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  • The Mysteries of the Trade:Christophe Lécuyer’s Making Silicon Valley
  • Ross Bassett (bio)

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 [End Page 401] 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 touch. One finds him more interested in nailing down specifics than in building broad theoretical frameworks. He finds Alfred Marshall's idea of an industrial manufacturing district the most helpful way of looking at Silicon Valley. Although he never cites it, Lécuyer's book could be seen to be an exposition of Marshall's statement:

The mysteries of the trade become no mysteries; but are as it were in the air, and children learn many of them unconsciously. Good work is rightly appreciated, inventions and improvements in machinery, in processes and the general organization of the business have their merits promptly discussed: if one man starts a new idea, it is taken up by others and combined with suggestions of their own; and thus it becomes the source of further new ideas.1

Reader's of Lécuyer's work who are familiar with other scholarship on Silicon Valley will be most interested in its relation to AnnaLee Saxenian's highly influential Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (1994). Lécuyer himself is coy here, saying he "partly concurs" (p. 4) with Saxenian's argument about Silicon Valley's character being based on disaggregated firms. While Saxenian's work is long on generalization and short on history, Lécuyer's is just the opposite, but overall Lécuyer tends to confirm Saxenian. Lécuyer accords technology a more central role in his narrative, showing in great detail the distinctive technologies developed in Silicon Valley. In Lécuyer's telling, Silicon Valley is built on the technical virtuosity of people like Charlie Litton, who developed innovative tubes and tube-making equipment, and the eight founders of Fairchild, who developed innovative silicon transistors, the planar process, and the integrated circuit. Lécuyer shows how this knowledge, widely diffused throughout Silicon Valley in a culture of cooperation, then led to a series of further innovations. But his Silicon Valley is never just about technology: he details a number...

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