Silicon Valley Turns Fifty
By David Laws
“What’s in a name?” — Romeo & Juliet, William Shakespeare
Fifty years ago, long before the advent of Facebook, Google, or the later reincarnation of Apple, a front-page article in the tech-industry’s leading newspaper, Electronic News, introduced a new nickname for a cluster of sleepy agricultural communities near San Jose, California. [1] Known nationwide as the “Valley of Hearts Delight” for its bountiful orchards, the Santa Clara Valley would henceforth be known as “Silicon Valley” after a key material used in semiconductor manufacturing, a booming new industry of the area.
As the fleshpots of San Francisco 60 miles to the north were expanding down onto the Peninsula at that time, the tabloid press assumed silicon was a misspelling of silicone, a chemical compound better known to their readers for amplifying the female anatomy. Today no one makes that mistake. Silicon Valley is famous worldwide as a center of entrepreneurial and technological innovation. This is the story of how Silicon Valley got its name.
In 1965, Electronics magazine published an article by Gordon Moore, Director of Research at Fairchild Semiconductor in Mountain View, showing that over the prior five years the number of electronic elements on his company’s silicon integrated circuits had doubled…
