Electronics in the West: The First Fifty Years by Jane Morgan (review)
Charles Süsskind · Technology and Culture · 1970
320 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Electronics in the West: The First Fifty Years. By Jane Morgan. Palo Alto, Calif.: National Press Books, 1967. Pp. xiv-)-194. $4.95. This work was commissioned by the Office of Education of Santa Clara County (which contains such artifacts as Stanford University, Stanford Industrial Park, and Foothill Electronics Museum) and repre sents an imaginative use of National Defense Education Act funds for the development of a resource text at the junior-high-school level. Although lacking all bibliographical apparatus, the book is a rich source of carefully researched and reliably reported anecdotal and pictorial material. The San Francisco Bay Area has been prominent in electronics from the start: the first ship-to-shore radio communication in the United States took place there in August 1899, a month before Mar coni’s arrival in New York; the first air-to-ground transmission was made in San Bruno, California, in 1910; and Lee de Forest, who had invented the triode in 1906, finally made it work as an amplifier in Palo Alto in 1912. San Francisco was both terminus of the first transconti nental telephone line in 1915 and a key point in the Pacific radio net work that helped the nation fulfill its manifest destiny. Mrs. Morgan (a freelance writer who is married to an engineer) lovingly traces all these firsts, as well as inspirational biographical vi gnettes of such western electronics “greats” as Farnsworth, Litton, and the Varian brothers and the genesis of company after company founded by selfmade men who seemed determined to give the lie to the propo sition that the Horatio Alger myth was dead. The book is amply illustrated with two-color drawings and with photographs reproduced by the offset process, but its general appear ance is marred by the tiny margins evidently dictated by competitive bidding under government specifications that omitted the aesthetic. Charles Susskind* Early History of the Electron Microscope. By L. Marton. San Fran cisco: San Francisco Press, 1968. Pp. v-(-56. $2.75. Dennis Gabor, in his gracious and perceptive preface to this book, characterizes the modern electron microscope as the most wonderful and successful instrument of our times. This warrants interest in a trea tise on the origins of the electron microscope by one of the pioneers, who demonstrated that unstained biological specimens could be imaged with electrons. In this book the reader will, indeed, learn about the principal steps which led from surmise to the realization of a practical instrument as well as the names of the many men who were involved in these steps. Yet these may be found elsewhere, with appropriate evaluation of their relative importance in the total development. * Dr. Süsskind is professor of engineering science at the University of California in Berkeley and author of many publications on the history of technology (espe cially electronics) and its effects on society. ...