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1-Page Summary of Silicon Valley
Way Out West
The founders of Apple, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, were not the first people to work on technology in Silicon Valley. In fact, many people had worked on technology before them. They helped build the radio tube industry by starting out as hobbyists who enjoyed electronics and building radios. The Peninsula was not a very popular place for businesses at this time because there were so many other companies that did what they did (e.g., Heintz & Kaufman). So when these men started their own company, they made sure to differentiate themselves from those established competitors by creating a unique product that no one else had created yet: an entire computer system built into one small box!
Although working for different companies, the two men collaborated on vacuum tubes. Litton developed a glass lathe that helped mechanize some of the tube’s operations. He also became an expert in manufacturing. Meanwhile, Eitel and McCullough built their comprehensive understanding of how vacuum tubes work mechanically. During the Great Depression, they started their own company specializing in vacuum tubes called Eimac (Eitel-McCullough). They worked closely with Litton Engineering Laboratories which manufactured most of the equipment required to make vacuum tubes such as glass lathes and pumps. The two firms shared design and production expertise while targeting ham radio operators as its main market. Eimac excelled at making high quality power tubes needed by ham radios but were produced primarily by Litton Engineering Laboratories located on San Francisco Peninsula because it was cheaper to manufacture there than anywhere else due to available resources like raw materials, labor force etc..
During the war, Eitel-McCullough was able to capitalize on its expertise in vacuum tubes and supply them to the military. After the war, it emerged as a leading power-tube manufacturing firm. Meanwhile, Litton Engineering Laboratories also became a prominent power-tube manufacturer and helped spur the development of another industry: microwave tubes.
Diversification
In 1946, Litton Engineering Laboratories expanded into Litton Industries. It was an authority on tube manufacturing by this time and its magnetrons were rated as better than any other Western manufacturer’s devices in the early 1950s. By this time, the nascent high-tech industry recognized Charles Litton as an authority on tube manufacturing. The San Francisco Peninsula expanded as a major microwave-tube manufacturing center just as the East Coast firms left the business to develop radio sets and television monitors.
The federal government used Litton’s microwave tubes in critical military equipment for the U.S. Navy during the Korean War, which led to huge contracts and a lot of growth for that company. It moved from designing magnetrons to manufacturing them, and it offered an unbeatable marketing combination of high-quality units at an extremely low cost. This helped develop more entrepreneurial activity in its region as well as contributed greatly to profits for Litton Industries, which brought federal scrutiny because it was disliked by some people who wanted more competition in this area of business. Charles Litton sold the entire company but kept his engineering lab with annual sales of $300,000; however he did not like dealing with all the attention from being such a large corporation so he sold off most of those assets too except for one small piece that stayed under his control until 1952 when he decided to sell even that portion too but left behind something called Litton Engineering Laboratories (LEL). The Navy rejected corporate suitors like Sylvania as a matter of policy because “it would reduce competition in the magnetron business,” but they approved buyers Tex Thornton and Roy Ash from Hughes Aircraft who remade Litton into a major military conglomerate growing tremendously over time.
