Ampex

Ampex was an early technology company in the farm-and-orchard landscape that would later be known as the Silicon Valley technology region. Its significance in the history described here lies not only in its engineering work, but in the way its workplace became a starting point for experiments linking LSD, personal development, and creativity. The effort to make Ampex a psychedelic corporation did not last; the people and ideas it gathered, however, moved beyond the company into a dedicated research foundation.

Company and Setting

By the mid-1950s, Ampex had become a prominent technology employer in a valley not yet called Silicon Valley. It was a pioneer in reel-to-reel magnetic tape for audio and data recording, and at its peak employed thirteen thousand people. Myron Stolaroff, one of its earliest employees, had studied engineering at Stanford University and become assistant to the president for strategic planning. His position and the wealth he gained as an early employee placed him inside a growing company while his personal interests were turning toward spiritual questions.

Stolaroff’s route into psychedelic research began outside Ampex. He was moved by the English philosopher Gerald Heard’s account of an LSD experience with Al Hubbard, and in March 1956 traveled to Vancouver to take LSD with Hubbard. The dose was sixty-six micrograms of Sandoz LSD. Stolaroff later described an experience that ranged across the planet’s history, from its formation and the development of life to humanity and his own birth. He said that reliving a painful birth experience helped him understand features of his personality, and that he also experienced human oneness and the reality of God. The session left him committed to the work and convinced that LSD was an extraordinary discovery.

An Experiment Inside the Company

Stolaroff shared his experience with a small circle of friends and colleagues at Ampex. They met roughly monthly to discuss spiritual questions and whether LSD could help healthy people realize their potential. Don Allen, a young Ampex engineer, and Willis Harman, a Stanford electrical-engineering professor, joined the group. Hubbard began traveling to Menlo Park to guide psychedelic sessions and train participants to guide others; Stolaroff later remembered him as an exceptionally good therapist.

Convinced that LSD could help people move beyond their limitations, Stolaroff tried, with Hubbard’s help, to reshape Ampex into what they envisioned as the world’s first psychedelic corporation. Hubbard held weekly workshops at company headquarters and administered LSD to executives at a site in the Sierra. The initiative encountered a direct obstacle in the workplace: Ampex’s general manager objected to the images of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the Last Supper that Hubbard insisted on bringing into his office. The project foundered. The episode exposed a tension at the center of the experiment: the group sought to bring spiritual transformation into a modern corporation, but Hubbard’s explicitly religious imagery proved unacceptable to a senior company executive.

Around the same time, Harman redirected some of his teaching at Stanford toward human potential, including a unit on psychedelics. The Ampex circle thus connected workplace experimentation to a broader intellectual and educational interest in human development, even as the company-based project itself failed to take root.

From Ampex to IFAS

In 1961, Stolaroff left Ampex to devote himself to psychedelic research. With Harman, he established the International Foundation for Advanced Study (IFAS), which investigated whether LSD could enhance personality and creativity. The foundation hired psychiatrist Charles Savage as medical director and James Fadiman, then a first-year graduate student, as staff psychologist. Allen also left his Ampex engineering position to work as a screener and guide.

IFAS obtained an FDA drug-research permit and supplies of LSD and mescaline from Hubbard. Over the next six years, it processed about 350 people, chiefly healthy volunteers or, in Fadiman’s description, healthy neurotic outpatients. Each client paid five hundred dollars for a package of personality testing before and after a guided LSD session, together with follow-up. Hubbard remained an intermittent presence rather than a routine staff member: Allen recalled that he would come and go, serving as the group’s inspiration and resident expert, while Fadiman called him the hidden force behind the Menlo Park research. Hubbard also took staff members to Death Valley for training, believing its primordial landscape especially conducive to revelatory experiences.

Legacy and Historical Place

Ampex’s role was therefore both practical and catalytic. Its engineering workforce supplied the initial circle of colleagues; its executive offices and a Sierra site became settings for workshops and LSD sessions; and the departure of Stolaroff and Allen transferred part of that circle into an independent research organization. The company was not itself the long-term research institution. Rather, it was the workplace from which a network of engineers, educators, guides, and clinicians began to pursue psychedelic research more systematically.

That transition also helps explain the experiment’s limits. Stolaroff’s attempt to alter the company’s culture depended on a narrow group of committed participants and on Hubbard’s methods, including religious imagery that clashed with the general manager’s wishes. When the corporate initiative stalled, the work did not simply disappear: Stolaroff, Harman, Allen, and their collaborators carried it into IFAS, where research with hundreds of clients could proceed under a formal permit. Ampex thus stands in the account as an unlikely incubator—important less for a lasting institutional program than for the people and research pathway that emerged from it.