Newspaper Article

Obituary: William Hewlett

Martin Campbell-Kelly, Tam Dalyell

2001

Overview

In 1939 he persuaded his two most promising graduate students, Hewlett and Packard, to form a company for making scientific instruments and test equipment. The Hewlett-Packard Company - HP for short - was founded on the principles of constant innovation, openness and employee participation that now define the Silicon Valley business culture. Today, HP is Silicon Valley's largest employer. It has sales approaching $50bn and 88,500 employees world- wide. William Redington Hewlett was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1913, moving to California in 1916, when his physician father joined the faculty of Stanford Medical School. As a child, Hewlett was fascinated by science and electronic gadgetry, which led him to enrol on the engineering programme at Stanford in 1930. There he struck up a friendship with his classmate [David Packard] that was to last over 60 years until Packard's death in 1996. Hewlett and Packard briefly left California for careers in more promising surroundings, but were lured back by [Frederick Terman] to complete their graduate studies at Stanford. In 1939, besides forming the Hewlett-Packard Company, Hewlett married Flora Lamson, a biochemist, with whom he went on to have five children. During the war years, while Packard ran the company, Hewlett served as an engineer in the US Army Signal Corps. On his return from the war, and for the next 30 years, he served alongside Packard in both technical and managerial positions. Of the partners, Packard has been described as the entrepreneur-manager and Hewlett the entrepreneur-inventor, although each was capable of both managerial and technical roles.

• Publisher: Independent Digital News & Media