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Most tours of Palo Alto's tech history start at the HP Garage. The story really starts a few blocks away and thirty years earlier, in a small house at the corner of Channing Avenue and Emerson Street. In 1909 a recent Stanford graduate rented the house, its garage and a radio mast next door and started a wireless company. By 1917 the firm employed more than 300 people. Along the way an inventor on its payroll figured out how to make a vacuum tube amplify a signal, a discovery that sits underneath radio, long distance telephone calls and sound film.
Our Silicon Valley history gives this chapter a few paragraphs. This page goes deeper: the company, the people, the invention and what you can still see. The main sources are the Perham Collection of Early Electronics at History San Jose, the state landmark listing and a master's thesis on Federal Telegraph published by FoundSF.
Cyril Elwell and the Poulsen arc
Cyril Frank Elwell was born in Australia in 1884 and came to Stanford to study engineering. In the early 1900s wireless telegraphy on the West Coast was dominated by the American Marconi Company, which used spark transmitters. Spark sets threw out a burst of noisy, broad signals. Elwell bet on something better.
The Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen had built an arc transmitter that produced a steady, continuous wave. Continuous waves could carry farther, tune more sharply and even carry a voice. Elwell secured a license to make Poulsen's arc in the United States. In 1909 he founded the Poulsen Wireless Telephone and Telegraph Company in Palo Alto. It was soon renamed the Federal Telegraph Company. Early backers included Stanford's president David Starr Jordan, according to the FoundSF thesis.
History San Jose describes Elwell's system as the first commercially successful form of continuous wave wireless telegraphy. Engineers led by Elwell and Leonard Fuller kept scaling the arc up. The company built ever larger transmitters, set daytime distance records and won contracts with the U.S. Navy.
A cottage at 913 Emerson Street
The first home of the company was not a factory. In 1909 Douglas Perham rented Elwell his cottage and garage at 913 Emerson Street. Perham had already put up a 75 foot radio antenna beside the house for his own experiments. The galvanized iron shed behind it was enlarged into a workshop and a small cottage at the back became the development lab. Perham sold the property to Federal in 1912.
It is a pattern Palo Alto would repeat. A garage becomes a workshop, a workshop becomes a company and the company outgrows the neighborhood. Federal moved in 1916 into a long corrugated iron building between El Camino Real and Alma Street, still close to its first site. The house at 913 Emerson was later torn down. Perham's collection of photographs and early equipment survives at History San Jose.
Lee de Forest comes to Palo Alto
Lee de Forest arrived in California in 1910 with a famous name and a troubled business. He had invented the Audion in 1906, a three-element vacuum tube that worked as a sensitive radio detector. His New York partners, though, were charged with stock fraud. De Forest was left in San Francisco without a company.
Elwell knew him from the local radio scene. He persuaded Federal's leadership to hire him. In 1911 de Forest got a lab in Palo Alto, two assistants and freedom to experiment. The assistants were Herbert Van Etten and Charles Logwood. De Forest was at first surprised by their lack of formal training. He came to respect their inventiveness. When federal agents came to Palo Alto in 1912 to arrest him in the old fraud case, Beach Thompson, the Federal backer who had agreed to hire him, posted $10,000 bail so the work could continue.
The amplifier and the oscillator
De Forest's assignment was practical. Federal needed to strengthen faint incoming telegraph signals so its receivers could pick them up. He went back to the Audion. Within months his team had a tube circuit that amplified radio signals far beyond what anyone expected. A few months later they found the same tube could oscillate, which meant it could generate radio waves as well as detect and boost them.
The state landmark plaque sums it up: here de Forest "devised the first vacuum tube amplifier and oscillator in 1911 to 1913." Most accounts place the key amplifier results in 1912. The thesis author argues that by the end of that year de Forest had applied the tube to all three stages of radio: making the signal, receiving it and amplifying it.
Why AT&T cared
Telephone engineers had the same problem as radio men. Signals faded over long wires. AT&T wanted a coast to coast line in time for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. De Forest took his amplifier east and demonstrated it to the company. AT&T later bought rights to the Audion patents through an intermediary. Its own engineers refined the tube into the repeaters that made transcontinental calls possible. De Forest left Federal in 1913 to start another company in New York.
Federal kept something valuable. Because the discovery happened on its payroll, the company held shop rights to make de Forest tubes for its own use. That mattered in the 1920s, when RCA and its partners controlled most tube patents.
Good to know
- The landmark's official name is Pioneer Electronics Research Laboratory, not Federal Telegraph.
- The plaque is in the sidewalk at the southeast corner of Channing and Emerson. Look down.
- De Forest invented the Audion detector in 1906, before he came west. The Palo Alto work was turning it into an amplifier and oscillator.
- Sources disagree on when Poulsen Wireless became Federal Telegraph. Some say 1911 and others "by 1912."
Navy contracts and growth
The arc transmitter was Federal's business. In 1912 Congress funded a chain of Navy radio stations. Federal equipment was tested between the new naval station in Arlington, Virginia and the battleship USS Arkansas. Later tests reached Federal's own station in Honolulu, more than 4,500 miles away. Contracts followed for stations in the Panama Canal Zone and elsewhere.
World War I brought a boom. Federal grew past 300 employees in 1917. After the United States entered the war, the Navy bought most commercial radio stations, Federal's among them, in 1918. The company resumed operating its stations in 1921. Rudolph Spreckels took control in 1924. In 1927 the Mackay Companies bought Federal and ITT acquired Mackay the next year. As a cost saving move the Palo Alto operation was moved to New Jersey in the early 1930s. History San Jose gives 1931 and the FoundSF thesis gives 1932.
The people Federal launched
Federal's biggest legacy may be its alumni. A small radio company in a college town trained people who went on to start their own firms. The thesis traces several:
- Magnavox. Peter Jensen was one of the Danes who came to help with the arc. He and Federal engineer Edwin Pridham left in 1910 for a lab in Napa. They developed a moving coil loudspeaker and formed Magnavox.
- Leonard Fuller. Federal's chief arc engineer left after World War I to help found the Colin B. Kennedy Radio Company in San Francisco, known for high quality home sets.
- Gerhard Fisher. He joined Federal in 1926, invented a metal detector in his Palo Alto garage in 1928 and opened Fisher Research Laboratories in Palo Alto in 1936.
- Charles Litton. Part of Federal's tube world, he built glass lathes that tube makers across the country adopted. He formed Litton Industries in 1946 and later sold the tube business to the group that kept the Litton name.
Frederick Terman, who grew up on the Stanford campus and became the mentor of Hewlett and Packard, knew this world well. Our Terman page explains how he turned that early radio culture into a deliberate strategy.
Why it matters
It is easy to treat Federal Telegraph as a footnote before the HP Garage. That undersells it. Three things make it central to the region's story:
- It proved the model. A Stanford graduate licensed a technology, raised money locally and built a company next to campus. That is still the template.
- It produced a world-changing invention. The vacuum tube amplifier made radio broadcasting, long distance telephony and talking pictures practical. In 1931 the physicist Robert Millikan called the electron tube amplifier the essential device underneath all of them.
- It seeded talent. Engineers trained at Federal stayed in the Bay Area and started companies of their own.
The full chain from radio to chips is told in our Silicon Valley history and the Shockley and semiconductors page.
Visiting the site
Nothing of the company survives at Channing and Emerson. What you will find is the state plaque in the sidewalk. It was registered as California Historical Landmark No. 836 in 1969. The Pacific Coast Architecture Database records that the city and the Palo Alto Historical Association erected it on May 2, 1970.
The corner is an easy walk from downtown. From the Palo Alto Caltrain station, walk up University Avenue, turn right on Emerson Street and continue south about half a mile. Combine it with the HP Garage at 367 Addison Avenue, about ten minutes further south. Our famous tech addresses tour links these stops with the later sites downtown and our Professorville guide covers the streets around them. For the date in context, see the Palo Alto timeline.
Frequently asked questions
Where is the Federal Telegraph plaque in Palo Alto?
It is set into the sidewalk at the southeast corner of Channing Avenue and Emerson Street, a few blocks south of University Avenue. It marks California Historical Landmark No. 836, the Pioneer Electronics Research Laboratory. The original buildings are gone.
What did Lee de Forest invent in Palo Alto?
Working at Federal Telegraph from 1911 to 1913 with assistants Herbert Van Etten and Charles Logwood, de Forest found that his three-element Audion tube could amplify weak signals. The team then made it oscillate, which meant a tube could also generate radio waves. The state plaque calls these the first vacuum tube amplifier and oscillator.
Who founded the Federal Telegraph Company?
Cyril F. Elwell, an Australian-born Stanford graduate, started the company in Palo Alto in 1909 as the Poulsen Wireless Telephone and Telegraph Company. It licensed the Danish inventor Valdemar Poulsen's arc transmitter and was soon renamed Federal Telegraph.
Why is Federal Telegraph important to Silicon Valley?
It was the first sizable electronics company in the area and a training ground for engineers. The amplifier work done there underpinned long distance telephone, radio and sound film. Former employees went on to found or shape companies such as Magnavox, Fisher Research Laboratories and Litton.
Can you visit the Federal Telegraph site?
Only the sidewalk plaque remains and it is free to see at any hour. The Perham Collection of Early Electronics at History San Jose holds photographs and equipment from the company's Palo Alto years.