Technology History | 367 Addison Avenue — A Coin Toss Settled Whose Name Went First

A coin toss settled the order of the two names, and the partnership it named started with $538.

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard signed their agreement on 1 January 1939 and worked in the one-car garage behind this house.

Packard rented the ground-floor apartment with his wife Lucile, who kept the books. Hewlett slept in the shed at the back of the lot.

What paid for everything was an audio oscillator, the Model 200A, grown out of Hewlett's Stanford master's work.

Its trick was a three-watt light bulb wired into the feedback path of a Wien bridge circuit. As the filament warmed, its resistance rose and damped the loop, holding the output steady from 35 Hz up to 35 kHz.

Hewlett filed the patent on 11 July 1939 and it was granted in January 1942.

A Walt Disney Studios engineer wanted a lower frequency range, so the two men modified the design into the Model 200B and sold Disney eight of them.

Those instruments checked theatre sound systems for the Fantasound release of Fantasia.

By 1940 the company had outgrown the garage and moved to Page Mill Road, and the partnership was incorporated in California in 1947.

The bronze plaque here reads "Birthplace of 'Silicon Valley'", which is a symbolic title rather than a literal one. No silicon was ever worked at this address — that arrived later and a few miles away, through Shockley's lab and the engineers who left it for Fairchild.

What does survive checking is the origin story itself, which is unusual in this valley. The work happened here, the first paying customer bought from here, and both founders attended the 1989 dedication.

California listed the site as Historical Landmark No. 976 in 1987.

HP bought the property in 2000 for $1.7 million and restored the house, garage and shed to their 1939 condition by 2005. The National Register added all three in 2007.

It remains a private property with no public tours. The plaque and the garage are visible from the sidewalk, and that is the whole visit.

The cover photograph dates from March 2002, showing the garage before the restoration.

Photo: Gerd Müller (www.twam.info), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.