There are lots of reasons why Silicon Valley became what it is today, but it seems that by far it is because William Shockley [0] was born there - "Shockley is

There are lots of reasons why Silicon Valley became what it is today, but it seems that by far it is because William Shockley [0] was born there - "Shockley is the man who brought silicon to Silicon Valley." Shockley was working at Bell Labs over in New Jersey on solid state electronics, and was jointly awarded the Noble Prize for the discovery of the transistor effect. When he moved back home, angry at how the invention of the transistor had been handled at Bell Labs, he took a number of researchers with him. Together they were one of the first startups in Stanford's new "Stanford Industrial Park", and the first to use silicon. Some of those researchers later started Fairchild Semiconductor, from which came many companies like Intel and AMD. If you haven't heard of it yet, Stephen Fry has an excellent (if too brief!) podcast that goes through this and the history of other big advances in technology in great detail, called Stephen Fry's Great Leap Years. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley [1] http://www.stephenfry.com/greatleapyears/ http://www.stephenfry.com/greatleapyears/