William Redington Hewlett

American engineer

• Born: May 20, 1913
• Birthplace: Ann Arbor, Michigan
• Died: January 12, 2001
• Place of death: Palo Alto, California

Hewlett cofounded the Hewlett-Packard Company, a manufacturer of computer hardware and software and one of Silicon Valley’s first start-up companies. Hewlett’s audio oscillator was the company’s first financially successful product.

Primary fields: Computer science; electronics and electrical engineering

Primary invention: Audio oscillator

Early Life

William Redington Hewlett was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on May 20, 1913. His father was an influential physician and a faculty member at the University of Michigan. When Hewlett was three years old, his father transferred to Stanford University and the family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. Hewlett’s father died suddenly when Hewlett was twelve, but the family survived the hardship and the boy continued to benefit from the dynamic cultural, scientific, and literary surroundings in the growing San Francisco region.

Hewlett attended Lowell High School in San Francisco, but he did not do well there because he suffered from dyslexia—a language-based learning disorder very poorly understood or accommodated at the time. The dyslexic person has difficulty reading well, sometimes reversing letters as he or she reads or writes. As inconvenient as it is for anyone to master academic subjects with this condition, a number of dyslexics are excellent visual thinkers. Many scientists and inventors have discovered that they can clearly imagine new machines in their minds. This disability can be a surprising asset to the mechanically inclined if their true ability can be recognized early enough. Hewlett was fortunate to have his knack for understanding how things worked brought to the attention of his high school principal, who saw past his poor grades, urged Hewlett to enroll at Stanford, and encouraged the university to accept him.

Life’s Work

Hewlett’s life work began earlier than most with his entrance in college in 1930. Hewlett was again blessed to have found a mentor in Professor Frederick Terman, one of Stanford’s most famous professors, who also had a large role in the development of the computer industry in Silicon Valley. Hewlett also met and became a close personal friend with David Packard—a vital friendship that developed into a synergistic, inventive collaboration and business partnership as they founded the Hewlett-Packard Company. When Hewlett graduated from Stanford in 1934, he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he earned his master’s degree in engineering in 1936.

That year, Hewlett returned to California to continue his graduate studies in engineering at Stanford, receiving a master of engineering degree in 1939. Professor Terman again significantly shaped the lives of both Hewlett and Packard by encouraging them to form their own company soon after they graduated. With little founding investment capital, the original headquarters of the Hewlett-Packard Company was in a garage. They also did not have money for a marketing survey to select a proper name for the company, so they decided to name it after themselves and flipped a coin to decide which of their last names would come first. The year 1939 was also important in that Hewlett married Flora Lamson. They eventually raised five children together.

In 1940, Hewlett invented the audio oscillator in his lab at Stanford, and it became the company’s first commercial success. Eight of the machines—priced at $71.50 apiece—were sold to Walt Disney’s new company to be used to create the 1940 hit film Fantasia. Far from being a stage prop for an animated movie, the audio oscillator was a valuable technical tool for physicians, clinical technicians, engineers, geologists, oil explorers, miners, the U.S. military, and others.

While Hewlett worked virtually his entire life at Hewlett-Packard, he did spend four years as an officer in the Army during World War II. Even then, his work was not far removed from technical engineering work. He first served on the staff of the Army’s chief signal officer but was soon elevated to the head of the New Development Division of the War Department’s Special Staff. In 1945-1946, he was on the special U.S. team that evaluated Japanese industry in the immediate aftermath of the war.

In 1947, Hewlett returned from the military to become the company’s vice president, while Packard served as president. Hewlett moved up to executive vice president in 1957 (the year the company went public) and president in 1964, when Packard became chairman. Hewlett became the chief executive officer (CEO) when Packard served as the deputy secretary of defense in Richard M. Nixon’s administration. Whatever the job titles, it is generally acknowledged that Hewlett and Packard worked well together.

Hewlett-Packard did not enter the minicomputer market until 1966. Nonetheless, its first computer, the 2116A, was truly innovative. Nearly all early computers were heat-generating, heat-sensitive, delicate machines requiring large and expensive air conditioning units for the rooms in which they were located. Most also had to be installed on spring-loaded floors to prevent damage from shaking. Hewlett-Packard planned its first computer as an instrumentation computer. As such, the company decided it needed to be as rugged and reliable as the other instruments with which it was to work. As a consequence, Hewlett-Packard is credited with inventing the first “go-anywhere, do-anything” computer. While Hewlett-Packard is most prominently associated with computers, it is important to remember that the company also provided a wide range of technical equipment for manufacturing, testing, measuring, copying, scanning, printing, and calculating.

In 1966, Hewlett and his wife founded the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which supports a number of educational and cultural institutions. Flora Hewlett died in 1977, and William married Rosemary Bradford the following year. He died in 2001 at the age of eighty-seven.

Impact

Hewlett had a significant impact not only on the invention and development of computers and their auxiliary products but also on the industry in general. He and Packard are credited with creating a productive corporate work environment in which employees were highly regarded. So famous is this aspect of the Hewlett-Packard corporate ethos that it has earned the sobriquet “The HP Way.” Hewlett-Packard was one of Silicon Valley’s first start-up companies and one of its most successful. At the time of Hewlett’s death, Hewlett-Packard was the thirteenth largest corporation in the United States, with about ninety thousand employees in 120 countries around the globe and annual sales of nearly $50 billion.

Bibliography

Anders, George. Perfect Enough: Carly Fiorina and the Reinvention of Hewlett-Packard. New York: Portfolio, 2003. An exciting account of Fiorina’s attempt to merge the classic values of engineering culture at Hewlett-Packard with a more market-oriented approach, which she thought could be achieved through a merger with Hewlett-Packard’s archrival, Compaq. Fiorina was CEO of Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2005.

Cohen, H. Floris. The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. A history of the process of modern science and technology, including invention.

Evans, Harold. They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine—Two Centuries of Innovators. New York: Little, Brown, 2004. A general history of innovations that includes useful material on William Hewlett.

Grissom, Fred, and David Pressman. The Inventor’s Notebook. 5th ed. Berkeley, Calif.: Nolo Press, 2008. A practical discussion of inventing, with some interesting insights into the process.

Malone, Michael S. Bill and Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World’s Greatest Company. New York: Portfolio, 2007. The title clearly indicates the author’s bias, but the book provides much useful information.

Morgan, Christopher. Wizards and Their Wonders: Portraits in Computing. Boston: ACM, 1997. Popular accounts of the pioneers of the computer industry.

Platt, Richard. Eureka! Great Inventions and How They Happened. Boston: Kingfisher, 2003. Platt examines the circumstances in which some of the world’s best-known inventions were conceived and the genius of their inventors.

Schwartz, Evan I. Juice: The Creative Fuel That Drives World-Class Inventors. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004. A theoretical look at the process of inventing that includes examples relevant to Hewlett’s audio oscillator.

Tomaselli, Valerie, ed. The Cutting Edge. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. A general account of inventions that includes important material on Hewlett and Packard and their inventions.