Famous Hitch Hikers’ Safety Assured by Fine Art Registry™ Tags — Part 1
by David Charles - 7/17/2006
Continued...
The hitchhikers
Frederick Emmons Terman departs from MIT in Cambridge, MA destined for Stanford College of Engineering after stopping in to party with YLEM and ISEA at the ZeroOne block party on First Street, San Jose.
As Vice President at Stanford University Terman made the university’s surrounding farmland available for lease, thereby essentially inventing Silicon Valley. From his position he did much to stimulate industry and put people together and was a moving force behind what is now Silicon Valley.
Robert Noyce begins his voyage on a pig farm in Iowa and ends up at the Robert Noyce Center for Learning in the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose. Why pig farm? you might well ask.
Here’s the answer from Julie:
“We really wanted some photos of Robert Noyce on a pig farm in Iowa. Apparently, he stole a pig during his college career at Grinnell College in Iowa, and was almost expelled. He of course went on to be a key founder of Fairchild Semiconductor, and then Intel. It was difficult finding a cooperative pig farmer. Grinnell College wanted nothing to do with our plan, fearing it might not somehow be appropriate to indicate he would have ever hitchhiked, and might get into a dangerous situation. He is, however, a wooden cutout, so we felt confident that he would not be bodily harmed.
“We have already educated a few pig farmers about the fact that their state produced such a famous person responsible in part even for the email we were able to send them about the project, so I do not feel bad about sending him out there if only for the educational value. We finally found a pig farmer that loved the project. He is, of course, an organic pig farmer. He promises to take Noyce fishing in Canada, and to a large bicycle race before he sends him our way with perhaps a dairy driver.”
With a final word from Jim:
“The story I heard re: Noyce and the purloined porker was that he swiped the pig for a barbecue or some such party in connection with a fraternity at Grinnell. I understand that he was caught only because he went back to the farmer the next day and offered to pay for the pig. If he had ignored his conscience, he might have made a clean getaway. I feel the pig story indicates initiative, resourcefulness, an adventuring spirit, bravery and most important, integrity. His weakness: a susceptibility to impulsiveness.
“I would not have started his hitch hiking journey with the companionable Iowan swine-herder, Dan Specht, if I believed the pig story was ignominious.”
So much for the founder of Intel. We hope he has a good trip from the fishing expedition in Canada to the Iowa roadside and, if all goes according to plan, from there to the San Jose learning centre named after him. Godspeed, Robert.
Lee de Forest
will be abandoned at the Opera House in San Jose, get down with the ladies of YLEM at the ISEA ZeroOne block party on First Street in San Jose and move on to the Perham Foundation Electronics Museum at the San Jose Historical Museum in Kelley Park.
De Forest is famous for inventing the Audion Tube in 1906, also called the triode. The nation’s electronics industry was based on his inventions.
Bon voyage Lee.
William Shockley is undoubtedly the most controversial of the hitchhikers. He will be abandoned at an Any Mountain store in the San Jose area and will make, it is hoped, a very low-key voyage to the fruit packing company where he started Shockley Labs, whose company charter was to make diffusion based transistors (he received the Nobel Prize for inventing the transistor with two other researchers at Bell Labs). He recruited the best talent to be found, the seeds for new companies in Silicon Valley. Eight of his key new hires left shortly thereafter to start their own company, complaining they could get the job done much faster without their difficult boss, who did not seem very interested in making transistors.
Not only was this British born, CalTech and MIT educated scientist very hard to work with, in his later years he splattered the US university landscape with some seriously racist notions. So much so that Jim Pallas refused to sculpt him unless he was abandoned holding an apology note in his hand and destined for the San Jose NAACP offices. When the Director of said establishment was contacted, however, his reaction to the plan put a short end to it. So Shockley, too important to be ignored but too extremist to be eulogized, is seen looking the other way dressed in shorts and surrounded by his baggage.
Nevertheless, we wish him a safe journey, and preferably a quiet one.
William Hewlett and David Packard are seen hitchhiking together, in true spirit of cooperation and collaboration which was perhaps the basis of their success, from the Hewlett Packard printer cartridge section of an Office Depot store in San Jose headed for the same party where the rendezvous with several others is supposed to take place, and will end their journey at the headquarters of Hewlett Packard, Inc.
They don’t really need an introduction but some may not know that their company, started with $500 capital in a garage, was responsible for the first personal computer. As hitchhikers they are seated atop the very garage which began their illustrious careers, which Jim painted from a photo he found on the web.
You can get more details who the hitchhikers were and what they each meant to Silicon Valley here http://www.ylem.org/Hitchhikers/ . See the Press Page for an overview of the project http://www.ylem.org/artists/jpallas/hh/pioneers/ .
Photo Frederick Terman courtesy of Stanford University.
Photo of Robert Noyce courtesy of Intel Museum.
Photo of Lee de Forest courtesy History of San Jose.
Photo of WIlliam Hewlett and David Packard courtesy of Hewlett- Packard Company
Technical Growing Pains
“Most electronic art projects need lots of technical assistance, which is one problem I have with them,” says Julie Newdoll. “One needs to be an engineer, not just an artist, or have a stockpile of engineer friends (no one engineer is going to put up with more than one project).”
The GPS system required for the tracking was a mass of headaches which were eventually relieved with the help of Mario Wolczko (Julie hopes her marriage is going to survive the project!). But it required Mario’s considerable expertise to come up with a stable way of plotting the progress of the five on a map on the screen embedded in Mike’s kiosk. He has done an incredible job.
...continue article page 4: Security and Fine Art Registry ›
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