High-Tech Pioneer William Hewlett Dies
William R. Hewlett, the surviving member of the duo who all but invented Silicon Valley in a Palo Alto garage 62 years ago, died Friday. He was 87.
Hewlett died quietly in his sleep at his Palo Alto home, according to a statement from Hewlett-Packard Co.
After first flipping a coin to determine whose name would go first, Hewlett and his Stanford University classmate David Packard founded Hewlett-Packard Co. in 1939 with combined capital of $538, partially borrowed from their engineering professor.
Their inaugural product, assembled by hand in that one-car garage, was a Hewlett invention: an audio oscillator capable of generating high-quality audio signals at low cost for communication and defense applications. Designated the HP200B to foster the impression it was made by an established company, its first major sale went to Walt Disney Studios, which ordered eight at $71.50 each to help develop the soundtrack for “Fantasia.”
But that was only one of the fledgling company’s products. “In the beginning, we did anything to bring in a nickel,” Hewlett once recalled. “We had a bowling lane foul line indicator. We had a thing that would make a urinal flush automatically as soon as a guy came in front of it. We had a shock machine to make people lose weight.”
From that start, Hewlett, Packard and their management team built the company into what is today a worldwide leader in high-technology. Hewlett-Packard Co. today boasts annual sales of nearly $50 billion and a work force of more than 88,500. His stock in the company he founded made Hewlett one of America’s wealthiest individuals, ranked last year by Forbes magazine at No. 26, with an estimated net worth of $9 billion.
But the company’s effect on its industry and its region goes well beyond the volume of its sales or the personal wealth it created. By encouraging other entrepreneurs through investments and joint ventures--and providing incipient entrepreneurs with the management skills they needed to form their own companies--Hewlett and Packard helped create a uniquely communal spirit across what was known then as the Santa Clara Valley and since the mid-1970s as Silicon Valley.
Corporate Culture Known as ‘the HP Way’
In a videotaped statement issued Friday, Hewlett-Packard Chairman and Chief Executive Carly Fiorina called Hewlett a “revered leader” and credited him with creating the corporate culture of teamwork, uncompromising quality and professional respect often referred to as “the HP way.” “It is really this culture which distinguishes Hewlett-Packard from all other companies,” she said.
Technology followers all over the valley remarked that Hewlett’s death signified the passing of the original generation of high-tech entrepreneurs.
“Today marks the final passing of their era, but their spirit lives on in every company in this valley,” said Steven P. Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple Computer Inc. and at one time an HP factory worker. As it happens, according to Apple legend, Jobs and his partner, another HP employee named Steve Wozniak, founded their own company in frustration at HP’s refusal to market a personal computer Wozniak had devised.
In physical appearance, the 5-foot-10, roughhewn Hewlett made a striking contrast with the patrician-looking Packard, who was tall enough to have briefly played professional basketball. But they shared prosperous childhoods--Hewlett as the son of a San Francisco physician, and Packard the offspring of a Pueblo, Colo., lawyer. More important, they harbored similar views of business and commerce.
“We just thought alike,” Hewlett told The Times in an interview upon his retirement as HP’s vice chairman in 1987. “If [an employee] didn’t get an answer he liked from me, he’d go to Dave, or the other way around. But almost invariably, he’d get almost the same answer. . . . We had the same ideas on where we were trying to go.”
Among the other qualities they shared was intellectual curiosity. As a youth, Hewlett “wanted to know how things worked and why they did what they did,” Packard wrote of his partner in his 1995 book, “The HP Way.” “[Hewlett] often conducted homemade experiments to find out. Some involved explosives, and like me, he was lucky to survive.”
Forced to Compensate for His Dyslexia
William Redington Hewlett was born May 20, 1913, in Ann Arbor, Mich. At age 3, his family moved to California, where his father, a doctor, joined the faculty of Stanford Medical School.
Although he was the beneficiary of the best Bay Area college preparatory education, Hewlett’s academic achievements were spotty, in part because undiagnosed dyslexia hampered his reading and writing. To compensate, he learned to consign facts and figures to memory in a logical way, which helped him excel in math and science.
In any event, he garnered a recommendation to Stanford University largely because of the prominence of his late father. At the university he met Packard during their freshman year. The two discovered a mutual appreciation of the outdoors, often hiking together into the Sierras in the company of a rented horse. They also both came under the influence of engineering professor Frederick Terman, who would help guide their academic careers and advise them on the founding of their pioneering company.
That happened in 1938, after Hewlett completed graduate study at MIT and Packard returned West from an engineering job at General Electric. They moved into modest accommodations on Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, where Packard and his bride, Lucille, occupied a ground-floor apartment and the unmarried Hewlett lived in a cabin out back.
The premises also included a peak-roofed garage, which the two men requisitioned as a workshop to assemble and spray-paint their audio oscillators, and which in 1989 was designated a California historical landmark as the “birthplace of Silicon Valley.”
World War II briefly interrupted the partnership: Hewlett, an Army Reservist, was called to duty while Packard remained behind to run the fledgling company. But the war also redoubled demand for the Hewlett-Packard line of electronic devices, and by 1947, with annual revenues of $1.5 million, the partnership was incorporated. The company went public in 1957.
Over that period, Hewlett and Packard established their complementary roles. Packard, who died in 1996, was to provide HP’s business acumen and step forward as its public and ceremonial face; much later he even served in the Richard Nixon administration as a deputy Defense secretary. Hewlett was happier rubbing shoulders with the company’s engineers on the laboratory floor, which he described as “management by walking around.”
This was an essential element of the company’s hallmark egalitarian and participatory management style. As a 1982 Harvard Business School case study described “the HP way”: “[It] supports, even demands, individual freedom and initiative while emphasizing commonness of purpose and teamwork.”
Management Style Fostered Enthusiasm
It was not unusual for even the most junior staff members to run into Hewlett in the company lunchroom and get invited upstairs to meet the senior engineers working on innovative new products. Moreover, Packard later wrote, Hewlett’s ability to analyze an inventor’s idea with transparent logic and personal sensitivity was so marked that the “process provided the inventor with a sense of satisfaction even when the decision went against the project--a vitally important outcome for engendering continued enthusiasm.”
One company legend, rehashed in a 1998 article in Stanford’s alumni magazine, told of Hewlett’s coming to work one weekend to discover the equipment storeroom under lock and key. He broke it open and left a note admonishing that it was not to be locked again, because Hewlett-Packard trusted its employees.
Within the company, Hewlett was a valued stimulator of innovation. At one point, enchanted by the miniaturization possibilities inherent in semiconductor technology, he challenged his staff to design a calculator that could fit in a shirt pocket. A team of engineers promptly measured the dimensions of his own. The resulting product, known as the HP 35 because of the number of its keys, was launched in 1972 and transformed the slide rule overnight from an indispensable engineer’s tool into a relic.
Hewlett retired as chief executive of HP in 1978 and served as chairman of the executive committee until 1983. He was also known as a philanthropist, having founded the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation with his late wife, Flora, and co-founded the Public Policy Institute of California, a multidisciplinary research institute, with a $70-million endowment in 1995. He received the National Medal of Science, America’s highest scientific honor, in 1985.
Hewlett is survived by his wife, Rosemary; five children from his first marriage; and five stepchildren from his second marriage. His first wife, Flora, died in 1977.
