Radar, chaff, and the Stanford lab at the center of Silicon Valley
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
Jonathan Hare's paternal grandfather, and a world-class physicist and electrical engineer. During the Second World War he worked on highly classified radar and radar countermeasures at Harvard's Radio Research Laboratory — including the invention of chaff — alongside Robert Buss and William Rambo.
His direct superior and mentor was Fred Terman, the man usually called the father of Silicon Valley, who championed Hewlett, Packard and Shockley. In 1955 Terman recruited him back to Stanford's Electronics Research Laboratory as Professor of Electrical Engineering, working on classified military projects. The ERL was the epicentre of the nascent Valley, and Hewlett and Packard were regular visitors.
He commanded enough standing that his $14,000 annual salary — a considerable sum in the late 1950s — supported a canvas-bodied private plane.
S-094 adds the war years and the move that put the family inside the founding circuitry of Silicon Valley: stationed at the Harvard Radio Research Lab in the immediate orbit of Fred Terman, then — after a brief spell in Lincoln, Nebraska — following Terman to Stanford and into faculty housing in Palo Alto. The chapter, and the widow's road to The Cats, are now on the record.
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The trail exists so that people who were there can reconstruct their own memories, recognize what they helped incubate, and add to or correct the record — or forward the few pages that belong to someone they know.
He and William L. Whitson were both professors at Union College in Lincoln, Nebraska, and close friends. After they moved apart they kept playing chess by post. That friendship is why, when he died and his son was sixteen, the Whitsons invited the boy to stay with them and their daughter — and it is how Hare's parents met.
He died at forty-six, when Hare's father was sixteen, before Hare was born. They never met.
The press accounts of the day cited a vague progressive illness. Hare's father always maintained it was suicide, driven by the pressure of the work. His mother, Grandmother Joy, insisted until her death that he had been poisoned by Soviet agents. There is no way from here to distinguish between them, and the record does not try.
His son — Hare's father — was riding in the back of the plane where the luggage was stowed, and stepped on the canvas floor of the fuselage. His foot went straight through it. Mid-flight, with his foot sticking out of the aircraft.
It was not treated as an emergency. The plane cruised at around a hundred knots, they landed, and somebody patched the canvas. Aircraft were simple in those days.
Hare thought of him constantly while soldering high-end vacuum tubes into Hewlett-Packard scientific instruments as a teenager — tubes that were direct descendants of technologies his grandfather had helped invent decades earlier. He later thanked David Packard personally at Stanford, and Bill Hewlett through an introduction from E. O. Wilson.
At the Radio Research Lab he worked the electronic side of the air war: how to make a bomber invisible to the radar hunting it. Chaff was the answer that stuck — clouds of cut foil that filled enemy screens with a thousand false bombers. It is among the small number of wartime inventions still in operational use, and it was invented by a pacifist denomination's son to keep men alive rather than to kill them. The record notes the shape of that fact and lets it stand.
There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.
The father of Silicon Valley — and Hare's grandfather's mentor
Open →Professor of Electrical EngineeringThe epicentre of the nascent Valley
Open →friend, colleague, chess correspondentNuclear physicist, Titan II, ARPA — and a two-hundred-word obituary
Open →professor atWhere both grandfathers taught, and the chess games began
Open →father ofSelma, 1965 — and the promise
Open →whose founders visited his labGold wire, three mentors, and a lesson that stuck
Open →grandfather ofConsilient Architect — the node this graph was seeded from
Open →husband ofHare's grandmother: widowed to The Cats estate in Los Gatos, then to Willows, running a 25-room motor court with her own mother
Open →Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.
The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-059The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-060The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
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