Shockley, who, while working at Bell Labs, invented the first germanium bipolar transistor together with his colleagues. In 1956, the researchers received the Nobel Prize in Physics for this. Subsequently, Shockley moved to California, where he founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View. The main goal of the new company was to develop methods for using silicon in the manufacture of transistors (which replaced the more expensive and less resistant to high temperatures semiconductor material germanium). Shockley gathered 8 talented young researchers in his team, who, after the death of their mentor, continued the work and established successful production of silicon transistors. These employees went down in history as the “Treacherous Eight”.
The name “Silicon Valley” was first used in 1971 by journalist Don Hefler in his report on the development of the semiconductor industry. The Russian-language version of “Silicon Valley” arose because of the similarity in the spelling of the English words silicon and silicone. Criticizing the mistake, in 1984 Steve Gibson wrote in Infoworld magazine: “…integrated circuits are made of thin, round, flat wafers of ultrapure silicon. This is not the same as silicone. Silicon Valley is what some Hollywood actresses see when they look down at their feet. Silicon Valley is a place in Northern California where they make microchips.”
In 1972, financiers Eugene Kleiner and Tom Perkins created the first venture capital company in Silicon Valley for young entrepreneurs. After that, inventors and scientists from all over the world began to try their luck in the Valley. It should be added that ordinary residents who had a piece of land in southwestern California became billionaires in no time after selling their plots.