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Varian Associates - Wikipedia

Varian Associates was one of the first high-tech companies in Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1948 by Russell H. and Sigurd F. Varian, William Webster Hansen, and Edward Ginzton to sell the klystron, the first vacuum tube en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varian_As…

which could amplify electromagnetic waves at microwave frequencies, and other electromagnetic equipment.

On April 20, 1948, the Articles of Incorporation were filed, signed by nine directors: Edward Ginzton, who had worked with the Varian brothers since his days as a doctoral

student; William Webster Hansen, Richard M. Leonard, an attorney; Leonard I. Schiff, then head of the physics department at Stanford University; H. Myrl Stearns, Russell H. Varian, his wife, Dorothy Varian, Sigurd F. Varian and Paul B. Hunter.

Francis Farquhar, an accountant and

friend of Russell's from the Sierra Club, later became a director, as did Frederick Terman, Dean of Engineering at Stanford, and David Packard, of Hewlett-Packard.

One of Varian Associates' major contracts in the 1950s was to create a fuse for the atomic bomb. The Varian

brothers had initially been supportive of military applications for the klystron and other technologies, on the grounds that they were primarily defensive weapons.

Military contracts for technology deemed necessary during the Cold War, including some classified projects helped

the firm succeed. In 1953, Varian Associates moved its headquarters to Palo Alto, California, at Stanford Industrial Park – noted as the "spawning ground of Silicon Valley" – and was the first firm to occupy a site there.

In 1967, Varian entered the computer business by

acquiring Decision Control Inc. (DCI) and renamed it Varian Data Machines. Their computers competed mainly with machines like those from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). 10 years later, Varian Data Machines was sold to Sperry Corporation.

The Varian brothers' parents, John

and Agnes Varian, were born and raised in Ireland, and were members of the Theosophical Society in Dublin they became involved with a theosophical group headed by William Dower.

John Varian became a leader of the Temple of the People at Halcyon.

The Temple of the People (not to

be confused with Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple). The Temple group was founded in 1898.

John and Agnes had three sons, Russell, Sigurd and Eric.

Composer Henry Cowell befriended Russell in 1911.

Cowell was also a music tutor of Ansel Adams, and the Varian family in turn

became friends with Adams, who became friends with Russell and Sigurd through their mutual activity in the Sierra Club.

In 1927 bro Russell went to work at Humble Oil, staying there for five months and receiving a patent for a vibrating magnetometer. Later he went to work in the

San Francisco area and was introduced to television technology through a job with Philo Farnsworth.

Sigurd was periodically ill because of tuberculosis. After a brief stint working for Southern California Edison Company stringing power lines, he took flying lessons and became a

pilot, airplane mechanic, and self-taught engineer. He worked as a barnstormer and later as a pilot for Pan American Airways.

His experience as a pilot in Central and South America made him particularly aware of the vulnerability of the Panama Canal to enemy attack, as he

believed it was relatively simple to fly over a military target at night or in heavy overcast sky in the absence of a defense warning system. Edward Ginzton, who later helped the brothers establish Varian Associates, stated: "[Sigurd] felt that Hitler could easily establish

bases in Central America, from which his planes could fly into the United States at night, or at low elevations, and drop bombs, without ever being detected."

Sigurd was interested in all-weather navigation systems, and suggested to Russell that together they could create a

radio-based technology using microwaves that could detect airplanes at night or in clouds.

They ultimately sought assistance from Russell's college roommate, William Webster Hansen, who was by then a professor at Stanford. With Hansen's help, they came to the attention of the

head of the Stanford physics department, David Webster, who hired them in 1936 to work at the University in exchange for lab space, $100 a year for supplies, and an agreement that Stanford University would have half of the royalties for any patents they obtained.

The brothers

and Hansen ultimately created the klystron, the first tube that could generate electromagnetic waves at microwave frequencies. Russell was responsible for the design and Sigurd built the first prototype, which was completed in August 1937.
The klystron, a microwave tube, was

noticed in 1938 by Sperry Gyroscope, who gave the Varian brothers and Hansen a contract to do further work.

Upon publication of a paper in 1939, news of the klystron quickly influenced the work of US and British researchers working on radar technology. Thereafter, klystron

equipment was set up in Boston in 1939, and with it, successful blind-landing tests of airplanes were completed. The Varians moved to the East Coast in 1940 to work for Sperry, where wartime development of the microwave tube continued.

Though little is known of their work in

this period (because they were presumably working on classified projects), it appears that they directed Sperry's vacuum tube and radar work during World War II.

After the war, the klystron became an important component in the further development of radar and the microwave

industry. It was used in broadcast television and in the development of various telecommunications technologies.

Military contracts for technology deemed necessary during the Cold War, including some classified projects, also helped the firm succeed. In 1953, Varian Associates

moved its headquarters to Palo Alto, California, at Stanford Industrial Park – noted as the "spawning ground of Silicon Valley" – and was the first firm to occupy a site there. Several spin-off corporations developed after the death of the Varian brothers; one branch, Varian,

Inc., was acquired by Agilent Technologies in May, 2010.

Agilent Technologies was created in 1999 by the spin-off of Hewlett-Packard's (HP's) "Medical Products and Instrument Group", including instrumentation and chemical analysis, electronic components, and medical equipment

product lines.

The HP Garage at 367 Addison Avenue is now designated an official California Historical Landmark, and is marked with a plaque calling it the "Birthplace of 'Silicon Valley'".

The company won its first big contract in 1938 to provide test and measurement

instruments for Walt Disney's production of the animated film Fantasia, which allowed Hewlett and Packard to formally establish the Hewlett-Packard Company on July 2, 1939.

In 1936, Walt Disney felt that the Disney studio's star character Mickey Mouse needed a boost in

popularity. He decided to feature the mouse in The Sorcerer's Apprentice, a deluxe cartoon short based on the 1797 poem written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and set to the 1897 orchestral piece by Paul Dukas inspired by the original tale.

To gain a better understanding of the

history of the planet the studio received guidance from Roy Chapman Andrews, the director of the American Museum of Natural History, English biologist Julian Huxley, paleontologist Barnum Brown, and astronomer Edwin Hubble.

During World War I and World War II, Barnum Brown

worked as an "intelligence asset". During his many trips abroad, he was not above picking up spare cash acting as a corporate spy for oil companies. Barnum discovered the first documented remains of Tyrannosaurus during a career that made him one of the most famous fossil

hunters working from the late Victorian era into the early 20th century.

Hubble's name is most widely recognized for the Hubble Space Telescope.

Perkin-Elmer, which built Hubble at its Danbury plant in Connecticut, tested the primary and secondary mirrors separately, but no

one tested the complete telescope before launch.

Perkin-Elmer sold to Hughes Aircraft in 1989.

The Hubble space telescope is not the only optical system giving NASA trouble. Mirrors for a weather satellite due to be launched in February 1992 warp when exposed to direct

sunlight. The fault should be easier to remedy than the one afflicting Hubble. However, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration badly needs the satellite in orbit; it is to replace the US’s only civilian satellite now collecting data on weather.

Unlike previous

models, the new satellites, designed by Ford Aerospace, rely on a pair of moving flat mirrors to reflect light from the Earth into telescopes aboard the satellite.

As early as 1946, the idea of cameras in orbit to observe the weather was being developed. This was due to sparse

data observation coverage and the expense of using cloud cameras on rockets. By 1958, the early prototypes for TIROS and Vanguard (developed by the Army Signal Corps) were created. The first weather satellite, Vanguard 2, was launched on February 17, 1959.

In response to the

launch of Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957, the U.S. restarted the Explorers Program, which had been proposed earlier by the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA). Privately, however, the CIA and President Dwight D. Eisenhower were aware of progress being made by the Soviets on

Sputnik from secret spy plane imagery. Together with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), ABMA built Explorer 1 and launched it on January 31, 1958.
The Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) under Dr. Wernher von Braun had suggested using a modified Redstone rocket (see: Juno I)

while the Air Force had proposed using the Atlas rocket, which did not yet exist. The Navy proposed designing a rocket system based on the Viking and Aerobee rocket systems.

Weather Underground is a commercial weather service providing real-time weather information over the

Internet.

Weather Underground is owned by The Weather Company, a subsidiary of IBM.

The company is based in San Francisco, California and was founded in 1995 as an offshoot of the University of Michigan Internet weather database. The name is a reference to the 1960s militant

radical student group the Weather Underground, which also originated at the University of Michigan.

The Weather Company started as the Weather Channel in 1982.

The Weather Company was previously owned by a consortium made up of the Blackstone Group, Bain Capital, and

NBCUniversal. That consortium sold the Weather Company's product and technology assets to IBM on January 29, 2016, but retained possession of The Weather Channel cable network until March 2018, when it was sold to Entertainment Studios.

At an SDS convention in Chicago on June

18, 1969, the National Office attempted to persuade unaffiliated delegates not to endorse a takeover of SDS by Progressive Labor who had packed the convention with their supporters.

At the beginning of the convention, two position papers were passed out by the National Office

leadership, one a revised statement of Klonsky's RYM manifesto, the other called "You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows".

The latter document outlined the position of the group that would become the Weathermen. It had been signed by Karen Ashley, Bill

Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, John Jacobs, Jeff Jones, Gerry Long, Howie Machtinger, Jim Mellen, Terry Robbins, Mark Rudd, and Steve Tappis.

Shortly after its formation as an independent group, Weatherman created a central committee, the Weather Bureau, which assigned its cadres to

a series of collectives in major cities. These cities included New York, Boston, Seattle, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Buffalo, and Chicago, the home of the SDS's head office.

In September 1970, the group accepted a $20,000 payment from the largest international psychedelic drug

distribution organization, called The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, to break LSD advocate Timothy Leary out of a California prison in San Luis Obispo, north of Santa Barbara, California, and transport him and his wife to Algeria, where Leary joined Eldridge Cleaver.

Leary

co-founded Kaiser Hospital's psychology department in Oakland, California, and maintained a private consultancy. It is the flagship hospital of Kaiser Permanente, the largest managed care organization in the United States, through its Kaiser Foundation Hospitals division.

Kaiser Permanente (/ˈkaɪzər pɜːrməˈnɛnteɪ/; KP), commonly known simply as Kaiser, is an American integrated managed care consortium, based in Oakland, California, United States, founded in 1945 by industrialist Henry J. Kaiser and physician Sidney Garfield.

Henry John Kaiser

(May 9, 1882 – August 24, 1967) was an American industrialist who became known as the father of modern American shipbuilding. Prior to World War II, Kaiser was involved in the construction industry; his company was one of the companies that built Hoover Dam. He established the

Kaiser Shipyards, which built Liberty ships during World War II, after which he formed Kaiser Aluminum and Kaiser Steel. Kaiser organized Kaiser Permanente health care for his workers and their families. He led Kaiser-Frazer followed by Kaiser Motors, automobile companies known

for the safety of their designs.
Six Companies Inc. was composed of:
1Henry J. Kaiser Co. of Oakland, California and Bechtel Corporation of San Francisco (as Bechtel-Kaiser): 30%

John Lowery Simpson of Sacramento, California became a partner of Schroder-Rockefeller Company

when that investment trust backed a construction company which became the world's largest, the firm of Bechtel Incorporated. Simpson was chairman of the finance committee of Bechtel Company, Bechtel International, and Canadian Bechtel.

Simpson states he was consultant to the

Bechtel-McCone interests in war production during World War II. He served on the Allied Control Commission in Italy 1943-44. He married Margaret Mandell, of the merchant family for whom Col. Edward Mandell House was named, and he backed a California personality, first for

Governor, then for President. As a result, Simpson and J. Henry Schroder Company now have serving them as Secretary of Defense, former Bechtel employee Caspar Weinberger. As Secretary of State they have serving them George Pratt Schultz, also a Bechtel employee, who happens to

be a Standard Oil heir, reaffirming the Schroder-Rockefeller company ties. Thus the "conservative" Reagan Administration has a Secretary of Defense from Schroder Company, a Secretary of State from Schroder-Rockefeller, and a vice president whose father was senior partner of

Brown Brothers Harriman.

Allen Dulles later became a director of J. Henry Schroder Company. Neither he nor J. Henry Schroder were to be suspected of being pro-Nazi or pro- Hitler; the inescapable fact was that if Hitler did not become Chancellor of Germany, there was little

likelihood of getting a Second World War going, the war which would double their profits.*

"Hitler was invited to a meeting at the Schroder Bank in Berlin on January 4, 1933. The leading industrialists and bankers of Germany tided Hitler over his financial difficulties and

enabled him to meet the enormous debt he had incurred in connection with the maintenance of his private army. In return, he promised to break the power of the trade unions. On May 2, 1933, he fulfilled his promise."
Present at the January 4, 1933 meeting were the Dulles brothers,

John Foster Dulles and Allen W. Dulles of the New York law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented the Schroder Bank. The Dulles brothers often turned up at important meetings. They had represented the United States at the Paris Peace Conference (1919); John Foster Dulles

would die in harness as Eisenhower's Secretary of State, while Allen Dulles headed the Central Intelligence Agency for many years. Their apologists have seldom attempted to defend the Dulles brothers appearance at the meeting which installed Hitler as the Chancellor of Germany,

preferring to pretend that it never happened.

After Herbert Hoover was elected president of the United States, he insisted on appointing one of the old London crowd, Eugene Meyer, as Governor of the Federal Reserve Board. Meyer's father had been one of the partners of Lazard

Freres of Paris, and Lazard Brothers of London. Meyer, with Baruch, had been one of the most powerful men in the United States during World War I, a member of the famous Triumvirate which exercised unequalled power; Meyer as Chairman of the War Finance Corporation, Bernard Baruch

as Chairman of the War Industries Board, and Paul Warburg as Governor of the Federal Reserve System.

Ford was assigned to provide B-24 components with final assembly performed by Consolidated at its Fort Worth plant, or by fellow licensee Douglas Aircraft at its Tulsa,

Oklahoma, plant. However, in October 1941 Ford received permission from Consolidated and the Army to assemble complete Liberators on its own at its new Willow Run facility.

After Ford declined to purchase the plant, it was sold to the Kaiser-Frazer Corporation, a partnership of

construction and shipbuilding magnate Henry J. Kaiser and Graham-Paige executive Joseph W. Frazer.

In 1943, Consolidated merged with Vultee Aircraft to form Consolidated-Vultee Aircraft, later known as Convair.

Consolidated produced important aircraft in the early years of

World War II, especially the B-24 Liberator heavy bomber and the PBY Catalina seaplane for the U.S. armed forces and their allies.

In March 1953, all of the Convair company was bought by the General Dynamics Corporation, a conglomerate of military and high-technology companies,

and it became officially the Convair Division within General Dynamics.

General Dynamics purchased Liquid Carbonic Corporation in September 1957 and controlled it as a wholly owned subsidiary until being forced by a Federal antitrust ruling to spin it off to shareholders in

January 1969. Liquid Carbonic was then bought that same month by the Houston Natural Gas Company.

Enron Corporation was an American energy, commodities, and services company based in Houston, Texas. It was founded by Kenneth Lay in 1985 as a merger between Lay's Houston Natural

Gas and InterNorth, both relatively small regional companies. Enron gone bankrupt on December 2, 2001.
James Bakers childhood neighbor Joanne Herring was married to Houston Gas Co chairman Robert Herring. She was famous for brokering arms to Mujahadeen for Operation Cyclone.

One of the more colorful postwar Barton Hills residents was Edgar Kaiser, son of the industrialist Henry Kaiser, who had taken over the Willow Run bomber plant to build Kaiser Frazer cars. Edgar enlarged the Riggs home and added a swimming pool. Every year he put up 3,500 outdoor

Christmas lights that drew viewers from all around, and ended the hol­iday season with a big New Year's party.

The Ford Nuclear Reactor was a facility at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor dedicated to investigating the peaceful uses of nuclear power. It was a part of the

Michigan Memorial Phoenix Project, a living memorial created to honor the casualties of World War II. The reactor operated from September 1957 until July 3, 2003.

Original calls for a war memorial came from University of Michigan students in 1947. Fred Smith, a local alumnus,

suggested a project looking into the peaceful uses of nuclear power. A full page poster was printed in the Michigan Daily suggesting that the Phoenix Project will show that Americans can work to benefit the world.

In February 1955, the Atomic Energy Commission licensed the FNR.