[LeifCarrotson]

No one disputes that those events you cite happened. However, those events were essentially random, not caused by local efforts to stimulate industry. Because of them, the area was blessed/cursed with an excess of productivity that it didn't know how to cause.

Now it's just coasting downhill, unable to maintain the altitude that it once had because it never knew how to (was never possible to?) build that altitude without a big dose of random luck.

[beambot]

They were most certainly caused by local efforts in the 1950s. The reason the Silicon revolution happened in Silicon Valley had everything to do with Cold War radar systems. I suggest watching Steve Blank's Secret History of Silicon Valley to get a better historical perspective:

https://steveblank.com/secret-history/

[hogFeast]

The "silicon revolution" happened at Bell Labs, rising out of their need to replace vacuum tubes. Shockley only moved to SV because his mother lived there, and she was sick. And it just so happened that Terman invested heavily in making Stanford into a college with heavy links to industry. It is true that military research was a factor in this process (again, semi-coincidentally...Bell Labs invested heavily in military research because they believed, correctly at first, that this would protect them from being broken up...radar was invented, in its modern form, in the UK and developed heavily by Bell Labs/MIT) but there were other factors. SV's pre-eminence looked at from the 1950s was extremely non-obvious however (Boston was the centre of the VC world, MIT and Bell Labs led in research).

[clairity]

the cold war and american science by stuart leslie is a good accounting of the overall history from the early 20th century to the 80s: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/212074.The_Cold_War_and_...

[dekhn]

Stanford Research Park was a joint venture between Stanford and the city of palo alto. It was highly non-random.

[maxwell]

Lots of failed research parks, oil wells, railroads, gold mining operations.

The thing with oil wells, railroads, and gold mining, is that geography/geology matters more than path dependence.

Silicon Valley and Hollywood, and to a lesser extent NYC and London, are more about path dependence. Their dominance in their sectors seem more resulting from, if anything specific to point to, legal factors, than geography or any particular natural resource/phenomenon.

Why make movies and software in California, one in the south and the other a bit more north?

The founding of Hollywood was just as random as the events that "caused" the rise of the Valley. What if Griffith had gone elsewhere? What if Edison hadn't enforced his patents, causing the exodus across the country to make movies out of his purview? Similar climate/environs/affordability elsewhere, why not AZ, NM, TX, GA, FL?

This is a lot different than, say, the reasons for North Carolina to eventually beat New England in textile production, or why the Rust Belt is where it is, or why rail and shipbuilding was big in the Northeast but not so much space and auto manufacturing. It's more like why the appliances that are made in the U.S. are mostly made in the south.

[lozaning]

Hollywood is what Hollywood is largely due to its geography. Within a ~4 hour drive of Hollywood its possible to get to an area of california that looks at least passingly (for the purpose of movie making at least) similar to more or less anywhere in the world.

This isn't the map i was looking for, but gives you the basic idea https://brilliantmaps.com/california-filming-map/. The Geographic diversity around Hollywood is absolutely responsible for its initial success.

[maxwell]

Cool map. Ecological diversity is evident around LA:

http://www.californiaherps.com/images/vegetationmapjeaster.j...

But what were the first two movies made in Hollywood? Griffith's Western and DeMille's Western. If another genre had been preferred in the 1910s, seems like a movie hub could've landed elsewhere. (Or maybe Westerns were actually made more due to budgetary constraints than preferences.)

https://digg.com/2019/movie-genre-popularity-1910-to-2018-da...

Couldn't've be East Coast because Edison.

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/51722/thomas-edison-drov...

[cellar_door]

The climate too. Always sunny (good lighting). Warm, but not too hot.

[Bluestein]

I honestly do not understand the downvotes. These are perfectly valid points, well argued ...

Edit: Was grayed out when first seen.-

[ylhert]

Agree, and a lot of those events were 60-80 years ago. I doubt that the amazing innovation and clever governance that allowed these events to happen (or cultivated them) would be possible today