Frederick E. Terman graduated from Stanford in 1922 with a BS in Chemistry and an MS in Electrical Engineering. He served as Stanford Provost from 1955 to 1965. Terman, dubbed the “Father of Silicon Valley,” left his stamp by encouraging Stanford students to have an entrepreneurial spirit.

In 1937, physicists Russell Varian and Sigurd Varian (namesake of the Varian Building, home to the physics department), along with William Hansen developed the klystron ultra-high-frequency vacuum tube, paving the way for commercial air navigation, satellite communication, and high-energy particle accelerators. In 1939, graduate students William Hewlett and David Packard developed the precision audio oscillator and founded the company HP. In 1951, Terman spearheaded the creation of Stanford Industrial Park (now Stanford Research Park) to house these high-tech firms led by those innovators.

The Cold War strengthened Stanford’s tie with Washington. To win more research grants from the Department of Defense, Terman expanded the science, statistics and engineering departments. In 1952, Physics Professor Felix Bloch became Stanford’s first Nobel laureate. In 1961, Mathematics Professor George Forsythe formed within the mathematics department a computer science division, which in 1965 spun off as a separate department, one of the first in the nation. Also in 1965, John McCarthy and Les Earnest founded the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), where the world’s first office desktop computer displayed appeared in 1971.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, managed by the Department of Energy, opened in 1962. There, advances in particle physics earned Stanford several Nobel prizes.

This era saw not only the birth of Silicon Valley, but also student activism for social justice. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke on campus in 1964 and 1967 to call for support of the Civil Rights movement. Stanford students were also part of the anti-Vietnam War movement. Even though then Stanford President Pitzer “opposed the draft and thought the Vietnam War was a mistake,” he still faced continuous student protests against the war. Pitzer resigned in 1970 after only two years of tenure; nonetheless, during his tenure, African and Afro-American Studies was launched as a new interdisciplinary major, the first of its kind at a major private U.S. university (Stanford News Service, 1998).