William R. Hewlett Teaching Center - Stanford University - Palo Alto, CA - People-Named Places on Waymarking.com

About the Place:
The William R. Hewlett Teaching Center is a building at Stanford University in California, United States named for William R. Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard.

Located west of the main quad, the Hewlett building was built by project architect James Ingo Freed and landscape architect Laurie Olin in 1999. Hewlett, along with the Packard Building, Sequoia Hall, and McCullough Annex (renamed Moore Materials Research), were all built as a part of a project to create a new Science and Engineering Quad. The building was formerly known as the Teaching Center at the Science and Engineering Quad (TCSEQ).

The project was funded primarily by Hewlett and David Packard, who donated $77.4 million in 1994. It houses two large auditoriums and teaching halls, often used for teaching introductory courses in the sciences or for lecture series. ~source

About the Person:

William "Bill" Redington Hewlett (May 20, 1913 – January 12, 2001) was an American engineer and the co-founder, with David Packard, of the Hewlett-Packard Company (HP).

Hewlett attended undergraduate classes taught by Fred Terman at Stanford and became acquainted with David Packard. Packard and he began discussing forming a company in August 1937, and founded Hewlett-Packard Company as a partnership on January 1, 1939. A flip of a coin decided the ordering of their names. Their first big breakthrough came when Disney purchased multiple audio oscillators designed by Hewlett for use in the production of the film Fantasia. The company incorporated in 1947 and tendered an initial public offering in 1957. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were very proud of their company culture which came to be known as the HP Way. The HP Way is a corporate culture that claimed to be not only centered on making money but also respecting and nurturing its employees. Hewlett was president of the Institute of Radio Engineers in 1954.

He was president of HP from 1964 to 1977, and served as CEO from 1968 to 1978, when he was succeeded by John A. Young. He remained chairman of the executive committee until 1983, and then served as vice chairman of the board until 1987.

A young Steve Jobs, then age 12, called Hewlett (whose number was in the Phone book) and requested any available parts for a frequency counter he was building. Hewlett, impressed with Jobs' gumption, offered him a summer job assembling frequency counters. Jobs then considered HP one of the companies that he admired, regarding it among the handful of companies (Disney and Intel were the others) that were built “to last, not just to make money”.

Philanthropy
Starting in the 1960s Hewlett committed much of his time and wealth towards numerous philanthropic causes. In 1966, William Hewlett and his wife Flora founded the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which became one of the largest private foundations in the United States. Aside from the foundation Hewlett gave millions to universities, schools, museums, non-profits, and other organizations. Stanford University was a large recipient of his philanthropy. ~source

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