Present at the Creation: How Pan Wenyuan Connected Silicon Valley and China

Andrew Leonard
12 min readJul 19, 2017

Produced in partnership with NewCo Shift.

Hewlett, Packard… and Pan?

In the late 1930s, when Frederick Terman — “the father of Silicon Valley” — was building his powerhouse electrical engineering department at Stanford, he led a graduate seminar that devoted an entire semester to tinkering with the design of an audio oscillator. Two of the participants in that seminar, William Hewlett and David Packard, took the technology out of the university lab and into their Palo Alto garage — “the birthplace of Silicon Valley” — and transformed it into their eponymous company’s first product : the RC 200a oscillator.

A third graduate student, Pan Wenyuan, co-wrote a paper with Hewlett that focused on some of the finer points of the oscillator’s technology. According to Pan’s daughter, Helen Troxel, he was even “invited to join Hewlett and Packard in the garage.” In a memorial written after Pan’s death, a friend recalled that he joked for many years that “if I had $90 to invest in HP then, we [he and his wife] would have owned 25% of the company.”

But Pan had other priorities. He had left his home in mainland China entrusted by his government with a patriotic mission: to help his country catch up with the West’s formidable advantage in science and…

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Andrew Leonard

20-year veteran of online journalism. On Twitter @koxinga21. Curious about how Sichuan food explains the world? Check out andrewleonard.substack.com