San Francisco
Fun Facts

Silicon Valley’s GDP

Silicon Valley’s GDP is estimated at $275 billion annually, which is approximately equal to the whole of Finland! Home to 39 different companies on the Fortune 1000 list, this area is infamous for being heavily populated by the world’s biggest tech giants. Companies like Google, Facebook, HP, and Apple call Silicon Valley home, as well as thousands of startups and venture capital firms. Unlike today, where people want to come and build their futures there, in the 1980s Silicon Valley used to be known as the “Valley of Death” as people were terrified that computers were going to steal human jobs.

The Golden Gate Park

The Golden Gate Park, with more than 24 million visitors each year, is actually larger than New York’s famous Central Park. With 1,017 acres, you’ll find sprawling green spaces, gardens, recreational sports facilities, the Japanese Tea Garden, the Conservatory of Flowers, and even a bison paddock where visitors can step back in time to when the bison roamed the park with sheep, elk, deer, and other wildlife. An emblem of the American West, bison had been driven nearly to extinction by the time Golden Gate Park’s herd was established. The herd’s first home was in the park’s eastern end, near where the Music Concourse now stands, but in 1899 they were moved to the meadow where you see them today, just west of Spreckels Lake along John F. Kennedy Drive.

The founding of Hewlett-Packard

In 1934, shortly after getting their electrical engineering degrees from Stanford University, William Hewlett and David Packard went on a two-week camping trip, during which they decided to venture into business together. Four years later, they founded Hewlett-Packard with a meager capital of just $538, which included the necessary equipment. To decide whose name would come first on the logo, the two men resorted to a coin toss, and thus the iconic HP logo was born. HP was founded in a humble Palo Alto garage, which is now an officially recognized historical landmark in the US.

Cable car system

Apart from being the world’s last manually operated cable car system, San Francisco’s iconic cable cars are also the only moving National Historic Landmark in the US. With only three remaining routes, these cable cars travel at just 15 kilometers per hour. Refurbished and equipped with new tracks, cables, turnarounds, and cable propulsion machinery, they operate much as they did on August 2, 1873, when Andrew S. Hallidie guided the first car down Clay Street. To ride the cable car you can either wait at the cable car turnarounds (at Powell or California and Market Streets) or hop on an approaching cable car along its routes.

Stay tuned for more fun facts