In January 1894, Stanford's fledgling electrical engineering department proposed building an electric railroad from the university to Palo Alto. Professor Frederic Perrine gave the project to students. The design called for no overhead wires, with Stanford owning the plant and students from different engineering departments doing all the work. It was the kind of ambitious, slightly reckless undergraduate project that would become the school's signature -- and a preview of the culture that would eventually produce Silicon Valley.
Frederick Terman became dean of engineering in 1944 and transformed the school from a regional institution into a national powerhouse. Using connections with the military and the Office of Naval Research, Terman secured funding for the Electronics Research Lab, then leveraged Korean War money to expand further. He opened the Applied Electronics Library and the adjacent Stanford Industrial Park. The department's EE faculty helped design the first linear accelerator in 1947. By the time Terman retired in 1965, the engineering school was inextricable from the defense-technology complex that had made Silicon Valley possible. The school formally organized as a separate unit in 1925 with four departments; today it has nine, from bioengineering (added in 2002) to computer science (moved from humanities and sciences in 1985).
On April 3, 1969, 700 Stanford students voted to occupy the Applied Electronics Laboratory. The coalition, known as the April Third Movement, held the building for nine days to protest Stanford's classified military research -- specifically electronic warfare technology being used against the Vietnamese people. Students slept on the roof, held nightly meetings in the hallways, and used the basement's publishing equipment to produce documents linking Stanford trustees to defense contractors. Fourteen hundred community members signed a statement of participation. The occupation marked a turning point: Stanford eventually ended most classified research on campus, though the school's deep ties to the defense industry continued in other forms.
The school's alumni list reads like a history of technology itself. Deans have included John Hennessy, who later became Stanford's president and chairman of Alphabet; Persis Drell, a particle physicist; and current dean Jennifer Widom, a computer scientist. In 1969, Stanford EE classes were broadcast to Silicon Valley via the Stanford Instructional Television Network -- an early precursor to online education. Recent research includes ultra-thin solar cell technology published in Nature Communications and work on lithium intercalation in twisted bilayer materials. The school offers joint degrees with the business and law schools, reflecting its conviction that engineering problems rarely stop at the boundaries of engineering.
Stanford School of Engineering is centered around the David Packard Building at 37.428°N, 122.174°W on Stanford's campus. The engineering quad is part of the broader campus complex. Nearest airports: Palo Alto (KPAO) 2 nm northeast, San Jose International (KSJC) 10 nm southeast.