From white gold to silicon chips: Hydraulic technology, electric power and Silicon Valley

Abstract

Unlike most accounts of the origins of Silicon Valley, this essay insists that the valley today is rooted in the Gold Rush, and only through understanding this can scholars fully comprehend the roots of the innovation process that so characterizes the region today. The Gold Rush began a long gestation period in the region’s technical sciences that, with its physical, economic and geographic characteristics, comprised a petri dish in which innovations flourished. Early on communities of interest emerged among the original Argonauts around hydraulic engineering and among later adventurers around hydroelectric power, electric-power transmission, radio technology and microwave electronics. Over the years their members included mechanics, inventors, engineers, academics and entrepreneurs, and they found like-minded souls in San Francisco Bay Area technical and scientific organizations, social clubs and educational institutions, where they all overlapped with each other and created the foundations for the modern Silicon Valley.