Frederick Emmons Terman (; June 7, 1900 – December 19, 1982) was an American professor and academic administrator. He was the dean of the school of engineering from 1944 to 1958 and provost from 1955 to 1965 at Stanford University.[ Palo Alto History Project ]
In 1951 he spearheaded the creation of Stanford Industrial Park (now Stanford Research Park), whereby the university leased portions of its land to high-tech firms. Companies such as Varian Associates, Hewlett-Packard, Eastman Kodak, General Electric, and Lockheed Corporation moved into Stanford Industrial Park and made the mid-Peninsula area into a hotbed of innovation which eventually became known as Silicon Valley.
Early life and education
Terman was born to
Lewis Terman and Anna Belle Minton Terman on June 7, 1900, in Indiana, U.S.
His father,
Lewis Terman, was a
Eugenics and a psychologist who studied gifted children and popularized the
IQ test in
United States as a professor at Stanford University. His mother attended Central Normal College and taught English at a school nearby. In 1895 she met Lewis Terman at the school; the relationship developed over the following years, culminating in marriage on Sept. 15, 1899. They then followed Lewis' education at Indiana University and
Clark University.
At the age of 10, Terman arrived at Stanford when his father joined the psychology faculty. As a boy, his favorite hobby was ham radio.
Education
Terman completed his undergraduate degree in
chemistry and his master's degree in electrical engineering at Stanford University.
He went on to earn an
ScD in electrical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1924 where his advisor was
Vannevar Bush, who first proposed what became the National Science Foundation.
Academic career
Terman returned to Stanford in 1925 as a member of the engineering faculty.
From 1925 to 1941 Terman designed a course of study and research in electronics at Stanford that focused on work with
vacuum tubes, circuits (electrical network), and
instrumentation.
Terman received tenure at Stanford by having the administration match his tenure offer at Cornell University. He hired Charles Litton and
Karl Spangenberg, a student of William Littell Everitt. Together they established a vacuum tube laboratory.
He also wrote
Radio Engineering (first edition in 1932; second edition, much improved, in 1937; third edition in 1947 with added coverage of new technologies developed during World War II; fourth edition in 1955 with a new title,
Electronic and Radio Engineering), one of the most important books on electrical and radio engineering, and to this day a good reference on those subjects. Terman's students at Stanford included Oswald Garrison Villard, Jr., Russell and Sigurd Varian, William Hewlett, and
David Packard.
[Gillmor, C. Stewart. Fred Terman at Stanford: Building a Discipline, a University, and Silicon Valley. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2004. Print.] He encouraged his students to form their own companies and personally invested in many of them, resulting in firms such as Litton Industries, Varian Associates, and
Hewlett-Packard.
[Leslie, Stuart W., and Robert H. Kargon. "Selling Silicon Valley: Frederick Terman's Model for Regional Advantage." Business History Review 70.04 (1996): 435-72. Print.] Terman was president of the Institute of Radio Engineers in 1941.
War years
During World War II, Terman directed a staff of more than 850 at the Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard University. This organization was the source of Allied jammers to block enemy
radar, tunable receivers to detect radar signals, and aluminum strips ("chaff, window") to produce spurious reflections on enemy radar receivers. These
significantly reduced the effectiveness of radar-directed anti-aircraft fire.
Stanford Research Park and Silicon Valley
After the war, Terman returned to Stanford and was appointed dean of the School of Engineering. In 1945 he was influential in the creation of a microwave research laboratory at the Stanford School of Physical Sciences.
In 1951 he spearheaded the creation of Stanford Industrial Park (now Stanford Research Park), whereby the university leased portions of its land to high-tech firms.
[ Sandelin, John, The Story of the Stanford Industrial/Research Park, 2004 ] Companies such as Varian Associates,
Hewlett-Packard,
Eastman Kodak,
General Electric, and Lockheed Corporation moved into Stanford Industrial Park and made the mid-Peninsula area into a hotbed of innovation which eventually became known as
Silicon Valley.
He served as provost at Stanford from 1955 to 1965.[Lécuyer, Christophe. Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930-1970.Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006. Print.]
Speaking of this effort, Terman said
In 1964, Terman became a founding member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Recognition
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He was awarded the IRE Medal of Honor in 1950 for "his many contributions to the radio and electronic industry as teacher, author, scientist and administrator".
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He was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
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The Frederick Emmons Terman Award was established in 1969 by the American Society for Engineering Education, Electrical and Computer Engineering Division. It is sponsored by Hewlett-Packard and is bestowed annually upon an outstanding young electrical engineering educator.
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The Frederick Emmons Terman Engineering Scholastic Award is presented to the students that rank academically in the top five percent of the graduating senior class from the Stanford University School of Engineering.
[ Stanford Scholastic Awards ]
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Stanford's Terman Engineering Center (1977–2011) was named in his honor.
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Terman Middle School in Palo Alto, California, and the adjacent Terman Park were named after Terman and his father. In 2018, the Palo Alto Unified School District school board unanimously decided to rename the school in honor of Ellen Fletcher after Terman's father's involvement with the eugenics movement came to the notice of parents and the school board. At the time of the renaming of the middle school, the city of Palo Alto had yet to decide if they would also rename the adjacent park.
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A section of U.S. Route 101 in California near Palo Alto is officially designated and signed as the Frederick E. Terman Memorial Highway.
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A road on the Tektronix Campus in Beaverton, Oregon is named after him.
Sources
Further reading
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Cherrier, Beatrice, and Aurélien Saïdi. "A century of economics and engineering at Stanford." History of Political Economy 52.S1 (2020): 85-111. online
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Ilham, Ramil Hasanov. "The role of Stanford University in the formation of Silicon Valley." PROBLEMS AND PERSPECTIVES (2021): 149+ online.
External links
