Menlo Park

The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World

by Randall E. Stross  · 13 Mar 2007  · 440pp  · 132,685 words

had been misaddressed to Newark; Batchelor, Edison, and their families, along with Edison’s laboratory and its staff, had recently moved to a new location, Menlo Park, New Jersey. The casual mention did not highlight the significance of this move, quite different from the many moves that had preceded it. This time

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lightly harnessed horses, roads lined with spectators, and frequent “collisions and rows” that brought unwanted attention from the police. In the little residential development of Menlo Park, however, such excitements were nowhere in evidence. Built up too recently to have the benefit of protective shade trees, the houses sat exposed to sunlight

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about the apparatus upon which Edison was working. What is most remarkable is how unremarkable Preece found the inventive activity there. The isolation of the Menlo Park setting infused the laboratory with a feeling of unbounded creative freedom. It encouraged an outlook that saw far, which also meant that little interest could

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second life years later, in the 1890s, when converted into the first electric tattoo needle.) Despite the ideal conditions, big ideas did not materialize in Menlo Park. Instead, odds and ends were turned out and marketed by another company that Edison established for this purpose, the American Novelty Company. It sold duplicating

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Edison that “a good deal of money could be made in selling these small traps.” Judging from the volume of correspondence coming in to the Menlo Park laboratory, the articles in Scientific American and reprints and secondhand digests of the articles carried in various newspapers had spread the word effectively. The task

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wife Dearly Beloved Cannot invent worth a Damn!!” He redefined their roles with a conventional boundary: his sphere was work; Mary’s, the home. In Menlo Park, the separateness of spheres remained intact even on Sundays, the only day of the week when the laboratory was nominally closed. After the Edisons’ second

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to being confused, too. The phonograph, described in close detail in the Sun’s long profile “A Marvelous Discovery,” which had started the stampede to Menlo Park, was regarded by many as fantastic. Edison received three hundred letters that denounced the reporter’s mendacity. One professor urged Edison to protect his reputation

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Typical was this brief item that appeared in several newspapers in June: “Edison has not invented anything since breakfast. The doctor has been called.” In Menlo Park, Edison could read these items and smile; they were harmless. But by July, he had passed through the exhilarating novelty of being well known; now

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for Edison and the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company to finally make good on their promises to the public. Flouting the phonograph’s patents presented the Menlo Park lab with a crisis. In Edison’s absence, it was left to Batchelor and Johnson to decide how to respond. Reflecting their different personalities,

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also received word that the Paris Exposition had awarded the grand prize to the phonograph. A perceptive newspaper reporter noticed upon Edison’s return to Menlo Park that blurring of boundary separating the private and the public that we now understand as accompanying the arrival of celebrity. “The people have come to

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“further necessary investigations and experiments” related to the light. A few days later, some members of the company’s executive committee paid a visit to Menlo Park, and Lowrey did his best to convince Edison that such visits were helpful in making their expectations of progress more realistic. “It is all the

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Bowdoin College, in Maine, then at Princeton, and had done postgraduate work under Hermann von Helmholtz at Berlin University in Germany. Before being invited to Menlo Park, he had been a temporary subcontractor doing a patent search for Edison in the Astor Library in New York City. In November 1878, Edison offered

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He acknowledged, and mocked, his own disappointment when it appeared that he and his fellow experimenters would never “see the untold millions roll in upon Menlo Park that my hopes want to see.” And then, in mid-November, the work in the laboratory produced new excitement, when carbonized paper, bent into the

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boardinghouse of Edison’s neighbor Sarah Jordan was outfitted with lights and opened up to visitors. Just as quickly, the stream of tourists descending upon Menlo Park grew, with hundreds arriving in the daytime, even before nightfall. The laboratory itself was opened to the public, too. The number of people crowding into

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did not involve bribes, but did involve currying of favor from political operators. Lowrey obtained Edison’s consent to provide a special performance of the Menlo Park magic light show for the New York Board of Aldermen. It’s impossible to determine whether Lowrey was supernaturally savvy, or just plain lucky, but

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evening that Broadway would be transformed into the Great White Way by Brush Electric. The aldermen missed the spectacle in New York, pulling in to Menlo Park on a private train provided by the Pennsylvania Railroad exactly at the moment when Brush Electric made its Broadway debut. Edison Electric attempted to put

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especially of his guests’ capacity for Champagne.” When the aldermen woke up the next day, the convivial feelings for Edison with which they had left Menlo Park were replaced by hangovers. Negotiations resumed and the aldermen would not back down from onerous terms, asking the Edison Electric Light Company to pay ten

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also met “commercial needs,” the segment of the marketplace that Lowrey had attempted to position the Edison Electric Light Company as uniquely capable of addressing. Menlo Park had been the perfect locale for Edison’s laboratory when the quest for novelty would bring eager feature writers to Edison’s door, happy to

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beaten tracks of men.” In retrospect, he should have taken heart in Edison’s example: Edison had the most reason to appreciate the seclusion of Menlo Park, and yet he acquiesced when necessity tapped on his shoulder, calling him to center stage. CHAPTER SIX IMMERSION FEBRUARY 1881–SEPTEMBER 1882 WHEN THOMAS EDISON

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gaslights with electric ones were clear enough to the warden of the Maryland state penitentiary in Baltimore, who had seen the electric lights in the Menlo Park demonstration and was eager to install them, “without any red tape,” he promised. This would have entailed installing a small power plant, like the

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one serving the laboratory in Menlo Park or the company’s office in the brownstone on Fifth Avenue. Such installations, which Edison Electric called “isolated lighting,” did not help the company advance

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have grabbed all the business it could handle by responding to requests for lights powered by on-site plants. In the three months following the Menlo Park demonstrations, the company received three thousand to four thousand separate applications—so many it had lost accurate count. Thomas Edison’s determination to spurn these

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space, new equipment, and large technical support staff were everything he would need to succeed in his ambition to eclipse his own earlier achievements in Menlo Park. Two years before, soon after the lab had begun operations, Edison had declared publicly that his inventions should be judged only on the basis of

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had long been excited by the idea that electrically charged magnets could be used to process iron ore, separating the iron from other material. In Menlo Park, more than ten years earlier, a laboratory notebook recorded experiments he had personally conducted to test the concept. Other inventors had also worked on “magnetic

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to the community that was his longtime home, as Insull did in Chicago. Edison had always sought isolation to protect his work routines, first in Menlo Park, and then in West Orange, but this isolation left him unaware of what his neighbors thought of him and his factories. When environmental problems, including

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with an appreciation of the nation’s technical ingenuity. It emerged as Greenfield Village, and contained a full-scale re-creation of Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory complex built as much as possible with materials salvaged from the original site. Ford had seven railcars deliver soil from the New Jersey site

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the five hundred invited guests who joined Ford and Edison for the festivities. After the evening banquet, Edison, Ford, and Hoover walked to the unlit Menlo Park laboratory to play a scripted melodrama fancifully re-creating the first lighting of the electric light. The radio announcer solemnly intoned: “Mr. Edison has two

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.: Rutgers University Press, 1986). Israel, Edison: Paul Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998). Jehl, Reminiscences: Francis Jehl, Reminiscences of Menlo Park (Dearborn, Mich.: Edison Institute, 1939). 3v. Josephson, Edison: Matthew Josephson, Edison: A Biography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959). Nerney, Edison: Mary Childs Nerney, Thomas A

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husband on February 11, 1875, the occasion of his twenty-eighth birthday. PTAED, SB178, scrapbook image 11. settled on land in Menlo Park: The proximate reason for Edison’s move to Menlo Park was a dispute he had with the municipality of Newark. Earlier, Edison had rented factory space from a Newark landlord on

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. A “spider web”: “That Wonderful Edison,” NYW, 29 March 1878, PTAED, MBSB10463. The twelve or so: Bernard S. Finn, “Working at Menlo Park,” in Working at Inventing: Thomas Edison and the Menlo Park Experience, ed. William S. Pretzer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 34. a disheveled figure: “A Marvelous Discovery,” NYS, 22 February

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. failed to appreciate: When Edison got back in touch with William Preece in England in early August 1877, three months after Preece’s visit to Menlo Park, Edison spoke excitedly of the speaking version of the telephone, able to articulate human speech, dog barks, cricket chirps—it is “now absolutely perfect,”

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,” English Mechanic, 30 November 1877, PTAED, MBSB10290X. Edison had shifted his experimental focus: Johnson most likely composed his undated letter on 6 November 1877. The Menlo Park notebooks show that on 1 November 1877 work continued on strips of wax paper (PTAED, QP001779), but on 5 November 1877 Edison proposed using a

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sufficiently: Alexander Graham Bell to Gardiner Hubbard, n.d., American Telephone and Telegraph Company, Corporate Research Archives, PTAE, 4:187n2. CHAPTER 2. THE WIZARD OF MENLO PARK “The Phonograph is creating”: Edward Johnson to Uriah Painter, 4 January [1878], PTAE, 4:15–17. In early January 1878: Edison’s Toy Contract, 7

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to Thomas Watson, 24 April 1878, American Telephone and Telegraph Company, Corporate Research Archives, PTAED, X012IAR; “Inventor Edison’s Last.” Hubbard’s letter describes the Menlo Park lab as he saw it when he visited on 23 March 1878. Ladies and gentlemen: “Edison, the Magician,” Cincinnati Commercial, 1 April 1878, PTAED, SB031094a

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April 1878, PTAE, 4:223–224. another visiting reporter: “Long-Range Chatting,” Philadelphia Times, 3 April 1878, PTAED, MBSB10493X. Ten days after: “The Wizard of Menlo Park,” NYDG, 10 April 1878, PTAED, MBSB10500X. Croffut’s previous attempt: “The Papa of the Phonograph,” NYDG, 2 April 1878, PTAED, MBSB10472. the Mania has broken

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TAE, 8 October 1878, PTAED, D7831C. The treasurer: Charles Bailey to TAE, 8 October 1878, PTAED, D7831C. A couple of months later: “Two Hours at Menlo Park,” NYDG, 28 December 1878, PTAED, MBSB21091. William Vanderbilt and his friends: TAE to Theodore Puskas, 5 October 1878, PTAE, 4:562. At the beginning of

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to TAE, 23 December 1878, PTAED, D7820ZDI. In his telling: “Invention by Accident,” NYW, 17 November 1878, PTAED, MBSB21019X. “I have begun”: “Two Hours at Menlo Park.” In January 1879: Calvin Goddard to TAE, 22 January 1879, PTAED, D7920M. Not having heard: William Croffut to TAE, 3 February 1879, PTAED, D7920W. note

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Farley, 29 December 1878, PTAED, MU005. In November 1878: Francis Upton to Charles Farley, 22 November 1878, PTAED, MU002. Accepting the offer to move to Menlo Park meant Upton could not return to Germany to resume his postgraduate studies. Life in Germany would have been “extremely pleasant,” he wrote his mother, but

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to spend money. Here I will learn how to earn it.” Francis Upton to Lucy Upton, 7 November 1878, PTAED, MU001. Upon arrival in Menlo Park: “Two Hours at Menlo Park.” Edison referred in a latter to working with “6 experimental assistants.” TAE to Theodore Puskas, 3 January 1879, PTAED, LB004079. Upton arrived on

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bamboo and incredible stories of his inland travels. See “Frank McGowan’s Journey Through South American Wilds,” NYS, 2 May 1889, PTAED, MBSB2457. Edison designated Menlo Park itself: Francis Upton to Elijah Upton, 9 May 1880, PTAED, MU048. The work was well advanced: Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, 179. In

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. Edison must have been upset: George Barker to TAE, 26 November 1880, PTAED, D8020ZJC. cartoons that turned: Cartoon captioned “The Decadence of the Wizard of Menlo Park,” General Electric Corporation, 1880, cited in David E. Nye, The Invented Self: An Anti-Biography from Documents of Thomas A. Edison (Odense, Denmark: Odense University

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was a very straightforward invitation to see “an exhibition of Electric Lighting,” without reference to a special feast. Letterpress invitation to exhibition of lighting at Menlo Park, 18 December 1880, HFM & GVRC, Box 47, Folder 47–40, All were alight: “The Aldermen Visit Edison,” NYT, 21 December 1880. Two years before: Jehl

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, Reminiscences, 690–693. one reporter described Edison: “Rival Electric Lights.” “That’s the last”: “The Wizard of Menlo Park,” NYH, 21 December 1880. It fell to Lowrey: Jehl, Reminiscences, 781–782. Edison did not know: “The Aldermen Visit Edison.” The guests then followed: “Aldermen

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at Menlo Park,” New York Truth, 21 December 1880, PTAED, MBSB21557X. the aldermen would not back down: “Lightning over Snow,” NYH, 20 January 1881, PTAED, MBSB21573. Brush Electric

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Plachno (Polo, Ill.: Transportation Trails, 1992), 32. he would do wicked impressions: Jehl, Reminiscences, 996. In its first year: Dyer and Martin, Edison, 361. The Menlo Park laboratory: Jehl, Reminiscences, 862. CHAPTER 6. IMMERSION Only “the very rich”: James D. McCabe, New York by Sunlight and Gaslight (Philadelphia: Douglass Bros.; repr. by

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.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Edison National Historic Site Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stross, Randall E. The Wizard of Menlo Park: how Thomas Alva Edison invented the modern world / Randall E. Stross. 1. Edison, Thomas A. (Thomas Alva), 1847–1931. 2. Inventors—United States—Biography. 3

Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime

by Julian Guthrie  · 15 Nov 2019

Moneymaking PART SEVEN: Life, Death, and Picassos PART EIGHT: The Days of Reckoning PART NINE: The Awakening Author’s Note Acknowledgments PROLOGUE SAND HILL ROAD MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA Mary Jane Elmore was giddy as she looked down at the rusted-out floorboards of her old green Ford Pinto. She could see the

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in her new job at the start-up Release, which had office space on the second floor of an old building called Casa Mills in Menlo Park. The company’s goal was to become the largest software distributor over the Internet. The building at 250 Middlefield Road frequently had brownouts, and a

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start by investing their own money, then raise funds from limited partners. They opened offices in San Francisco’s South of Market district and in Menlo Park. When the story on the founding of Aspect broke, Theresia told a reporter she wanted to invest in great companies, regardless of whether they were

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target with $200 million, and Melinda was in as an investor through her company Pivotal Ventures. In an ironic twist of fate, Aspect moved from Menlo Park to the office in Palo Alto where Facebook had been located when it first got funding, where Theresia had presented the Series A term sheet

The Power Makers

by Maury Klein  · 26 May 2008  · 782pp  · 245,875 words

multiplex telegraphs as well as a curious “Electric Pen and Duplicating Press.” Earlier that spring the ambitious young inventor had boldly set up shop at Menlo Park in New Jersey. On June 25 Alexander Graham Bell arrived in Philadelphia to demonstrate three of his telephonic devices to impressed judges, who pronounced them

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systematic as his personal life was disorderly. Having achieved some success as an inventor, Edison in 1876 brought his family to the obscure hamlet of Menlo Park, New Jersey, and erected what became the first laboratory devoted entirely to the work of invention.32 Hamlet may be too ambitious a description. A

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telephone research led him to a variation on voice reproduction that thrust him into the public eye in a new role as the “Wizard of Menlo Park.” Paul Israel has called the phonograph “the most important [invention] of Edison’s career. It made his reputation as the ‘Inventor of the Age.’ ”

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October 1878 it became the first to have ample capital behind the pursuit of its goal.10 Edison understood his mission clearly. He had started Menlo Park to make invention a business, and he never lost that objective. On one occasion he complained to an assistant that one of his colleagues tended

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and showed them everything. The Herald reporter called him “Professor Edison.” So too was he hospitable to the steady stream of visitors who flocked to Menlo Park to view the Wizard at work on his latest creation, whatever it might be. With the electric light, however, Edison was more secretive, saying that

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$78,225 in loans from the stockholders—a substantial sum of money in those days. Besides labor and materials, Edison added three new buildings to Menlo Park: an office-library, a steam plant and machine shop, and a glassblowing facility. He bolstered his staff with a chemist, a glassblower, a mathematician,

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a large light or a blinding light, but a small light having the mildness of gas.19 Having defined his task, Edison harnessed all of Menlo Park’s talent to achieve it. No other inventor commanded the resources Edison had at his disposal, and he used them freely. He surrounded himself with

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some of the others. Edison agreed even though he had already decided to abandon platinum. Darkness had fallen when the financiers arrived by train at Menlo Park. Ushered into the plush reception room of the library, which at Lowrey’s bidding had been furnished with fine cherry furniture to accommodate Wall Street

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found both Edison’s and Upton’s houses brightly lit by the new lamps. Edison wanted more money to erect a pilot power station at Menlo Park, but the financiers hesitated. No one yet knew whether the new lamp could be made commercially viable. Edison had allowed only one reporter, Marshall

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of the New York Herald, to get the full story on condition that he not publish it until the inventor was ready. However, rumors about Menlo Park’s lights began leaking out until the story could no longer be contained. On December 21, 1879, the Herald interrupted its usual parade of murders

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earlier panic, had dismissed Edison’s lamp as a “philosophical toy,” but the dramatic announcement would “reassure the public whose faith in the ‘Wizard of Menlo Park’ has grown feeble.” The most striking feature of the new lamp was its “unexpected and remarkable simplicity.” Even those devout believers in Edison’s work

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and his men put the finishing touches on the entire laboratory complex as well as their own houses and other buildings at Menlo Park. He welcomed a friendly Sun reporter to Menlo Park to view the lamp and the system as it extended to houses and buildings about the grounds. Along with his usual

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select group of men, including a representative of the gas interests. Three days later he arranged a demonstration for his investors, but curiosity seekers flooded Menlo Park as well. After explaining the system he lit one bulb, then another, until twenty burned as evenly and brightly as the first. He also showed

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the vacuum?” Another suggested that the lamps could be improved by closing up the pores of the glass.44 Throngs of curiosity seekers descended on Menlo Park from every train to mill around the grounds inspecting every facility. Sometimes in their eagerness they damaged displays or equipment despite the efforts of the

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train departed and they could finally get back to work.45 Few grasped the full significance of the sight before them: The system installed at Menlo Park for experimental and demonstration purposes was nothing less than the first incandescent central power station in the world. It included three Edison dynamos, each rated

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obscure locations and began work. Then, in December, came the splash of publicity over Edison’s new lamp and his anointment as the Wizard of Menlo Park. Sawyer had long resented dwelling in Edison’s shadow and missed no opportunity to denigrate his more publicized rival. As early as January 1876 he

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was usually dead tired when he did. Her loneliness and insecurity grew even greater after Edison moved his family to the house he bought in Menlo Park near his laboratory. Even then he seldom came home, absorbed in work or simply preferring the company of the boys. Lonely and unhappy, a

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playing with them, he had a volatile temper and could be cruel. Most of the time, however, he was simply absent from their lives. At Menlo Park Dot and Dash became pets of the laboratory.9 Although Edison kept his hand in everything, his role gradually evolved into one of director more

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central station housing large dynamos driven by steam engines. To test and cost every element in the system, Edison began installing a model version at Menlo Park in the spring of 1880. Then, in April, Henry Villard, one of his stockholders, asked Edison to create a lighting system for a new

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decade; Charles L. Clarke replaced him as Edison’s chief mathematician. By November 11 the factory was ready to begin production. Using lines run from Menlo Park’s machine shop and then its own power plant, it became the first factory to draw all its power from electricity.18 That same summer

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and install a complete system. The seeming ease with which the Brush system operated successfully contrasted sharply with the absence of any evidence beyond the Menlo Park demonstrations coming from Edison. None of the criticism and hand-wringing fazed Edison, who plodded methodically toward his goal with the single-minded purpose for

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city was needed, and the board of aldermen predictably expressed concern about the plan to tear up streets. Lowrey arranged for the aldermen to visit Menlo Park for a demonstration of the system. On December 20, 1880, the aldermen dutifully arrived, under the full glare of newspaper publicity. Edison greeted them

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with handshakes all around and led them off on a jaunt through Menlo Park. After two hours of touring and scientific explanation, much of which passed over the visitors’ heads, Edison led them back inside for a lavish

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giant “C” model dynamo.29 The first tests took place in January 1881; a month later the machine succeeded in powering all 426 lamps at Menlo Park. Gleefully Edison led a late-night parade to the neighborhood saloon for a round or three of drinks. Further tests led to more improvements until

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the lamp factory. Later he sold the business for $1.085 million.46 The machine works on Goerck Street absorbed the tools and machinery from Menlo Park in stepping up its operation to produce a variety of dynamos. The Electric Light Company had agreed to use only generators from the Edison shop

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had already turned out two Jumbo dynamos and 355 smaller generators, with another twelve Jumbos in production. Charles Dean had come to New York from Menlo Park early in 1881 to serve as superintendent of the plant. Like the indispensable Kruesi, Dean could “execute from verbal explanations or rough sketches anything Edison

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ditched both in favor of a new engine designed by the Arlington & Sims company.48 As the business grew, the once tight-knit core of Menlo Park regulars scattered to new posts. Batchelor had gone to Europe to oversee the installation of isolated plants on the Continent. The business mushroomed after the

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and his testing instruments to Goerck Street, it hit him like a bombshell. “I had always thought,” he recalled, “that Edison would never give up Menlo Park, that he would return when the urgencies of affairs in New York were over.”49 More than half a century later, through the mists of

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wrote, “Edison was the high priest, and we ‘boys’ were his followers. I had devoted all my energies in loyal obedience to the cause.”50 Menlo Park faded into the realm between history and myth because Edison had outgrown it. Despite the demands of business, he never stopped being an inventor. Between

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After Edison gave his first public demonstrations in December 1879, Schuyler ordered Maxim to develop an incandescent lamp. During the summer of 1880 Maxim visited Menlo Park, where Edison devoted an entire day and evening to showing him the lamp and the works. It was a courtesy he showed any electrician who

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other electricians. In particular he followed Edison’s work closely despite his skepticism about the incandescent light. Sometime during 1879 his curiosity brought him to Menlo Park to see not only the work being done but the “invention factory” itself. Edison greeted him warmly and gave him the grand tour along with

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old enthusiasm and energy returned. At Lynn the company provided him with all the resources he needed to dive back into inventing. Like Edison at Menlo Park, he assembled a support team in a workshop called the Model Room, which became at once his haven and the command center for the design

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enough that the family returned to the Gramercy Park house, but during the summer her condition worsened. An anxious Edison took her back to the Menlo Park house where, on August 9, she died unexpectedly of what her daughter called “congestion of the brain,” which was mostly likely a tumor. Finding

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everywhere, bought his cigars, and even cashed checks for him though she was only twelve.33 Mary’s death also dealt a final blow to Menlo Park. Already most of its activities had been transferred to New York, but her death made Edison reluctant even to visit the place. As the laboratory

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complex turned into a ghost town, the village of Menlo Park sank back into the obscurity it had possessed before Edison made it famous. In 1921 Francis Jehl, Charles L. Clarke, and William S. Andrews

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have everything on hand that might be needed in an experiment to avoid delays. Here truly was an invention factory on a scale that dwarfed Menlo Park, which was exactly what Edison intended. It was on one hand a monument to himself, intended to translate his personal visions into products, and

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to oversee much of the work. His interest in what was then called “counter electric motive force” led him to create an electric railway at Menlo Park to study it. He had developed the low-resistance armature dynamo that served nicely as a motor. As Frank J. Sprague, who became the pioneer

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dynamos supplied the power through the rails, one rail being positive and the other negative. Since these same generators also powered all the lights at Menlo Park, the electric railway could never operate at the same time as the lighting. For a locomotive John Kruesi built a third dynamo to serve as

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that our street and elevated railways may at no very distant day be successfully operated by electricity,” most of the railroad men who flocked to Menlo Park to see the electric railway were unimpressed. Frank Thomson, head of the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad, examined the system, rode the train, and pronounced it

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Edison in 1890 to develop an electric railway system suitable for cities that could not use overhead trolley lines. Edison revived the method used at Menlo Park of using the rails as conductors, but his low-voltage system failed to compete with trolleys and later subways.47 As for Sprague, he signed

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Edison Company and The Westinghouse Electric Co.,” he observed. Recalling the time Edison had spent with him nearly a decade earlier when Westinghouse had visited Menlo Park in search of a system for his home, and a later meeting at Sigmund Bergmann’s factory, Westinghouse extended an invitation for Edison to come

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inventive playfulness that enabled Edison to turn out one clever amusement after another or the compulsive pursuit of technical perfection that sustained the Wizard of Menlo Park’s efforts to improve the phonograph.” Instead he looked always to what return the solution of a problem would produce. “Not one of [his]

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vacuum tube, radio, and television. As an old man Edison became close friends with Henry Ford, who idolized him to the point of reconstructing the Menlo Park laboratory at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. The dedication in October 1929 featured Edison and an elderly Francis Jehl re-creating the 1879 birth of

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far as he could. Later Edison reminded him wryly that “Central Station was coined I think either by myself or some of the boys at . . . Menlo Park in the days when guessing was a substitute for mathematics.”16 The General Electric gang bade him farewell with a lovely dinner at Delmonico’s

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on, and later making the report.” Carlson assigns Houston a much larger role in the whole process. For a version favoring Edison, see Francis Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, vol. 1 (Dearborn, Mich., 1936), 80–93. 12. New York Herald, December 2, 1875. For more detail, see Paul Israel, Edison: A Life

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. Passer, Electrical Manufacturers, 86 –88; Jehl, Reminiscences 1:214–15. Passer includes more financial details. Before the new additions, Edison had only three buildings at Menlo Park: the laboratory, a carpenter shop, and the carbon shed. See Jehl, Reminiscences 1:214. 19. Jehl, Reminiscences 1:215; New York Herald, December 11, 1878

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Light, 55–56. Friedel and Israel call Edison’s grasp of the high-resistance principle a “major breakthrough” that “began to distinguish the work at Menlo Park from what had gone before.” 25. Israel, Edison, 168–70; Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, 76. 26. Josephson, Edison, 183–84, 198–

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58. New York Sun, December 22, 1879. 59. Ibid., December 23, 1879; New York Herald, December 24, 1879; Jehl, Reminiscences 1:395–97. For the Menlo Park episode, see Josephson, Edison, 225–26. 60. New York Sun, December 27, 1879; Scientific American, April 10, 1880, 230. Josephson, Edison, 225, identifies Sawyer as

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: A Life of Invention (New York, 1988). James, Frank A. J. L. The Correspondence of Michael Faraday, vol. 1 1811–1831 (London, 1991). Jehl, Francis. Menlo Park Reminiscences (Dearborn, Mich., 1936 –41), 3 vols. Johnson, Robert Underwood. Remembered Yesterdays (Boston, 1923). Josephson, Matthew. Edison: A Biography (New York, 1959). Keily, William Eugene

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

by John Markoff  · 1 Jan 2005  · 394pp  · 108,215 words

put a stake in the ground at Kepler’s, an eclectic bookstore run by pacifist Roy Kepler that was located on El Camino Real in Menlo Park beginning in the 1950s, and drew a five-mile circle around it, you would have captured Engelbart’s Augment research group at SRI, McCarthy’

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deeply influenced by the political and cultural climate of the Midpeninsula. Indeed, within Stanford Research Institute, the research center where Engelbart began his work in Menlo Park, his researchers came to be seen as the lunatic fringe. In the midst of this engineers’ world of crewcuts and white shirts and ties arrived

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as an interdisciplinary research center shortly after World War II on the grounds of what had once been the Hopkins estate, an early mansion in Menlo Park. During the war, the land had been occupied by the U.S. Army, which had built a hospital there in anticipation of a wave

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a pretty good paper. Why don’t you get him to come to see me?” the Pentagon man said.10 Shortly after Rosen returned to Menlo Park, Engelbart got his first $25,000 research grant, which permitted him to begin playing with scaling concepts in earnest. In May of 1959 he

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research independently. Largely with his own financial support, he set up the grandly titled International Foundation for Advanced Study on a quiet side street in Menlo Park. During the next four years, initially charging subjects five hundred dollars to participate in a study of LSD and creativity, the foundation ultimately led more

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Vic Lovell convinced young writer and fellow student Ken Kesey to take part in a series of experiments with psychedelic drugs being conducted at the Menlo Park Veterans’ Administration Hospital. Lovell later became the first coordinator of the Palo Alto Free University, and Kesey introduced the world at large to LSD

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off campus, to its Midpeninsula counterpart. Roy Kepler had been a World War II conscientious objector, who in the early 1950s had founded the lively Menlo Park institution. Ira Sandperl, who would later be well-known as folksinger Joan Baez’s mentor and a committed Gandhian, was a fixture there, where he

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a job. On the Peninsula, he received a much warmer reception, and so he shelved the idea of graduate school and went to work in Menlo Park. Although his new job working on a military training system was humdrum, he was soon able to enter a co-op education program and begin

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oNLine System. Doing so by long distance was a laborious process, but he tried. He had one programmer at the time, who wrote code in Menlo Park and then traveled to Santa Monica to run and debug it, and sometimes Engelbart himself flew down to work on the machines. But SDC had

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that it crashed repeatedly. A frustrated Engelbart began to explore the idea of remotely connecting to the SDC computer from the Control Data minicomputer in Menlo Park using an early modem. Unfortunately his engineers were never able to make the system communicate reliably. As a result, for the next two years

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to build his system on a computer that had far less processing power than an Apple II of a decade and a half later. The Menlo Park computer used the magnetic-core memory that Engelbart, Crane, and English had all worked on improving in the fifties. It had a capacity of

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buildings in place, and the tiny group had sought refuge in one of the ramshackle World War II barracks that dotted the grounds of the Menlo Park campus. The buildings had open crawl spaces beneath their wooden floors, and the Augment team soon gave new meaning to the concept of a raised

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Foundation for Advanced Study, Myron Stolaroff’s project for continuing his research on the uses of LSD. When Stolaroff and Harman set up shop in Menlo Park in March 1961, they weren’t the only ones on the Midpeninsula exploring the therapeutic uses of LSD. Experiments were already being conducted at the

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Veterans’ Administration Hospital in Menlo Park, and the Palo Alto Mental Research Institute had also begun introducing local psychiatrists and psychologists, and even writers such as Allen Ginsberg, to psychedelic drugs

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be sent to Fort Dix for menial duties. Brand declined the invitation and went to Fort Dix, receiving his discharge in 1962. He settled in Menlo Park and began studying to become a professional photographer. Not long afterward, he visited the Stanford computer center with Jim Fadiman and saw a number of

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algorithm for music synthesis called wave shaping. LeBrun wasn’t the only high school kid to find his way to SAIL. Geoff Goodfellow, a hypercybernetic Menlo Park teenager, had found a job working at SRI and the Network Information Center after the computing manager realized that it was better to have him

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an impossibly long time into the future. During his travels, Kay also visited the nation’s best computer-science research centers. He spent time in Menlo Park with the Augment Group, where Bill English took him under his wing and introduced him to many of Engelbart’s best young researchers. He traveled

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1968, and each modem carried data in only a single direction—to connect Engelbart’s keyboard, mouse, and key set to the SDS-940 in Menlo Park. It required a complicated choreography to mix the images from the display screen, a camera that was pointed at Engelbart’s keyboard, and a second

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camera in Menlo Park to show demonstrations by members of the laboratory research team. At times it seemed to the audience that Engelbart wasn’t quite there, that he

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what was being executed, as a way of creating auditory feedback. After introducing the project and the system, Engelbart invited Jeff Rulifson on-screen from Menlo Park. Instantly, there he was on the giant display above Engelbart’s head, a serious young man with dark hair, a jacket and tie, and

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interactive multimedia entertainment on a scale the world hadn’t seen. The computing world was beginning to blend with the counterculture. Operating the camera in Menlo Park for Engelbart’s landmark presentation was Stewart Brand, who by then was a twenty-nine-year-old multimedia producer and a friend of English. He

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to a new wave of urban refugees who were ill equipped for their newly adopted life. The Whole Earth Truck Store came into existence in Menlo Park just a few doors away from Raymond and Albrecht’s Portola Institute, where Brand was an informal fellow-in-residence. In July of 1968,

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omnipresent and ambitious Swiss Army knife clipped to his belt, drove around the commune circuit, selling goods and accepting orders.3 Later that year in Menlo Park, with a small staff and the help of his wife, Lois Jennings, he put together the first expanded version of the Whole Earth Catalog,

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to be able to hear more than low-quality telephone audio. In the final demonstration, the audience heard from both Engelbart’s headset and, from Menlo Park, simple noises like keyboards and the responsive sound of a computer, which added to the impact of what was shown that day. Now, stationed back

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in Menlo Park at SRI, Brand was running the camera to document the birth of a new kind of computing, and Engelbart publicly thanked him from the stage

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on. He nodded several times before glancing up at the screen and just briefly breaking into the sad smile that was becoming his trademark. In Menlo Park, the Augment team had no idea how the demonstration had been received, as the video wasn’t two-way. “Did they like it?” someone

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That was followed by an abortive stint as an SRI consultant working with Burroughs and the National Provincial Bank in England. When he returned to Menlo Park the following year, he still had a job at SRI, but he needed to find something to do and Shaky the Robot, an early robotics

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the reality of the bureaucracy, it took another three years for the network to be established and the Network Information Center to be created in Menlo Park. In the interim, the Augment Group added an electronic journal and mail to the NLS system. Engelbart gave the task of designing the journal

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Engelbart was interested in having a remote version of NLS built to make it possible to use the system widely and spread its utility beyond Menlo Park. Duvall agreed as a condition of his relocation to program a simple version of the software that would enable him to work remotely via a

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ideal opportunity to test the fledgling network. There was a PDP-10 at the University of Utah, and so Andrews transferred his program file from Menlo Park to Utah and then ran it remotely, all from a log cabin in the backwoods of northern California. He found the whole concept to be

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sixteen demonstrators were arrested, and ninety warrants were issued based on photos taken by right-wing students. The next day, students marched on SRI’s Menlo Park headquarters. Inside Doug Engelbart’s group, there was a brief attempt to use the new NLS as part of a command center in case the

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looking for a way to explore new educational ideas. It all sounded like great fun, and so Albrecht, who had just remarried, moved to Menlo Park. He hadn’t lost any of his passion for Greek dancing, and he decided to offer a class at the Free University. The events were

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the Atherton backyard of Doug Engelbart, another folk-dancing devotee. Raymond and Albrecht soon transformed Raymond’s nonprofit into the Portola Institute, housed in downtown Menlo Park just off El Camino Real. There wasn’t a lot of money involved. Initially, Raymond put in some, as did Hewlett-Packard. It wasn’

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a slide projector that every fifteen seconds projected another scene from Greece on a large wall. When Dymax moved to a tiny shopping center in Menlo Park, a “People’s Computer Center” was created in the adjacent office, and it soon offered terminals connecting to a time-sharing computer service. People

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minicomputer showed up, which Albrecht had arranged to acquire in trade for his technical-writing work. The machine was delivered to Albrecht’s house in Menlo Park, which at the time was empty. (He was living out another dream—residing with his new wife and young son on a boat at the

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Irene quickly made their way to California, where father and daughter became itinerants, living in rooms in communal houses in various towns around the Midpeninsula—Menlo Park, Mountain View, Palo Alto—and over the hills in Santa Cruz, the tiny beach town, which had only recently achieved college-town status. Although

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that someone had scrawled on her back in black marker: I am not lost; my name is Chiqui (nickname). I live at 345 Willow Road, Menlo Park 325-5315. My daddy is here; his name is Fred Moore.8 Officer Calla recognized the young girl immediately; it was the second time she

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by logging in as another user and so she “linked”—the equivalent of modern chat or instant messaging software—to her friend Miranda back in Menlo Park. “Please send your password so I can use your account for a demonstration,” Weinberg typed, while the all-male group of officers clustered around

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. A couple of years later, SRI sold the Augment technology to the Tymshare Corporation. Engelbart and the group of remaining ARC researchers moved offices from Menlo Park to Cupertino. An era had ended, a new one was about to begin, and Doug Engelbart had been tossed out into the wilderness. 7 |

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with them. Larry Tesler, however, had seen something that struck his curiosity. He was then living next door to Fred Moore on Homer Lane in Menlo Park. Both men were single fathers, and they shared a radical political perspective. In the Whole Earth Catalog spirit, Tesler’s activist neighbor argued with him

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wrote a series of funding proposals for an information-access network to be based at the Whole Earth Truck Store on Santa Cruz Avenue in Menlo Park. Initial reactions were lukewarm, and no funding was forthcoming, but he kept playing with the idea, and in October he established a nonprofit information

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gave his demonstration in San Francisco in December 1968, Allison was able to watch the remote half of the presentation from a corner of the Menlo Park laboratory. An incurable software hacker, he helped out another group of programmers at SRI who were creating a version of BASIC for a mainframe computer

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outsiders who had begun to glimpse the idea of computing as a medium, one they could control for their own means. By the early 1970s, Menlo Park had become ground zero for the new search for community that had evolved from the antiwar politics and the drug culture of the previous decade

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he had ever made before. Albrecht and Moore also teamed up to teach a course they called Electronic Magic Boxes at the Peninsula School, the Menlo Park alternative school. It was a simple course in the fundamentals of electronic design, using digital components to make things like coin tossers, electronic dice,

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it and brought it with him to the third Homebrew meeting, this time at the Peninsula School, which was housed in a converted mansion in Menlo Park. There was no desk available, so Dompier set up shop on the floor, but when he plugged in his new computer, nothing happened. His

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longer and been drawn more deeply into the industry that he had helped create. However, his relationship with a woman he was living with in Menlo Park was ending painfully. It was also clear to him that the Homebrew Club was heading in an entrepreneurial direction, and was not going to be

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Michael Malone called “The Big Score”—more simply put, greed. In fact, it was not long after the Homebrew Computer Club’s first meeting in Menlo Park that the hobbyist conclave began spawning names such as Apple, Osborne Computer, Cromemco, and North Star, owing their roots, directly or indirectly, to the

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p. 23. 19.Ibid., p. 25. 20.Kary Mullis, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, New York: Pantheon Books, 1998. 21.Author interview, Don Allen, Menlo Park, Calif., August 22, 2001. 22.Vic Lovell, “The Perry Lane Papers (III): How It Was,” in One Lord, One Faith, One Cornbread, eds. Fred Nelson

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Viking, 2001), p. 217. 10.Oral history, interview by Eklund. 11.Author interview, William English, Sausalito, Calif., May 11, 2001. 12.Author interview, Don Andrews, Menlo Park, Calif., September 27, 2001. 13.Oral history, interview by Lowood and Adams. 14.Bill English, “Early Computer Mouse Encounters,” presentation sponsored by the Computer History

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2003. 8.Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning, pp. 168–69. 9.Author interview, Adele Goldberg, San Francisco, Calif., July 15, 2001. 10.Author interview, Larry Tesler, Menlo Park, Calif., August 27, 2001. 8 | Borrowing Fire from the Gods 1.Fred Moore, letter to Dick Raymond and Point Agents, February 28, 1972, personal papers

Facebook: The Inside Story

by Steven Levy  · 25 Feb 2020  · 706pp  · 202,591 words

obstacles to success or even survival. But these were the people Zuckerberg wanted to meet: nerds with dreams. In the giant headquarters he built in Menlo Park, California, among the posters festooning the walls like a giant confetti blast of techno-propaganda were dozens that read BE THE NERD. So while other

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, many people who supported the other candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton. For Facebook, the shock was compounded by something else: a huge collective finger pointed toward Menlo Park, California, where the company had its sprawling headquarters. Almost from the minute that the New York Times needle indicating a victor crossed over from the

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Rosensweig’s house. (Ironic, since Rosensweig was also on the candidate list.) They made arrangements for a longer conversation at the Flea Street café in Menlo Park, a farm-to-table haven for Bay Area foodies that Sandberg adored. They found plenty to talk about. They were so deep in discussion—Zuckerberg

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from his experience there, he later said, was that “most people at most companies are really shit”—and joined the venture-capital firm Mayfield, in Menlo Park. Every couple of months or so, he and Zuckerberg would get together. Zuckerberg’s combination of chutzpah and shyness appealed to Palihapitiya. Not that Palihapitiya

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”—a glass-walled area in the center of the vast workspace on the first floor. When Facebook later moved to the former Sun campus in Menlo Park in 2011, he opted for an even less private situation, in a ground-floor office with a large window fronting the courtyard, where a steady

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finally acquired a house, with actual furniture, only a few hundred feet away from the office.) When Facebook later moved to a remote area of Menlo Park, near salt marshes, he’d continue the practice; during one walk, an executive noticed a large snake close to Zuckerberg’s path. Zuckerberg just kept

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offerings with regularity. His office was not in New York City or even the financial district in San Francisco but on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where the big VC firms made their bets. He had worked on the Google IPO and recently on LinkedIn’s. And he was friendly with

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-ringing ceremony on the NASDAQ floor, commemorating the moment when company shares go on sale. Instead, employees gathered in the mall of Facebook’s new Menlo Park campus, where Zuckerberg would ring the bell remotely. It was just as well he stayed in California. At the moment the stock was about go

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system. NASDAQ postponed the opening, but even when the stock went on sale more than an hour late—to hugs and whoops of joy in Menlo Park—transactions were still delayed. That meant that smaller investors, who had reserved shares at the opening price, were unable to confirm the trades, or to

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, was questioning whether the post should be removed. The issue came up in the weekly “Sheryl meeting,” a videoconference involving policy executives in DC and Menlo Park. Kaplan argued to leave the post up; others noted the difficulty Facebook would have in explaining why it didn’t act on something that violated

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the feature until quietly pulling the plug in 2018. * * * • • • AFTER THE TRENDING Topics fiasco, Kaplan suggested that Facebook invite a slate of right-wingers to Menlo Park so the company could convince them that it was giving them a fair shake. Some Facebookers found this an insulting contrast to the virtual snub

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Black Lives Matter at other times.) In contrast, Facebook was treating a motley lineup of right-wing pundits like rock stars, flying them out to Menlo Park to listen to Zuckerberg and Sandberg’s explanation of how respectfully their posts were treated, even the shrill conspiracy charges from Rush Limbaugh and Glenn

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. “He was a little enigmatic, but I thought he was trying to do the right thing.” Despite whatever good feelings the meeting engendered, after leaving Menlo Park the conservatives returned to complaining about Facebook’s treatment of them—while piling up millions of views because of their skill in exploiting Facebook’s

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’—they do that just as much as anybody else does,” a “senior intelligence official” told Time. An angry Senator Mark Warner of Virginia had visited Menlo Park that summer, demanding that Facebook look deeper into the source of fake news. Warner, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, had been increasingly critical

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Facebook campus regularly. He ate a lot of free lunches. He did a presentation. Eventually he would provide consulting services to Facebook and work at Menlo Park for a short stint. “I know Building 20 well,” he says. Meanwhile, Kogan’s lab had grown to fifteen people. A postdoc from Texas named

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Guardian’s scheduled publication that Saturday, Cadwalladr contacted Facebook. She always had problems getting responses from its communications people. She didn’t know anyone in Menlo Park and had to filter her requests for comment though the UK office. A silence of several days was broken by Facebook’s deputy general counsel

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’t using the data and had deleted it, we considered it a closed case. In retrospect, that was clearly a mistake.” When Zuckerberg returned to Menlo Park, he appeared at the all-hands meeting like one of the conquerors he had so admired as a young Latin student. But the upbeat mood

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get any more real.” For years, the halo effect from empowering righteous activists would blind Facebook to the potential for abuses in other countries. From Menlo Park, it was hard to envision how the platform’s political mojo that freed people could just as easily be used by those in power to

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DC, Bickert had appeared several times before committees, often having to defend Facebook content by invoking rules that made sense only in conference rooms in Menlo Park or K Street. Now we are in a cocktail lounge down the block from the conference and she is recounting Christchurch. The seventeen-minute video

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must remain, be taken down, or in rare cases, escalated to a manager, who might send the most baffling decision to the policy-crats at Menlo Park. Facebook says that there is no set time limit on each decision, but reporting by journalists and several academics who have done deep dives on

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so Facebook quickly removed the image. Egeland was annoyed, and tried to repost the photo. Facebook suspended his account. By then, the issue had reached Menlo Park. Bickert’s team now understood that Facebook was censoring a photo of historic value, but supported the takedown. If you make exceptions for one naked

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that seemed to violate Facebook’s rules. Nearly every time a Facebook representative would testify before Congress, GOP legislators would rant about the conspiracy of Menlo Park liberals to suppress conservative speech. Their complaint was not only that in some cases Facebook took down posts from extremists—the Republicans believed that Facebook

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claimed, “The errors we made in our 2014 filings were not intentional.” Zuckerberg kept pushing. In early 2017, he insisted that WhatsApp move to the Menlo Park campus. The move was as harmful to WhatsApp’s culture as Acton and Koum feared. The WhatsApp people were accustomed to a different atmosphere from

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the boisterous, close-quartered dorm-room spirit permeating Facebook’s offices. Porting WhatsApp’s more heads-down vibe to Menlo Park created friction. To Zuckerberg’s credit, he allowed WhatsApp employees to keep their larger desks, and even had the bathrooms remodeled to accommodate them—the

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that the IGTV videos would be posted to Facebook by default before it could launch the product. The launch, which was to take place in Menlo Park with a live connection to journalists and influencers gathered in Facebook’s East Village New York City office, was a disaster. Instagram had contracted with

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digital version: Michael M. Grynbaum, “Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06: The Whiz Behind Thefacebook.com,” Harvard Crimson, June 10, 2004. his creations were terrible: Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park Town Hall, May 14, 2015, Accessed via Facebook Watch. “Everything was tech”: Randi Zuckerberg made her comments on The Human Code with Laurie Segall podcast

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-Based Personality Judgments Are More Accurate Than Those Made by Humans,” PNAS 112, no. 4, January 27, 2015: 1037. had gotten a patent: Facebook, Inc., Menlo Park, CA (US) got patent No. US 8,825,764 B2 with Michael Nowak, San Francisco, CA (US); Dean Eckles, Palo Alto, CA (US) as inventors

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, 21, 522 Zuckerberg’s ambitions for, 14–15, 127, 231, 289, 329–30, 370, 371, 524 ConnectU, 56–57, 60, 72–76 conservatives’ meeting in Menlo Park, 342–43 conspiracy theories, 346, 362, 446 content arbitration on Facebook and artificial intelligence, 452, 455–56 Bickert’s role in, 433–34 and charges

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand

by John Markoff  · 22 Mar 2022  · 573pp  · 142,376 words

) | LCCN 2021039443 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735223943 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735223950 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Brand, Stewart. | Technologists—United States—Biography. | Appropriate technology—United States—History. | Whole Earth catalog (Menlo Park, Calif.) | Counterculture—United States—History. | Technology—California, Northern—History. | Futurologists—United States—Biography. | Technological innovations—Social aspects—United States. | Journalism, Technical—United States—History. | California

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the life of his running shoes, and in 1973 he started a company to sell it.) His clients at SRI ranged from the city of Menlo Park to the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair—he had convinced the fair organizers that the buildings, including the Space Needle, should be permanent. Dick and

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social, political, and technological forces that would all take shape during the next decade. By 1961 Stolaroff and Harman would establish a research group in Menlo Park to study the relationship between creativity and LSD. One of their first subjects would be a young Stewart Brand. * * * Brand’s early flirtation with libertarianism

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wrote in his journal. “If a species works it survives; if not, not.” * * * As a junior, Brand had moved off campus to a cottage in Menlo Park. At the time, he had proudly written to his mother that he would be the master of his world. “Essentially, I am alone to study

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sure, is primarily a matter of timing.” Yet recognizing that he had done something stupid and costly, he sat in front of his cottage in Menlo Park and cried. Later it would become apparent that interest in a romantic relationship was more on his side than hers. Joan Squires was looking for

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discussion led by Willis Harman, who had the previous year helped launch the International Foundation for Advanced Study, to explore LSD and human creativity, in Menlo Park. It was one of several spin-offs from the Sequoia Seminars, in which a number of the founders had participated. The foundation had begun offering

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had had LSD enlightenment, and came away with only one doubt: where could I scare together the $500 necessary for the month-long process in Menlo Park.” He’d likened it to skydiving with his body, but he added that these people were skydiving through the universe with their minds. “When they

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to build Esalen. * * * Run by psychologists and engineers who were collecting data to find a link between the drug and creativity, the LSD experiment in Menlo Park included both an extensive preparation and a debriefing. The first step was to write an extended personal biography. Brand had gone through similar exercises at

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to try psychedelics. When, in March of 1961, Stolaroff and Harman set up the International Foundation for Advanced Study on a quiet street in downtown Menlo Park, just two miles from the Stanford campus, they weren’t the only ones exploring the therapeutic uses of LSD on the San Francisco Peninsula. Experiments

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were going on at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Menlo Park, and the Palo Alto Mental Research Institute had already begun introducing local psychiatrists and psychologists and even poets such as Allen Ginsberg to psychedelic drugs

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, he walked outside and looked up at a full moon. He stood frozen as it receded, transforming itself into three separate dancing images. To the Menlo Park foundation researchers, Brand had proved a tough nut to crack. Their analysis was that he was stuck in here-and-now concepts and resistant to

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into more inner-generated symbolism, he still kept “one foot on the ground.” It would only be later, during several follow-up sessions, that the Menlo Park psychologists noticed he softened, becoming less defensive, less concerned about how he was perceived, and more accessible and easier to be with. Not surprisingly, the

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was three years older than Brand, had been introduced to the drug when, to supplement his income, he had participated in government studies at the Menlo Park Veterans Administration Hospital. On a whim, Brand mailed some of the photographs he had taken in Oregon to Kesey, who was in the process of

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moving over the hill to the small mountain community of La Honda because his cottage on Perry Lane in Menlo Park was being torn down. Brand added a short note: “Pictures were taken this May on the first stage of a brochure job for the Warm

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, waving the cheese he was holding as if conducting an imaginary orchestra. He had what he had long sought in psychedelics—a transformative experience. In Menlo Park he had felt claustrophobic restrictions; now, release. The experience was sharpened, he wrote in his journal, because his situation felt so dangerous. He was far

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Earth Catalog. The Brands roamed the country freely during the summer of 1967, intermittently returning to the Bay Area, where they parked their trailer in Menlo Park, just off the Stanford campus, at the home of Diana Shugart, a former Stanford student then working as a social worker, who became a close

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computing. When Raymond invited Albrecht to join him in creating the Portola Institute, he moved to relatively bucolic and suburban Menlo Park. The institute was housed in an unassuming commercial building in downtown Menlo Park, just off El Camino Real, the original route of the Spanish padres that runs from San Jose to San

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longer obvious only to the priesthood of engineers and programmers who had access to corporate computers. When Dymax moved to a tiny shopping center in Menlo Park, a People’s Computer Center was created in the adjacent office, and soon terminals were connecting to a time-sharing computer service. People could walk

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, he added: “Notion: every catalog item pictured is held by a naked lady.” He would never finish reading Spaceship Earth. When he arrived back in Menlo Park, once again something had changed in the way he viewed the world. Early the next morning he drove to the Portola Institute and pitched the

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you a steering wheel. So would the Catalog. * * * When Brand decided to abandon any notion of going back to the land and instead returned to Menlo Park to explore his “technology,” the location of the Whole Earth Truck Store would prove to be fundamental. Despite his grand plan to become a tool

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which were hard to find, it mostly sold books, T-shirts, and other clothing, maps, and postcards. Set just across El Camino Real from the Menlo Park business district in four thousand square feet of retail space with a volleyball court in back, the Truck Store was a storefront with a large

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job. Years later Brand would adopt the mantra “Live small, so you can live large.” Indeed, when the Brands first arrived on Alpine Road in Menlo Park, they lived in a fifteen-foot-long box trailer that had little more than a bed and a tiny kitchen. It was a classic hippie

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-class neighborhood known as Ladera. Vic Lovell, Shugart’s former boyfriend and a psychology graduate student who alerted Kesey to the LSD experiments at the Menlo Park Veterans Administration Hospital, and Richard Alpert, as well as the writers and Kesey pals Robert Stone and Ed McClanahan, had previously lived just a couple

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told her it was time to move on. They also told her that Stewart Brand was looking to hire someone for a new project in Menlo Park. Coincidentally, she knew who Brand was: one day walking across Harvard Square after class she had seen this odd fellow in a top hat, standing

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the garage of Rancho Diablo, a seventy-acre former hippie crash pad with views of the Pacific Ocean. For a while they all commuted from Menlo Park up into the hills to the garage. Later Brand and Jennings moved the two trailers up to Skyline. At one point they lived in the

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layout. In the summer when it got hot they just opened the garage doors. The first sixty-four-page Catalog was printed at a small Menlo Park printing press located around the corner from the Truck Store, and then the cover, which was printed separately in color, was saddle-stitched to create

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about the hypertext concept for linking documents that would decades later become the basis of the World Wide Web. The computer itself was located in Menlo Park, just blocks from the Portola Institute. Brand was on hand there to operate a video camera that would relay images of the computer operators to

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an observer, but there was no video feed of the audience to see the crowd reaction to the demonstration. When Engelbart ended his presentation, the Menlo Park team asked over the microwave relay, “Did they like it?” They waited for what seemed like a very long time, and then the answer came

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how to get chickens by mail from Iowa, when he met Baldwin. Baldwin told Kahn about the Whole Earth Truck Store, so he drove to Menlo Park to meet Brand. When he read the first issue of the Catalog, he realized that Brand was way ahead of him, and he didn’t

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pushing far south. The next day the Durkees’ child was born and named Aurora. * * * * * * The Spring 1969 Catalog was produced in the Truck Store in Menlo Park, which turned out to be a mistake resulting in countless interruptions. Afterward, Brand hitchhiked to New Mexico to “clear his head” for what would be

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have to leave the island they had created. The plastic enclosure—unceremoniously sandwiched between a restaurant and a supermarket in Hayward across the Bay from Menlo Park—was equipped with portable toilets and an emergency “hospital tent.” Unable to get permission for a larger venue, Brand was forced to hold the event

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the parking lot, soaking sleeping bags, and numbers dwindled further. When the rains continued, the decision was made to evacuate to the Truck Store in Menlo Park. The next morning the police showed up and told them to leave, and Brand had a confrontation with an angry cop that threatened to get

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general, attention only made him feel worse. He tried to improve his outlook with a visit to Jack Dowling, a gestalt therapist and neighbor in Menlo Park, who had introduced LSD therapy for alcoholics in the early 1960s. Their meetings were ineffective. (Dowling instructed him to shout at a chair that was

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Brand, and Crosby said he was anxious to meet the Catalog’s creator. On a whim they jumped into Brilliant’s car and headed to Menlo Park and the Truck Store. When Crosby and Brilliant arrived, they were escorted into the back room where Brand was sitting up in bed, editing. If

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Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He had been hired at SRI as part of a futures group led by Willis Harman, one of the founders of the Menlo Park–based LSD group where Brand had taken part in the 1962 drug experiment. (Schwartz had shown up at SRI just in time to be given

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moved back to North Beach and signed up to take part in an LSD experiment being conducted by the International Foundation for Advanced Study, a Menlo Park–based research group founded by several electronics industry engineers and Stanford professors. For Brand his first LSD experience was an intense and unpleasant one. The

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-inventor of the computer mouse pointing device. Later Brand would officiate at English’s wedding in the backyard of a home on Homer Lane in Menlo Park. Trained as a mathematician, Lois Jennings was the driving force behind the Whole Earth Catalog. She kept the books, managed the employees, and even worked

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to his friends living rurally in communes, Brand soon located the Whole Earth Truck Store adjacent to the Portola Institute near the train station in Menlo Park. The store mostly sold books, along with an eclectic mix of tools and other often quirky gear. It was located in the heart of the

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, but Another Had the Idea First,” New York Times, April 18, 2005. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4 Stewart Brand, “History,” The Last Whole Earth Catalog (Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, distributed by Random House, 1971), 439. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5 Brand, “History,” 439. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6 Brand, “History,” 439

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, 63, 64–65 Varda, Jean, 35, 37, 50–51 Varda, Joan, 74 Vassar College, 13 Venice, Phelan and SB in, 274–75 Veterans Administration Hospital (Menlo Park), 77, 88, 160 Vietnam Day Committee, 121 Vietnam War, 53, 54, 68, 121–22, 149, 205, 241 growing US involvement in, 65 Whole Earth Catalog

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism

by Fred Turner  · 31 Aug 2006  · 339pp  · 57,031 words

began to develop an affection for psychedelic drugs. In 1959 Kesey became a subject in a series of experimental protocols at the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park, sponsored by the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program. Doctors in these experiments gave volunteer subjects various psychedelic drugs and observed their behavior. In return they

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together around Kesey’s house on Perry Lane on the edge of the Stanford campus. Not long after he began visiting the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park, Kesey began bringing drugs home. A scene began to emerge: some of the writers from Stanford, the artist Roy Seburn, psychologist Richard Alpert (later known

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and a member of the Grand Traverse band of the Ottowa. They married in the spring of 1966, and in late 1967 they moved to Menlo Park, where Brand began working at his friend Dick Raymond’s nonprofit educational foundation, the Portola Institute. Founded a year earlier, the Portola Institute housed and

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couldn’t actually buy any of these goods through the Catalog—to make purchases they would have to visit the Whole Earth Truck Store in Menlo Park, California, or turn to other retailers. But they could write in to recommend new products, to respond to other contributors’ reviews, or to simply describe

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the outside world. At the start, the Catalog was a fairly modest proposition. After their first foray to the communes, Stewart and Lois returned to Menlo Park, hired two assistants, and, with a small portion of Brand’s inheritance, as well as several thousand dollars Lois had inherited from her grandmother, printed

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linking proceeded in three stages. In the first phase, between 1968 and 1972, two communities began to mingle within blocks of the WholeEarthCatalog offices in Menlo Park. One, centered around the Stanford Research Institute and composed primarily of engineers, was devoted to the ongoing pursuit of increased human-computer integration. The other

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these groups in the region maintained offices within a few square blocks of each other and of the offices of the Whole Earth Catalog in Menlo Park. One of the groups consisted of the researchers associated with Douglas Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and later

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mingle operations research, economics, and political forecasting in the process. In the late 1960s and 1970s, with offices just down the road from Stanford in Menlo Park, SRI was permeated with a sense of what Kleiner calls “the sheer, pragmatic, exalting usefulness of system-centered, holistic faith.” Much of that faith had

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. 33. J. Tetrault and S. Thomas, Country Woman: A Handbook for the New Farmer (New York: Anchor Books, 1975), 97, quoted in Binkley, “Seers of Menlo Park,” 299. 34. Brand quoted in McClanahan and Norman, “Whole Earth Catalog,” 118; Bowker, “How to Be Universal,” 116. 35. Reich and Bihalji-Merin, World from

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. Albright, Thomas, and Charles Perry. “The Last Twelve Hours of the Whole Earth.” In The Seven Laws of Money, edited by Michael Phillips, 121–27. Menlo Park, CA: Word Wheel; New York: Random House, 1974. Anderson, Philip W., Kenneth Joseph Arrow, David Pines, and Santa Fe Institute. The Economy as an Evolving

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, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1988. Aneesh, A. Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Ashby, Gordon, ed. Whole Earth Catalog $1. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, July 1970. Aufderheide, Patricia. Communications Policy and the Public Interest: The Telecommunications Act of 1996. New York: Guilford Press, 1999. Bakardjieva, Maria

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. The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. Binkley, Sam. “The Seers of Menlo Park: The Discourse of Heroic Consumption in the Whole Earth Catalog.” Journal of Consumer Culture 3, no. 3 (2003): 283 –313. Boczkowski, Pablo. Digitizing the News

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of the Atomic Age. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Brand, Stewart. “Buckminster Fuller.” In Whole Earth Catalog, edited by Stewart Brand, 3. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, 1968. ———. “Civilization and Its Contents.” In Rheingold, Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, 5. ———. The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility. New

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Information Economy Is Being Created and Shaped by the Hacker Ethic.” Whole Earth Review 46 (May 1985): 44 –55. ———, ed. The Last Whole Earth Catalog. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, 1971. ———. “Local Dependency.” CoEvolution Quarterly 8 (Winter 1975): 5. ———. The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT. New York: Viking, 1987. ———. “Money

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: Access to Tools. San Francisco: Point Foundation, 1974. ———. “We Owe It All to the Hippies.” Time 145, special issue, Spring 1995. ———, ed. Whole Earth Catalog. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, Spring 1969. B i b l i o g ra p h y [ 295 ] ———, ed. Whole Earth Catalog

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. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, Fall 1969. ———, ed. Whole Earth Catalog One Dollar. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, January 1971. ———, ed. Whole Earth Epilog: Access to Tools. San Francisco: Point Foundation, 1974. ———. Whole Earth

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Press/Doubleday, 1985. Brand, Stewart, Joe Bonner, Jan Ford, Diana Shugart, and Annie Helmuth, eds. The Difficult but Possible Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, September 1969. Brand, Stewart, Joe Bonner, and Ann Helmuth, eds. The Difficult but Possible Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog

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. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, January 1969. ———, eds. The Difficult but Possible Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, July 1969. Brand, Stewart, Ann Helmuth, Joe Bonner, Tom Duckworth, Lois Brand, and Hal

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Hershey, eds. The Difficult but Possible Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, March 1969. Brand, Stewart, Lloyd Kahn, and

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Sarah Kahn, eds. Whole Earth Catalog. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, Spring 1970. Brand, Stewart, Cappy McClure, Hal Hershey, Mary McCabe, and Fred Richardson, eds

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. Whole Earth Catalog $1. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, January 1970. Branwyn, Gareth. Whole Earth Review. A Web site available at http://www.streettech.com/ bcp/BCPgraf/CyberCulture/wholeearthreview.html (accessed

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.” In Smith and Hershey, Whole Earth Catalog One Dollar, 13. Norman, Gurney, and Diana Shugart, eds. Whole Earth Catalog $1. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, March 1970. ———, eds. Whole Earth Catalog One Dollar. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, September 1970. O’Neill, Gerard K. The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space. Garden City, NY

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Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer. New York: Morrow, 1988. Smith, J. D., and Hal Hershey, eds. The Whole Earth Catalog. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, Fall 1970. Smith, Marc A. “Voices from the WELL: The Logic of the Virtual Commons.” Master’s thesis, University of California, Los

The New Geography of Jobs

by Enrico Moretti  · 21 May 2012  · 403pp  · 87,035 words

331.10973—dc23 2012007933 Printed in the United States of America DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To Ilaria Introduction Menlo park is a lively community in the heart of Silicon Valley, just minutes from Stanford University’s manicured campus and many of the Valley’s most

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newly built mini-mansions and low-rise apartment buildings. In 1969, David Breedlove was a young engineer with a beautiful wife and a house in Menlo Park. They were expecting their first child. Breedlove liked his job and had even turned down an offer from Hewlett-Packard, the iconic high-tech giant

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in the Valley. Nevertheless, he was considering leaving Menlo Park to move to a medium-sized town called Visalia. About a three-hour drive from Menlo Park, Visalia sits on a flat, dry plain in the heart of the agricultural San Joaquin Valley. Its

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, and cold in the winter. Breedlove liked the idea of moving to a more rural community with less pollution, a shorter commute, and safer schools. Menlo Park, like many urban areas at the time, did not seem to be heading in the right direction. In the end, Breedlove quit his job, sold

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communities because they thought those communities were better places to raise families. But things did not turn out exactly as they expected. In 1969, both Menlo Park and Visalia had a mix of residents with a wide range of income levels. Visalia was predominantly a farming community with a large population of

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laborers but also a sizable number of professional, middle-class families. Menlo Park had a largely middle-class population but also a significant number of working-class and low-income households. The two cities were not identical—the

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typical resident of Menlo Park was somewhat better educated than the typical resident of Visalia and earned a slightly higher salary—but the differences were relatively small. In the late

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1960s, the two cities had schools of comparable quality and similar crime rates, although Menlo Park had a higher incidence of violent crime, especially aggravated assault. The natural surroundings in both places were attractive. While Menlo Park was close to the Pacific Ocean beaches, Visalia was near the Sierra Nevada range and Sequoia

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. Fully half of its residents have a college degree, and many have a PhD, making it the fifth best educated urban area in the nation. Menlo Park keeps attracting small and large high-tech employers, including most recently the new Facebook headquarters. By contrast, Visalia has the second lowest percentage of college

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years—one of the worst performances in the country. For someone like David Breedlove, a highly educated professional with solid career options, choosing Visalia over Menlo Park was a perfectly reasonable decision in 1969. Today it would be almost unthinkable. Although only 200 miles separate these two cities, they might as well

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be on two different planets. The divergence of Menlo Park and Visalia is not an isolated case. It reflects a broader national trend. America’s new economic map shows growing differences, not just between people

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losing ground. While in 1969 Visalia did have a small professional middle class, today its residents, especially those who moved there recently, are overwhelmingly unskilled. Menlo Park had many low-income families in 1969, but today most of its new residents have a college degree or a master’s degree and a

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over a ten-year period in today’s dollars. Skeptics are correct in pointing out that Facebook directly employs only 1,500 workers in its Menlo Park headquarters and another 1,000 scattered around America. While this number is growing rapidly, General Electric and General Motors have about 140,000 and 79

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passing year, reflecting and possibly exacerbating the effect of growing socioeconomic differences. When David Breedlove, the Silicon Valley engineer mentioned in the introduction, moved from Menlo Park to Visalia in 1969, life expectancy in the two communities was comparable. Today life expectancy in San Mateo County, where

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Menlo Park is located, is almost six years longer than in Tulare County, where Visalia is located—a remarkable change. The rising inequality in life expectancy among

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to spend the year at Stanford as a visiting professor. Every morning on my way to work, I would drive along Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. Sand Hill Road contains the largest concentration of venture capital firms in the world. All major VC firms are located there, including the mythical Sequoia

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scores of, [>] Chi-Ping Hsu, [>]–[>] Chronicle Building project, [>]–[>], [>] Cincinnati, [>], [>] Cisco, [>], [>], [>] Cities of United States as environment for innovation, [>] Great Divergence in, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>] (see also Great Divergence) Menlo Park vs. Visalia, [>]–[>] and metropolitan areas, [>] population rise and fall of, [>]–[>] Clark, Shelby, [>] Class divide, [>] Clean-tech companies, [>] in Fremont, California, [>]–[>], [>] patents for, [>] in San Francisco

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of concentrations in, [>] and Great Divergence among cities, [>], [>], [>], [>] and wage levels, [>]–[>] lessened number of students in, [>], [>]–[>] and local economy, [>] and wages of unskilled workers, [>]–[>] and Menlo Park vs. Visalia, [>]–[>] and mobility of graduates, [>]–[>], [>] self-selection problem in evaluation of, [>] social return on, [>] tuition increase for, [>] of wives, [>] See also Human capital Colman

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, Karl, [>] Mathematics, poor U.S. achievement in, [>]–[>] Matheson, Kent, [>] Maveron, [>] Mayo Clinic, [>], [>] McAllen, Texas, [>], [>] McAllen-Edinburg-Pharr-Mission, Texas, [>], [>] McCreary, Colleen, [>] McKinsey consulting company, [>] Medicare, [>] Menlo Park, California, [>], [>], [>], [>]–[>] Visalia contrasted with, [>]–[>], [>] Merced, California, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>] Mercedes, [>] Metropolitan areas, [>] Mexico, PISA scores of, [>] Miami, [>], [>], [>] Microsoft, [>], [>], [>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>] Cambridge lab of, [>] employee compensation at, [>] and nonprofit sector, [>] patents

…

-by-side work, [>] Video games, [>] Vineland-Milville-Bridgetown, New Jersey, [>], [>] Virtuous cycle of growth (self-reinforcement), [>], [>] through Empowerment Zones, [>] in high-tech world, [>] Visalia, California, [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>], [>] Menlo Park contrasted with, [>]–[>], [>] Von Zastrow, Ben, [>]–[>] Vouchers, relocation, [>]–[>] Wages and salaries city differences in, [>]–[>] and cost of living, [>]–[>] and college education over life span, [>]–[>] economic rent

AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War

by Tom McNichol  · 31 Aug 2006

the right mind. In 1876, Edison built a state-of-the-art “invention factory” where he could continue his work. He set up shop in Menlo Park, New Jersey, about twenty miles outside New York City, constructing what could be considered the first modern research and development center in the world. The

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Menlo Park laboratory employed dozens of workers, and later hundreds, all toiling on various Edison projects. His men soon learned to adapt themselves to their boss’s

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mankind far more than will ever be returned to him under any patent he may ever take out.” The press dubbed him “The Wizard of Menlo Park.” It was a role Edison had been rehearsing for most of his life. c03.qxp 7/15/06 8:46 PM Page 40 c04.qxp

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seen the newspaper game from the inside during his days on the Grand Trunk Railroad—and journalists were happy to take the train out to Menlo Park to interview such a reliably colorful subject. Edison wanted the publicity not to satisfy his own vanity, but rather to attract Wall Street investors. The

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total of $300,000 to create a new company, the Edison Electric Light Company. Edison received the money in installments to fund his experiments at Menlo Park; in return he agreed to assign to the newly formed company all his inventions in the lighting field for the next five years. With funding

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testing the inventor’s spirit. Edison plunged into the task of improving his platinum wire lamp with a world-class laboratory at his disposal. His Menlo Park workshop steadily expanded, growing to a staff of as many as sixty machinists, carpenters, and lab workers. Most of the serious work took place on

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move forward. As Edison’s chief scientific assis- c04.qxp 7/15/06 8:39 PM Page 51 LET THERE BE LIGHT 51 tant at Menlo Park, Francis Upton, put it, “I have often felt that Mr. Edison got himself purposely into trouble by premature publications and otherwise, so that he would

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reverberated around the world. In the week following Christmas 1889, hundreds of visitors made a pilgrimage to Menlo Park to see the marvel for themselves, so many that the railroad had to run extra trains to Menlo Park. On New Year’s Eve, the throng grew to several thousand, including a New York Tribune

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exclamation, ‘There is Edison!’ invariably caused a rush that more than once threatened to break down the timbers of the building.” Those who came to Menlo Park never forgot the sight of the glowing lamps, even if many didn’t understand how they worked. More than one visitor asked Edison how he

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THE BIG APPLE “My light is perfected,” Edison announced. “I’m now going into the practical production of it.” In February 1881, Edison moved from Menlo Park to New York City to fulfill his next mission: bringing electric power to the Big Apple. He and his staff moved into a four-story

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be worked out before the system went into place. Edison constructed a large working model of an electrical distribution system on the grounds of his Menlo Park laboratory. Eight miles of electrical wiring were buried in the ground, supplying power to six hundred lamps dotting the property. The model let Edison troubleshoot

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Man, it was high praise indeed. Tesla and Edison were hardly equals; the two men inhabited vastly different worlds. Edison was the renowned Wizard of Menlo Park, master of a sprawling electrical empire, a man of social standing in New York. Tesla was an unknown electrician who spoke with a strange accent

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air brake. In the early 1880s, Westinghouse began to turn his attention to electricity. Westinghouse had been one of thousands of spectators at Edison’s Menlo Park lab when the Wizard first demonstrated his incandescent lamp. Electricity had always been technically interesting to Westinghouse; with the success of the Edison system, it

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.qxp 188 7/15/06 8:44 PM Page 188 FURTHER READINGS IN ELECTRICITY Francis Jehl’s Menlo Park Reminiscences (Edison Institute, 1938) is an endearingly fusty account by one of Edison’s laboratory assistants at Menlo Park. It’s not always reliable on chronology, but it offers a rare view over Edison’s

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.gov/edis/) recreates the lab where Edison worked the last four decades of his life. Nearby, in the town of Edison, New Jersey (formerly Menlo Park), is the Menlo Park Museum (phone 732-549-3299), which contains an interesting collection of Edisonia, including vintage phonographs and wax recordings. The Memorial to Topsy the Elephant

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kill animals demonstrated to, 106–107, 108–110, 115; investigated electrocution as execution method, 96–97; recommended using AC to execute criminals, 110–112 Menlo Park Museum, 189 Menlo Park Reminiscences (Jehl), 188 Microsoft, 182 Mimeograph, 36 Morgan, J. P., 45, 62, 65, 131 Morita, Akio, 183 Morse, Samuel, 27 Motion pictures: camera invented

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination

by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang  · 12 Jul 2021  · 372pp  · 100,947 words

their perspectives were conveyed in this book, they refused repeated requests for interviews. On three occasions, Sandberg invited us to off-the-record conversations in Menlo Park and New York, with the promise that those conversations would lead to longer interviews for the record. When she learned about the critical nature of

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and philanthropist; she, business icon and feminist—and have surrounded the inner workings of “MPK,” the shorthand employees use to describe the headquarters’ campus in Menlo Park, with its moat of loyalists and culture of secrecy. Many people regard Facebook as a company that lost its way: the classic Frankenstein story of

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gone wrong. The truth is far more complex. Chapter 1 Don’t Poke the Bear It was late at night, hours after his colleagues at Menlo Park had left the office, when the Facebook engineer felt pulled back to his laptop. He had enjoyed a few beers. Part of the reason, he

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meeting known as the “all-hands,” which had a more rigid agenda and featured programs and presentations. A couple hundred employees attended the meeting in Menlo Park, and thousands more watched a livestream of the meeting from Facebook’s offices around the world. In the lead-up to the Q&A following

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to all employees that had been posted on the general Workplace group.2 In the post, Zuckerberg addressed the brewing scandal at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters over the defacement of Black Lives Matter slogans written on the walls of its office buildings. “‘Black Lives Matter’ doesn’t mean other lives

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advice. He assured her that he could handle the controversy by convening a meeting of top conservative media executives, think tank leaders, and pundits in Menlo Park. It was critical, however, that Zuckerberg agree to play a prominent role in the event. On May 18, sixteen prominent conservative media personalities and thought

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leaders—including Glenn Beck of Blaze TV, Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute, and Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots—flew to Menlo Park for the afternoon gathering to air their concerns of political bias. Only Republican Facebook staff were allowed in the room, a former Facebook official said

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board for the nonprofit child advocacy group Common Sense Media, described a meeting with Sandberg at Facebook’s new offices at One Hacker Way, in Menlo Park. The cofounder of San Francisco–based TPG Capital, one of the largest private equity companies in the nation, Price moved in the same circles of

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highballs mixed from an old-fashioned bar cart stocked with Johnnie Walker, Jose Cuervo, and a selection of mixers. Those who weren’t based in Menlo Park, including Moran and other members of the threat intelligence team who worked out of DC, often joined by video. Within a year of joining Facebook

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Lewandowski did not fit the company’s culture or brand. Ultimately, Kaplan was wary of Lewandowski, Washington staff said, and passed on the pitch. In Menlo Park, Zuckerberg sat in the Aquarium, attempting to confront a different type of fallout from the election. In the days following the vote, a narrative had

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do with his victory. He spoke about Russia, and Putin, in warm, even glowing terms. Facebook’s Washington lobbyists had delivered a clear message to Menlo Park: the suggestion that Russia had done anything to influence the election was not well received by the Trump administration and would be seen as a

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of his security experts, engineers, and advertising employees and was led by one of Facebook’s earliest employees, Naomi Gleit—began to meet in the Menlo Park offices. They called themselves “Project P”—the P for “propaganda.” The group met daily and discussed its progress on a secure Facebook page. The banner

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Facebook’s policy team in Washington, but had repeatedly walked away with the feeling that the company was holding something back. Now he was in Menlo Park to confront Sandberg directly. The sofas, where Sandberg preferred to sit for meetings, were ignored, and the group sat formally at the conference table. Warner

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campaign, they had overlooked the IRA’s highly effective troll army. The discovery of the IRA ads prompted Stamos’s team to double down. In Menlo Park, they were already isolated in their building on the outskirts of the Facebook campus; Moran and a small number of other members of the threat

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to autism. It was as if she curated her worldview to exclude negative or even critical feedback. When the company had relocated to the new Menlo Park offices, she had even named her conference room “Only Good News.” The uplifting stories were validation both of Facebook’s mission and of her ambition

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the CEO. Some of Facebook’s lobbyists and communications staff watched a livestream of the hearing in a conference room in the Washington offices. In Menlo Park, executives gathered in a glass conference room with the hearing displayed on one TV screen and their colleagues in DC on videoconference on another. The

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the most basic details of how Facebook worked. Zuckerberg paused and then smiled. “Senator, we run ads.” The audience chuckled, and executives in Washington and Menlo Park exploded with laughter. In the joint Senate Committee on Commerce and Senate Committee on the Judiciary hearing, the average age of its four leaders was

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two hours in, if he needed a break, he declined. “You can do a few more,” he said with a small smile. In Washington and Menlo Park, employees cheered. “Oh, he’s feeling good!” one Washington staffer exclaimed. Even younger congressional members made embarrassing errors. “If I’m emailing within WhatsApp, does

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in much the same way it had been used in the United States and Europe. What happened in other languages was invisible to leaders in Menlo Park. Zuckerberg, for his part, was encouraged by the early results. After Internet.org began rolling out in 2014, he touted how women in Zambia and

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taking place on Facebook. In the month following the call, a handful of Facebook employees started an informal working group to connect Facebook employees in Menlo Park with activists in Myanmar. The activists were told it would be a direct channel of communication, used to alert the company to any problems. Various

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. It’s not that they cannot solve this; it’s that they refuse to do what is necessary.”9 On Thursday, Zuckerberg and Sandberg in Menlo Park and Kaplan in Washington, DC, met over videoconference to come up with a response. The fact-checkers and the AI that Sandberg had touted to

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about Trump’s stance on immigration. The cultural rift between the Washington office and MPK was widening. The Oval Office meeting upset many employees in Menlo Park, but to their counterparts in Washington, Kaplan was simply following the lobbying playbook used across corporate America. His main goal was to preserve the status

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changes. “Mark still wanted people using Facebook as much as possible, as often as possible.” Sheryl Sandberg sat in a sun-filled garden outside her Menlo Park home surrounded by high-resolution cameras set up to stream a live interview with the Reuters Next media conference. It was January 11, 2021, and

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her middle school–age children; she and her fiancé, Tom Bernthal, had combined their families. Berthnal’s three children had moved from Los Angeles to Menlo Park and enrolled in school there. Some employees claimed that they weren’t seeing her as often in high-level meetings, but Sandberg’s aides insisted

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Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software

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QI: The Book of General Ignorance - The Noticeably Stouter Edition

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Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations

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The Idea of Decline in Western History

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The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance

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The Search for Life on Mars

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Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again

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Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming

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Makers

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The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value

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Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences

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The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

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Data Mining: Concepts, Models, Methods, and Algorithms

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Work Rules!: Insights From Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

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Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Revised and Updated for the 21st Century

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Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

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Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

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Empire of Guns

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Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist

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An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000

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Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing

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Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science

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A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

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Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism

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Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

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The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite

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Energy: A Human History

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Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History

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So You've Been Publicly Shamed

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Momma and the Meaning of Life

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Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Inside Technology)

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Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

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The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future

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The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy

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The Sport and Prey of Capitalists

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The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

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Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days

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Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat

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Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

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Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy

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Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following

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The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World

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The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

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To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others

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Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

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The new village green: living light, living local, living large

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Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley

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Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet

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Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing Before Cybernetics

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Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street

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The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal

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The Global Citizen: A Guide to Creating an International Life and Career

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Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System

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The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility

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The Key Man: The True Story of How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale

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Eon

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Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media

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Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

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The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture

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The Shadow of the Wind

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The Six: The Untold Story of America's First Women Astronauts

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Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

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The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

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The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era

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Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

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David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

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How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age

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Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex

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The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

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Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

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The Comedy Film Nerds Guide to Movies

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The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea

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Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor

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Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse

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The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993

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1491

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Lethal Passage

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Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI

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The Enlightened Capitalists

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The Art of Rest: How to Find Respite in the Modern Age

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The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives

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Gambling Man

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The Everything Blueprint: The Microchip Design That Changed the World

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Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America's Eyeballs

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The Art of Computer Programming: Sorting and Searching

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Shampoo Planet

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Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green

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The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

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The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society

by Binyamin Appelbaum  · 4 Sep 2019  · 614pp  · 174,226 words

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by Po Bronson  · 2 Jan 2001  · 446pp  · 138,827 words

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Shoe Dog

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Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

by James Gleick  · 1 Jan 1992  · 795pp  · 215,529 words

Simple and Usable Web, Mobile, and Interaction Design

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Turing's Cathedral

by George Dyson  · 6 Mar 2012

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

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Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

by John Carreyrou  · 20 May 2018  · 359pp  · 110,488 words

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

by Tim Harford  · 3 Oct 2016  · 349pp  · 95,972 words

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

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Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

by Laura Hillenbrand  · 16 Nov 2010  · 554pp  · 164,923 words

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010

by Charles Murray  · 1 Jan 2012  · 397pp  · 121,211 words

Come and Take It: The Gun Printer's Guide to Thinking Free

by Cody Wilson  · 10 Oct 2016  · 246pp  · 70,404 words

Darwin Among the Machines

by George Dyson  · 28 Mar 2012  · 463pp  · 118,936 words

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It

by Marc Goodman  · 24 Feb 2015  · 677pp  · 206,548 words

I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59

by Douglas Edwards  · 11 Jul 2011  · 496pp  · 154,363 words

How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight

by Julian Guthrie  · 19 Sep 2016

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction

by Derek Thompson  · 7 Feb 2017  · 416pp  · 108,370 words

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century

by P. W. Singer  · 1 Jan 2010  · 797pp  · 227,399 words

Owning the Sun

by Alexander Zaitchik  · 7 Jan 2022  · 341pp  · 98,954 words

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era

by Gary Gerstle  · 14 Oct 2022  · 655pp  · 156,367 words

Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

by James Mahaffey  · 15 Feb 2015

It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO

by Felix Gillette and John Koblin  · 1 Nov 2022  · 575pp  · 140,384 words

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination

by Mark Bergen  · 5 Sep 2022  · 642pp  · 141,888 words

Polaroids From the Dead

by Douglas Coupland  · 1 Jan 1996

King of Capital: The Remarkable Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Steve Schwarzman and Blackstone

by David Carey  · 7 Feb 2012  · 421pp  · 128,094 words

Bill Marriott: Success Is Never Final--His Life and the Decisions That Built a Hotel Empire

by Dale van Atta  · 14 Aug 2019  · 520pp  · 164,834 words

The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge

by David McCullough  · 1 Jun 2001  · 848pp  · 240,351 words

Red Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson  · 23 Oct 1992  · 660pp  · 213,945 words

Atrocity Archives

by Stross, Charles  · 13 Jan 2004  · 404pp  · 113,514 words

Surfaces and Essences

by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander  · 10 Sep 2012  · 1,079pp  · 321,718 words

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

by Ron Chernow  · 1 Jan 1997  · 1,106pp  · 335,322 words

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It

by Richard Florida  · 9 May 2016  · 356pp  · 91,157 words

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

by Alan Weisman  · 23 Sep 2013  · 579pp  · 164,339 words

The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition

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Please Report Your Bug Here: A Novel

by Josh Riedel  · 17 Jan 2023  · 287pp  · 85,518 words

The Passenger

by AA.VV.  · 23 May 2022  · 192pp  · 59,615 words

Eastern USA

by Lonely Planet

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

by George Packer  · 4 Mar 2014  · 559pp  · 169,094 words

The Future Won't Be Long

by Jarett Kobek  · 15 Aug 2017  · 510pp  · 138,000 words

GCHQ

by Richard Aldrich  · 10 Jun 2010  · 826pp  · 231,966 words

California

by Sara Benson  · 15 Oct 2010

Aerotropolis

by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay  · 2 Jan 2009  · 603pp  · 182,781 words

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest

by Zeynep Tufekci  · 14 May 2017  · 444pp  · 130,646 words

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

by Thomas L. Friedman  · 22 Nov 2016  · 602pp  · 177,874 words

USA Travel Guide

by Lonely, Planet

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World

by David Kerrigan  · 18 Jun 2017  · 472pp  · 80,835 words