Federal Telegraph: Where Radio Was Born in the Valley
California
The strip of Palo Alto near El Camino Real was already becoming a place where technology changed the world. In nineteen nine, Cyril Elwell founded the Federal Telegraph Company here and began building the most powerful radio transmitters then in existence using an arc-based technology called Poulsen arc transmitters.
In nineteen eleven, Elwell invited Lee de Forest to work at this laboratory. De Forest had already invented the triode vacuum tube, a device capable of amplifying electrical signals, which made long-distance radio telephony possible. The collaboration at Federal Telegraph pushed wireless communication forward dramatically. Within a few years the company was running the first transoceanic wireless circuits.
Though Federal Telegraph was eventually absorbed by Mackay Radio and later International Telephone and Telegraph, its work here established Palo Alto as a serious center for electronics research decades before William Hewlett and David Packard set up in a nearby garage. Some historians trace the origin of Silicon Valley's technology culture directly to this corner of El Camino Real.
