Authors: Eric Weiner
EIGHT
GENIUS IS WEAK: SILICON VALLEY
I AM IN A BOOKSTORE with my nine-year-old daughter. Having successfully steered her away from Harry Potter land and nimbly skirted Rick Riordan world, we find ourselves in the nonfiction section. I’m trying to get her interested in history, and in genius.
I spot a display that seems to satisfy both wishes: minibiographies of famous historical figures:
Who Was Benjamin Franklin
?
Who Was Albert Einstein?
And there, sandwiched between Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt, is Steve Jobs.
Really? Steve Jobs? Sharing the same lofty cerebral space with Jefferson and Franklin—and Einstein?
While I was researching this book, people always asked me, “How do you define
genius
?” I answer their question with a question: Was Steve Jobs a genius? The responses are invariably passionate, and split right down the middle.
“Yes, absolutely he was a genius,” some people argue, whipping out their iPhone to underscore their point. “Look at this thing, man. It’s awesome. Steve Jobs changed the world. Of course he was a genius.”
“No, he wasn’t,” others argue just as passionately. “He didn’t invent anything. He stole other people’s ideas.” Okay, they concede, “Perhaps he was a marketing genius or a design genius.” They say this knowing full well that true genius never requires a modifier. We don’t describe Einstein as a “scientific genius” or Mozart as a “musical genius.” Both of these men transcended their particular fields, as genius always does.
So who was Steve Jobs? Genius or not? The Fashionista Theory of Genius tells us that, yes, Jobs was a genius because we (or at least many of us) believe he was. Genius is a social verdict, and the people have tweeted. That we are even asking the question of Jobs and not of, say, Thomas Adès, speaks gigabytes. Never heard of him? He’s one of the greatest classical composers of our time. We get the geniuses that we want and that we deserve.
A more important question, for my purposes, is not whether Jobs was a genius but whether the place that nurtured him is. Does Silicon Valley deserve pride of place alongside classical Athens, Renaissance Florence, Song Dynasty China? Again, some of you will shout a loud “Nay!” You’d point out that while past greats such as Thucydides proudly proclaimed that they aimed to create “a possession for all time,” the same cannot be said of the coders and other technokinds residing in the Valley. Your new iPhone, gleaming and magical, will be obsolete before you can even
say
Thucydides. You might also point out that these past golden ages sparked in many different directions—art, science, literature—while Silicon Valley plays basically one note, albeit in different keys. Complicating matters is that, unlike the stories of Athens and Florence, Silicon Valley’s story isn’t told in the past tense. It’s still unfolding.
Clearly, though, the Valley meets at least one important criterion for genius: impact. We live differently today from how we did twenty-five years ago, thanks largely to the products and ideas that have been perfected, if not invented, in Silicon Valley. These innovations have changed not only how we talk to one another but what we say, for, as Stanford University historian Leslie Berlin points out, “by changing the means, you change the content.”
What is honored in a country will be cultivated there.
Clearly, we honor
what the Valley is selling. We honor it every time we stand in line for the latest Apple iteration, and every time we log on to Facebook or Twitter.
Silicon Valley is different in other ways, too. For starters, it is not a city. It is suburban sprawl, which all the California sunshine and digital pixie dust can’t hide. Silicon Valley is also more familiar than Athens or Florence. I may not own any Greek statuary or Renaissance paintings, but I do own an iPhone. I may not write Chinese poetry or produce Indian art, but I google regularly. I don’t know any ancient Greek philosophers, nor have I hobnobbed with a Medici, but I do know people who reside in the Valley. I briefly lived there myself a while ago. Heck, I’ve even binge-watched the eponymously named HBO series. So, yes, I know Silicon Valley.
Or do I? Silicon Valley, I realize, is a lot like my iPhone. It does wondrous things. I can’t live without it. But I have no idea how it works or what’s inside. Apple warns me not to open the back; bad things will happen if I do. I have obediently complied, content to buy into the shiny slab of mythology resting so perfectly, so ergonomically, in the palm of my hand. That is about to change. Screwdriver please.
Good,
Socrates says.
Recognizing your ignorance is the beginning of all wisdom.
Freud, student of the ancients, concurs, adding that my overconfidence is clearly masking some deep-seated insecurity and probably has something to do with my mother. David Hume echoes both Socrates and Freud, adding that I will never know Silicon Valley, or any place for that matter, unless I know its history. Otherwise, I will remain forever a child. It’s time to grow up.
Arriving in Palo Alto, it quickly becomes apparent that Silicon Valley, unlike say, Florence, doesn’t wear its history on its streets. Walking down the city’s tony University Avenue, with its pricey eateries and designer-bike shops, the $100,000 Teslas silently gliding by, the past is nowhere in sight. The city, I suspect, is too busy imagining the future,
creating
the future, to spare any bandwidth for the past. It is here though. It just requires some digging.
Pilgrims in search of Silicon Valley’s roots typically head straight for 367 Addison Avenue. It’s not the house that interests them but what’s
behind it: a small garage with a green door. Here, in 1938, two young Stanford graduates, Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett, spent hours experimenting, though that is probably overstating it. They were tinkering. “They hammered away on projects such as a motor controller helping the telescope at Lick observatory track objects better and a bowling alley device that chirped when someone crossed the foul line,” my guidebook,
Geek Silicon Valley
, cheerfully informs me. Eventually, the duo happened on a winning invention, an audio oscillator, used to test sound equipment. I look up and see a small plaque, which confirms that I am standing on hallowed ground:
THE BIRTHPLACE OF THE WORLD’S FIRST HIGH-TECHNOLOGY REGION: SILICON VALLEY
. Like so much in the Valley, though, the sign is misleading. This is not the birthplace of Silicon Valley.
The true birthplace isn’t far, though. I walk a few more blocks, past charming little houses worth more than I’ll earn in a lifetime, before stopping at what was once 913 Emerson Street. The house itself is gone. All that remains is a small plaque, situated across from a dry cleaner’s and an auto repair shop. It informs me that this was the original site of the Federal Telegraph Company. Despite its name, it was a radio company, and a good one.
Radio was the digital technology of its day—new, magical, and brimming with the potential to change the world. If you were young and smart and ambitious shortly before World War I, radio was where you wanted to be. The fledgling industry received a huge boost in 1912, thanks to the law of unintended consequences. After the sinking of the
Titanic
that year, Congress passed a law requiring all ships to carry radios. As a port city, San Francisco was perfectly suited to ride this new wave of interest in radio technology.
At about the same time, Federal Telegraph hired a brilliant young radio engineer named Lee de Forest, in what was perhaps the first, but far from last, time the region poached talent from back East. De Forest was hoping to rejuvenate a stalled career. He succeeded wildly, inventing, here on Emerson Street, the first vacuum-tube amplifier and oscillator, devices that shaped not only radio technology but also television and all of electronics. De Forest was passionate about his work, relishing the
time he spent in this “Invisible Empire of the Air . . . intangible, yet solid as granite.” I realize that statement could easily apply to the Silicon Valley of today. The Invisible Empire continues to expand its reach.
Radio wasn’t only a business. It was a hobby, too. A culture of tinkering blossomed in the San Francisco Bay Area. Ham radio clubs proliferated, thus firmly establishing the cult of the amateur in the region. You can draw a straight line from the amateur radio clubs of the 1910s and ’20s to the Homebrew Computer Club, which in the 1970s and ’80s played such an important role in the development of the personal computer.
Palo Alto, a small town, was the unlikely hub of this radio revolution. Boasted the
Palo Alto Times
, “What Edison’s Menlo Park is to the incandescent lamp, Palo Alto is to radio and the electronic arts.” No one was more enthralled than a curious fourteen-year-old named Fred Terman. He was mesmerized by this new technology and the pioneers at Federal Telegraph, “literally a looming presence,” writes his biographer Stewart Gillmor. “Four 50-foot poles strung with twelve miles of aluminum for ‘secret’ experiments now graced the company’s new site.” Danger signs were posted everywhere, and nothing piques a teenager’s interest more than the forbidden. Terman spent every free minute hanging out near the company grounds and even managed to finagle a summer job. I’m reminded of a young Filippo Brunelleschi, walking past the domeless cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore every day and wondering, “What if?” Did young Fred Terman harbor similar dreams?
Terman was a child of Stanford in more ways than one. Not only did he spend most of his eighty-two years here, but he was the son of Lewis Terman, a professor of psychology at the university and cocreator of a widely used IQ test, the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales. Lewis Terman believed it was crucial that educators recognize potential genius at an early age so that they could nurture it. “In Terman’s view, nothing less than the future of civilization was at stake,” notes Darrin McMahon in his brilliant history of genius. Terman was an American Galton, certain in his belief that genius was hereditary and that the job of educators was to identify those with the “right” genes.
In 1921, Lewis Terman launched a landmark study aimed at doing
just that. He found some one thousand children with IQs of over 140 (“genius in the making”), then tracked them over many years. The “Termites,” as they were known, performed well enough academically but produced little in the way of true genius. What’s more, Terman’s experiment failed to detect two future Nobel Prize winners, Luis Alvarez and William Shockley. “Their tested IQs failed to meet the cutoff of 140, and they were weeded out and discarded accordingly,” explains McMahon.
Lewis Terman was smart, but like many smart men he had blind spots. He failed to realize that intelligence and creativity are only tangentially related, as are education and creativity. Higher education does not correlate with a greater likelihood of genius. Terman also failed to recognize that, as Paul Saffo, resident futurist of the Valley, told me over crepes one day, “you can be a really stupid genius.”
I know it sounds absurd, but Saffo defended his claim by pointing out the apocryphal tale known as Egg of Columbus. In the story, Columbus returned from his voyage to America a hero, but some in Spain remained unimpressed with his feat.
“Anybody can sail across the ocean, just as you have done,” one critic said over dinner. “It is the simplest thing in the world.”
Columbus replied by reaching for an egg and challenging the dinner guests to make it stand on end. When none could do it, Columbus took the egg and broke the shell slightly. It stood easily. “It is the simplest thing in the world,” he said. “Anybody can do it—after he has been shown how.”
Young Fred Terman grew up in the shadow of his father’s social experiment, and I can’t help but wonder how it affected him. At the very least, he seemed determined to impress his father with his academic performance. He earned a pair of degrees at Stanford and soon established the first electronics lab west of the Mississippi. Later, as dean of Stanford’s engineering school, he set out to attract the best and the brightest minds from the East Coast. Like the executives at Federal Telegraph, he poached shamelessly, choosing only the best. “It’s better to have one seven-foot jumper on your team rather than any number of six-foot jumpers,” he once wrote. His aim, he said, was to build “steeples of excellence.”
Terman saw the world through an engineer’s eyes. He believed in
measurable results, metrics, long before it became fashionable. He was shy and would no doubt have found truth in that old joke about engineers: “How can you spot the extroverted engineer? He’s the one staring at
your
shoes.” Yet Terman pioneered what has since become a Silicon Valley trope: the heroic nerd.
Terman was an introvert who did a good impersonation of an extrovert. His forte was connecting people. He was the original networker, at a time when the word had not yet acquired the mercenary overtones it has today. “He did not ‘network’ for personal gain or to hook a juicy funding agency but rather saw his own job as expediting a circle of relationships,” writes Gillmor.
One relationship he cemented was between two of his former students, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. He encouraged them to exploit the commercial potential of their device, the audio oscillator, and lent them $538 to help them get off the ground. That the country was in the midst of the Depression actually helped convince the two young graduates to take the leap. As Dave Packard would later explain, jobs were scarce, so why not start your own company?
Success came quickly. Their first big customer was Walt Disney Studios, which bought eight oscillators for the filming of
Fantasia,
marking the beginning of a collaboration between Silicon Valley and Hollywood, Pixar being the most obvious example of that partnership today.
Much is made of Stanford University’s role in the birth of Silicon Valley, and deservedly so, but not for the reasons most believe. It was not because Stanford was a world-class university. At the time, it was not. Rather, what Stanford did under Fred Terman was redefine the role of the university. Terman demolished the walls that separated the academy from the “real world.”