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It is a minor scandal that Silicon Valley, the world's preeminent technology region and the subject of a great deal of work by journalists and scholars, has only now received its first book-length treatment by a historian of technology: Christophe Lécuyer's Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930-1970 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005, x+393, $40). One can attribute this delay to a variety of factors: historians' caution at examining still highly active terrain, where changes in the present might dramatically change how the past is interpreted; a Gresham's law phenomenon, where superficial and breathless work by journalists discourages more serious study; and the sheer difficulty of finding the archival sources historians are most comfortable with. Lécuyer's outstanding work puts technology at the center of Silicon Valley and shows the special contributions that academically trained historians of technology can make to understanding this region's development.
Lécuyer works to a sensible topical and temporal definition of Silicon Valley: the tube and semiconductor companies on the San Francisco Peninsula between 1930 and 1970. He largely ignores the systems companies, such as the iconic Hewlett-Packard or IBM, as well as aerospace firms. By ending his study in the early 1970s-the formation of Apple serves as the endpoint-Lécuyer avoids the explosion of Silicon Valley firms during the latter 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The challenge for Lécuyer is to convince us that he has found in those years the heart of Silicon Valley. He shows how on the San Francisco Peninsula, an area with a small but significant technical infrastructure, radio enthusiasts and microwave engineers developed companies that effectively competed with larger East Coast firms, provided the military with significant quantities of complex tubes, and employed thousands of technicians and workers. Then, starting with the arrival of William Shockley in 1956, the author chronicles the development of the silicon semiconductor industry, first by Fairchild-formed by defectors from Shockley-then the dozens of firms formed by Fairchild defectors.
Lécuyer employs a very light theoretical...