YLEM - Artists using Science and Technology presents

Pioneers Hitchhiking in the Valley of Heart's Delight

a multi-site artwork created by a team of YLEM members

Hitchhiker concept and sculptures by Jim Pallas.
Website narrative and graphics by Mike Mosher
Initiator/manager, Silicon Valley theme/GPS concept by Julie Newdoll.
GPS technology and map display engineered by Mario Wolczko.


Current location of all five hitchhikers based on the GPS tracking data they are sending our way - Lee deForest, Hewlett and Packard, Frederick Terman, William Shockley and Robert Noyce. To see what we did, click here.
art hand

 

TechnoHitchhikers dug the Valley. They came, by train or car or were born here, and conquered. Their inventions delight us all.

Cue up Marvin Gaye's "Hitchhike", for a so-called Motown boy—your author—blithely thumbed around New England in my collegiate 1970s, a habit given up upon hearing tales of disappearing California hitchhikers when I moved west. From San Francisco we relocated to Silicon Valley—where the computer graphics work was to be found—in 1988. By then I drove a 1965 Cadillac Coupe de Ville from our apartment complex parking lot to the corporate ones.

We arrived in time to witness the Valley's final defruiting, deorcharding; Orchard Supply Hardware soon bowed its overall'd knee to Fry's Electronics and Weird Stuff Warehouse. It's not my fault!

We moved out of the Valley in 2000, back to my home state Michigan, crossing the country in a 1995 Firebird with a fistful of good CDs given us by the KFJC-FM Los Altos Hills disk jockey called "Ann Arbor" (coincidentally, David Packard's birthplace!). Now back in Michigan from whence I began, I watch the auto industry further contract and spread dissolution and anguish through rustbelt industrial communities like Flint, Saginaw and Bay City.

This summer I'm called back to the Valley by its pioneers...

 

1. Lee deForest

2. Frederick Terman

3. William Hewlett and David Packard

4. William Shockley

5. Gordon Moore

6. Robert Noyce

7 Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak

 

 

       

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