When Fred Terman praised this system for bringing technical skill to big business in a 1956 address to engineers there were clear echoes of Lewis Terman’s ideas about ensuring that the smartest are in charge. “The idealists, the social planners, the do-gooders, the socialists and others of their ilk . . . called for better distribution of wealth,” Frederick Terman said, while engineers, working within the system of free enterprise, simply got it done, “making possible the creation of so much new wealth that redistribution was unnecessary.”