New_Scientist_May_27_2017
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ANSEL ADAMS PUBLISHING RIGHTS TRUST<br />
Russell and Sigurd Varian with one of their<br />
many pieces of cunning technology<br />
Valley company after Hewlett-Packard,”<br />
says John McLaughlin of the Silicon Valley<br />
Historical Association. In 1953, Varian<br />
Associates moved – and became the first firm<br />
based in Stanford Industrial Park in Palo Alto.<br />
McLaughlin notes that, years later, Steve Jobs’s<br />
mother worked at Varian, as a bookkeeper.<br />
Russell and Sigurd never thought they’d<br />
make big money from building klystrons,<br />
expecting to simply license the patents.<br />
But Varian Associates’ first big contract was<br />
to make klystrons for guided missiles. It put<br />
the firm on the map. The company was soon<br />
making klystrons for many applications –<br />
including in ballistic-missile early-warning<br />
systems, satellite communications and<br />
television transmission equipment. Klystrons<br />
are ubiquitous today.<br />
But the Varians were not one-trick ponies.<br />
Perhaps inspired by the brothers’ Halcyon days,<br />
Varian Associates developed a reputation for<br />
creativity and the free-flow of ideas. Like Apple<br />
and Google today, the company attracted top<br />
minds and innovated furiously. Among other<br />
things, it went on to pioneer nuclear magnetic<br />
resonance technology, which revolutionised<br />
molecular research, X-ray accelerators, which<br />
have become ubiquitous in cargo screening<br />
in ports worldwide, and radiotherapy<br />
technology, which treats many thousands of<br />
people with cancer every day. One descendant<br />
company, Varian Inc, was bought by Agilent<br />
Technologies in 2010 for $1.5 billion.<br />
A bum idea<br />
However, the brothers didn’t always get it<br />
right. Sigurd once asked Russell if he thought<br />
it was worth developing a kind of metalprinting<br />
gun to put wires into radio sets,<br />
instead of having to do this by hand or with<br />
traditional machinery. Russell dismissed it as<br />
“a bum idea” – but, as they later marvelled, the<br />
information age as we know it was founded<br />
perhaps on one technology more than any<br />
other: printed circuits. You can’t win them all.<br />
Nonetheless, their impact on the world<br />
has been huge, even if neither brother would<br />
live to see it. Both died suddenly in separate<br />
incidents. In 1959, Russell suffered a heart<br />
attack in Alaska while travelling with his<br />
family and companions. They had been<br />
searching for land that could be turned into<br />
a new national park when a storm caught<br />
their boat in a riptide. Exhausted after<br />
rescuing it, Russell collapsed and died.<br />
Two years later, Sigurd was flying into<br />
Puerto Vallarta in Mexico, but the airport<br />
never received a telegram asking for the<br />
landing lights to be switched on. His plane<br />
crashed into the sea – tragically ironic, after<br />
his pioneering work on technology that<br />
allowed for blind landings. It was a premature<br />
end to a story of remarkable innovation. ■<br />
By Chris Baraniuk<br />
<strong>27</strong> <strong>May</strong> <strong>2017</strong> | <strong>New</strong><strong>Scientist</strong> | 41