This carefully researched and well-written book offers the best full-length scholarly treatment available on the rise of Silicon Valley, a topic that has been, for the most part, the province of boosters and popularizers. Christophe Lécuyer, who has a doctorate in history from Stanford University and is now a senior scholar at the Chemical Heritage Foundation and an economic analyst for the president of the University of California, has mined a wealth of archival materials and conducted numerous interviews to present a detailed yet engaging history of the San Francisco Peninsula's development from an industrial backwater with just a few radio enterprises in the early 1930s to a main center of electronic component firms by the 1960s. By this time, Silicon Valley had become central to the U.S. political economy, producing and developing the components used in the military's advanced weapons systems as well as in many industrial goods.

By starting with the 1930s and by focusing on the history of key electronics firms, Lécuyer challenges the work of historian Stuart W. Leslie (The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford [New York: Columbia University Press, 1992]) and others that emphasizes the role of cold-war military funding and of Frederick Terman, Dean of Engineering and then Provost of Stanford University, in fostering the growth of Silicon Valley. Lécuyer does not discount this view entirely, agreeing that electronics firms benefited from proximity to Stanford, and also that the military, as both patron and customer, was important to Silicon Valley's success. But Lécuyer aligns himself with the theories of economist Alfred Marshall and emphasizes the development of “unique manufacturing, product engineering, and management competencies” (p. 5) as the keys to Silicon Valley's emergence and growth as an industrial region. He thus locates the seeds of Silicon Valley's success in the innovative practices of business corporations rather than in geographical factors such as proximity to a university or in political-economic developments such as cold war military spending.

Lécuyer, who shows an understanding of business and economic history as well as a gift for explaining complex technologies in terms comprehensible to the layperson, illustrates his argument through a close study of a handful of companies—Eitel-McCullough, a manufacturer of power-grid tubes; Litton Industries and Varian Associates, designers and producers of microwave vacuum tubes; and Fairchild Semiconductor and its spinoffs Intel and Signetics. He strives to place each company's development in the context of the political economy, showing, for example, how a company's relationship to the Defense Department shaped both the engineering and marketing challenges it confronted and the choices the company made to overcome them. For example, to get a foothold in the manufacturing of magnetrons, a kind of microwave tube used in advanced radar systems and much in demand by the military during the Korean War, Litton Industries approached the Navy for advice and then, at the Navy's suggestion, set itself the task of manufacturing a magnetron like one being made by Sylvania and Raytheon but at lower cost and higher quality. To achieve this, the company adopted innovative manufacturing methods, developing a new, very clean process for producing magnetrons and instituting tight discipline over the workforce, requiring workers to inspect their own work and making them responsible for its quality in order to ensure a precision product.

Lécuyer asserts that Silicon Valley companies developed not just in relation to Defense Department needs and constraints, but also in relation to each other, the culture and practices of early electronics component firms being adopted by companies that came later. For example, Litton's emphasis on designing a high-quality product and developing new manufacturing techniques was adopted by subsequent microwave tube entrepreneurs, and became characteristic of Silicon Valley firms, according to Lécuyer.

This argument—that culture and practices important to success were developed and transmitted from one company to the next—would be more convincing had Lécuyer delineated the mechanisms and networks through which ideas and practices were disseminated, not just among the handful of companies examined in Making Silicon Valley, but also among the hundreds of ventures that came to make up Silicon Valley. One wonders, for instance, what part was played by the Defense Department, particularly by its scientific and industrial liaisons, in creating and fostering communication among Silicon Valley engineers. Also worthy of consideration is the role of Stanford University, both through its Industrial Affiliates and other programs, which brought Stanford engineering faculty together with participating Silicon Valley companies to exchange research ideas, and through its science and engineering faculty, who trained many of the employees of Silicon Valley companies, and, in several instances, founded electronics companies themselves. One also wonders whether an examination of additional companies, including those that did not succeed as well as those founded by Stanford professors wishing to bring to the market technologies developed under military sponsorship, would affect his theory as to what made Silicon Valley into a dynamic high-tech region.

Whether or not Lécuyer, in emphasizing the innovations made by electronics entrepreneurs and engineers, has uncovered the key to the rise and success of Silicon Valley, he has produced an intelligent and valuable study that deserves a place on the bookshelves of economic and business historians as well as historians of science and technology.