Russell and Sigurd Varian

Russell and Sigurd Varian were brothers (the former was the idea man of the pair; the latter the fabricator) who had significant roles in early electronics work, and in the growth of Silicon Valley.

They grew up in Halcyon, a utopian-oriented community on the central California cost. Russell Varian received undergraduate and graduate degrees in physics from Stanford. His younger brother, Sigurd Varian, became a pilot in the barnstorming age, and did a lot of exploratory flying in South America; necessarily, with the aeroplanes of that era, and in that environment, he developed a very good mechanical sensibility. He subsequently developed an interest in precision manufacturing.

After graduating from Stanford in 1927, Russell Varian began working for Philo Farnsworth's Television Laboratory in San Francisco; there he gained familiarity with vacuum tube technology; he also did consulting work for other Bay area electronics companies. In about 1935, the brothers, concerned about the rise of Nazism in Europe, decided that they needed to work on radar, and decided that microwaves were the best medium to use. Since existing technology for producing them was poor, in April, 1937, they reached an agreement with Stanford to partner with them on work on microwave devices. Shortly thereafter, in June, 1937, Russell Varian came up with the basic idea of the klystron; by August, 1937, Sigurd Varian had produced the first experimental unit.

Shortly thereafter, the Varian formed a business arrangement with Sperry Gyroscope (later to form Sperry Rand by merging with Remington Rand) to produce klystrons, and they and several of their associates moved to the East Coast for the duration of WWII, in furtherance of that goal. After the war, the group decided to return to California and set up their own company, which they did in April, 1948: Varian Associates, one of the first major Silicon Valley companies.

Further reading

• Dorothy Varian, The Inventor and the Pilot: Russell and Sigurd Varian, Pacific Books, Palo Alto, 1983 - biographies of the brothers by the wife of Russell Varian
• Christophe Lécuyer, Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930-1970, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2006 - gives the background of the brothers' work at Stanford before WWII, and their work with Sperry Gyroscope during the war