The Idea Factory

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• At the peak of its reputation in the late 1960s, Bell Labs employed about fifteen thousand people, including some twelve hundred PhDs. Its ranks included the world’s most brilliant (and eccentric) men and women. In a time before Google, the Labs sufficed as the country’s intellectual utopia. It was where the future, which is what we now happen to call the present, was conceived and designed.
• Indeed, the phrase used to describe the era that the Bell scientists helped create, the age of information, suggested we had left the material world behind. A new commodity—weightless, invisible, fleet as light itself—defined the times.
• Instead, it looks primarily at the lives of a select and representative few: Mervin Kelly, Jim Fisk, William Shockley, Claude Shannon, John Pierce, and William Baker.
• The men preferred to think they worked not in a laboratory but in what Kelly once called “an institute of creative technology.”
• So rapid is the evolutionary development of technological ideas that the journey from state-of-the-art to artifact can occur in a mere few years.
• “At first sight,” the writer Arthur C. Clarke noted in the late 1950s, “when one comes upon it in its surprisingly rural setting, the Bell Telephone Laboratories’ main New Jersey site looks like a large and up-to-date factory, which in a sense it is. But it is a factory for ideas, and so its production lines are invisible.”
• “My zeal,” Kelly noted in the Gallatin High School yearbook, “has condemned me.”
• At the same time, however, he scorned talk about scientific theory, and even admitted that he knew little about electricity. He boasted that he had never made it past algebra in school. When necessary, Edison relied on assistants trained in math and science to investigate the principles of his inventions, since theoretical underpinnings were often beyond his interest. “I can always hire mathematicians,” he once said at the height of his fame, “but they can’t hire me.”
• By the early twentieth century, physicists were already dividing into camps: those who theorized and those who experimented.
• Almost from the day the Bell System was created, when Alexander Graham Bell became engaged in a multiyear litigation with an inventor named Elisha Gray over who actually deserved the patent to the telephone, the Bell company was known to be ferociously litigious.
  • Disney and Apple have also become super litigious. Indicator of a corporate mode of harvest vs innovate?
• Vail didn’t do any of this out of altruism. He saw that a possible route to monopoly—or at least a near monopoly, which was what AT&T had always been striving for—could be achieved not through a show of muscle but through an acquiescence to political supervision. Yet his primary argument was an idea. He argued that telephone service had become “necessary to existence.”
• As the business historian Louis Galambos would later point out, as Vail’s strategy evolved, the company’s executives began to imagine how their company might adapt its technology not only for the near term but for a future far, far away: “Eventually it came to be assumed within the Bell System that there would never be a time when technological innovation would no longer be needed.” The Vail strategy, in short, would measure the company’s progress “in decades instead of years.”
• Soon to be known as the vacuum tube, it and its descendants would revolutionize twentieth-century communications.
• “Of its output,” Arnold would later say of his group, “inventions are a valuable part, but invention is not to be scheduled nor coerced.” The point of this kind of experimentation was to provide a free environment for “the operation of genius.” His point was that genius would undoubtedly improve the company’s operations just as ordinary engineering could. But genius was not predictable. You had to give it room to assert itself.
• Frank Jewett had no illusions that his Western Electric shop was in the business of increasing human knowledge; they were in the business of increasing phone company revenues.
• Davisson used to tell people he was lazy, but Kelly believed otherwise: “He worked at a slow pace but persistently.” Years later, Kelly noted that Davy might well be called “the father of basic research” at Bell Labs.
• BY THE TIME KELLY ARRIVED at AT&T, the U.S. government had begun to concur with Theodore Vail’s arguments for his company’s expansion. A group of senators issued a report noting that the phone business, because of its sensitive technological nature—those fragile voice signals needed a unified and compatible infrastructure—was a “natural monopoly.”
• These organizations would fund Bell Labs’ work. At the start its budget was about $12 million, the equivalent of about $150 million today.
• The Bell Labs employees would be investigating anything remotely related to human communications, whether it be conducted through wires or radio or recorded sound or visual images.
• In short, he added, modern industrial research was meant to apply science to the “common affairs” of everyday life.
• The industrial lab showed that the group—especially the interdisciplinary group—was better than the lone scientist or small team. Also, the industrial lab was a challenge to the common assumption that its scientists were being paid to look high and low for good ideas. Men like Kelly and Davisson would soon repeat the notion that there were plenty of good ideas out there, almost too many. Mainly, they were looking for good problems.
• KELLY HEWED to his vacuum tube work in the years after World War I. As he ascended steadily into management, his job came to include responsibility for developing the vacuum tubes built by Bell Labs for Western Electric, which was to say he saw himself as being responsible for improving the most important invention of his lifetime up to that point.
• There were large water-cooled tubes the size of wine bottles that were used in high-power radio broadcast stations; small tubes for public-address systems; and the famed repeater tube that had been Harold Arnold’s great contribution in bringing the transcontinental connection to bear.
• Almost all of them had found a way out—a high school teacher, oftentimes, who noticed something about them, a startling knack for mathematics, for example, or an insatiable curiosity about electricity, and had tried to nurture this talent with extra assignments or after-school tutoring, all in the hope (never explained to the young men but realized by them all, gratefully, many years later) that the students could be pushed toward a local university and away from the desolation of a life behind a plow or a cash register.
• At one point during the first few days the freshmen were asked to sell the rights to their future patents, whatever these might be; their research, wherever it took them, was to benefit Bell Labs and phone subscribers. None of the young men refused. And in exchange for their signatures, each was given a crisp one-dollar bill.
• The physicists that Kelly hired toward the end of the Great Depression—Shockley, Fisk, Wooldridge, Townes, and all the rest—already knew how easily ideas could move from one side of the earth to the other. Usually the ideas came inside an envelope, printed in a formidable journal—Annalen der Physik from Germany, for instance, or Physical Review from New York—transported by the mail trains to New England, the Midwest, or the West Coast, where the package would be eagerly received by young physicists at places like Harvard, Chicago, or Caltech. The ideas also came to willing readers, in clear and eloquent English, via a publication named the Bell System Technical Journal, where a physicist named Karl Darrow, another former student of Millikan’s, had a gift for summarizing what he called “contemporary advances” in science, such as the newest model of the structure of the atom. Darrow had trembling hands. This left him unsuited to experimentation. Before Harold Arnold died, however, he had recognized in Darrow a useful skill for disseminating information. “I was thinking that I ought to look for a place in the academic world,” Darrow recalled, when Arnold “told me I might remain and do what I pleased.”
• Some years later the physicist Richard Feynman would elegantly explain that “it was discovered that things on a small scale behave nothing like things on a large scale.”
• In the 1920s, a one-hour colloquium was set up at 5 p.m. on Mondays so that outside scholars like Robert Millikan and Enrico Fermi or inside scholars like Davisson, Darrow, and Shockley—though only twenty-seven years old at the time—could lecture members of the Bell Labs technical staff on recent scientific developments.
• Shockley lived nearby in an apartment on West 17th Street. “I don’t think we had the idea then that some of the sort of things that later have become so central in the technology—that they were around the corner,” he would recall. “There’s no telling how far off they were.”4 By outward appearances, the study group was merely comprised of telephone men who were intent on learning new ideas.
• Some of the findings that came out of the multiyear inquiry—summarized in a scathing portrait of the company, written by a federal lawyer named N. R. Danielian, entitled A.T.&T.: The Story of Industrial Conquest—portrayed the Bell System as a monstrous entity focused less on public service than on maintaining its stock price and rate of expansion.
• But Danielian likewise acknowledged that the discoveries at Bell Labs had been essential to the progress of society at large. “They have not only made things better, but have created new services and industries,” he wrote of the scientists and engineers. “They have also made significant contributions to pure science. For these, no one would wish to deny just praise.”
• WE USUALLY IMAGINE that invention occurs in a flash, with a eureka moment that leads a lone inventor toward a startling epiphany. In truth, large leaps forward in technology rarely have a precise point of origin.
• The science prodigy seemed to have a compulsive need to charm, to entertain, to challenge the dull conventionality of academia, often in a way that subtly merged humor and aggression.
• The scientists were not permitted to rip out pages. Nor were they encouraged to attach loose sheets of paper into the notebook. “No erasures,” says Brown. “Lines through mistakes—initialed by who drew the lines.”
• Shockley had concluded by then that a certain class of materials known as semiconductors—so named because they are neither good conductors of electricity (like copper) nor good insulators of electricity (like glass), but somewhere in between—might be an ideal solid replacement for tubes.
• “Buckley in essence handed over Bell Laboratories to [Mervin] Kelly during World War II,” one Bell Labs researcher recalled.
• Like Kelly, Shockley rarely lingered over any one project. That he had figured out the essential concepts for nuclear power on his own (actually, the idea came to him while he was taking a shower) merely seemed an intriguing interlude in a frenetic schedule. Indeed, his schedule was too busy for him to do anything else but keep moving.
• Mervin Kelly had long regarded scientific research as a pursuit of the unknown that inherently defied corporate and political regimes. Science had no true owners, only participants and contributors. By the early 1940s, the great discoveries of his lifetime, including the work of his friends Robert Millikan at Chicago and Davy Davisson at Bell Labs, were such that they transcended borders and nationalities. The results of their work were widely shared, discussed, and augmented, as Kelly thought they should be, through international gatherings and cooperative, investigative efforts. Engineering, however, was different. Kelly defined it as the application of science to a problem affecting society. Engineers dipped into the “common reservoir” of science on behalf of their own industries and countries. In peacetime, that meant they focused on making profitable commodities like automobiles and telephone equipment; in wartime, that meant they focused on building military communications equipment as well as ships, planes, and munitions. At the same time, wartime engineers had an additional responsibility. They were charged not only with building everything better but building everything faster, which meant striving to improve their processes as well as their products.
• A slightly different explanation was that a meritocratic organization such as the Labs could perceive a competitive disadvantage of passing over the best scientists on religious grounds, an error they might have already made with the young Richard Feynman, a former colleague of Shockley’s at MIT who would eventually be drafted into the Manhattan Project.
• For the first few years of World War II, the word “radar”—its name stood for “radio detection and ranging”—was almost unknown by the general public, earning it the description of a New York Times reporter as being “the war’s most fabulously and zealously guarded secret.”
• Kelly never offered any details about his war work and likely either destroyed or purposely discarded his personal files on military matters. Secrecy began to cloak his responsibilities, as well as his power. When a three-hundred-page internal history of Bell Labs’ World War II work was later compiled, his name was never mentioned.
• Scientists who worked on radar often quipped that radar won the war, whereas the atomic bomb merely ended it.
• Notably, radar was a far larger investment on the part of the U.S. government, probably amounting to $3 billion as contrasted with $2 billion for the atomic bomb.
• Luis Alvarez, a physicist who wasn’t present that day but would later work directly on the magnetron designs, pointed out that the invention improved upon current technologies by a factor of three thousand. “If automobiles had been similarly improved,” he noted, “modern cars would cost about a dollar and go a thousand miles on a gallon of gas.”
• His team passed its finished work on to Western Electric, which ultimately manufactured more than half of the radar sets used in World War II.
• The work, the travel, the wartime pressure—all of it bore down on him. In addition, Shockley was struggling to manage a few dozen men, some of whom in his opinion were not as bright or committed as he regarded himself. And here, perhaps for the first time, a clear sign of Shockley’s limitations emerged. Whatever his friend Jim Fisk found easy and natural—relaxing a roomful of scientists with some inspired slapstick, for instance, or giving men freedom to do their work as they chose—Shockley found difficult. He simply could not get the hang of managing people.
• As they toured industrial labs in the United States and Europe in the mid-1930s, seeking ideas for their own project, their opinions were reinforced. They wanted the new building to reflect the Labs’ lofty status and academic standing—“surroundings more suggestive of a university than a factory,” in Buckley’s words, but with a slight but significant difference. “No attempt has been made to achieve the character of a university campus with its separate buildings,” Buckley told Jewett. “On the contrary, all buildings have been connected so as to avoid fixed geographical delineation between departments and to encourage free interchange and close contact among them.”3 The physicists and chemists and mathematicians were not meant to avoid one another, in other words, and the research people were not meant to evade the development people.
• The Bell Labs executives had not only built a new lab; they had built a citadel.
• One newspaper dubbed the New Jersey suburbs “research row.”
• Kelly became executive vice president, giving him complete control over day-to-day operations. One of his first acts was reorganizing the Murray Hill staff one day in July 1945. On that morning, several supervisors were demoted, while men younger and better versed in solid-state physics, such as Bill Shockley, were promoted.
• Essentially Kelly was creating interdisciplinary groups—combining chemists, physicists, metallurgists, and engineers; combining theoreticians with experimentalists—to work on new electronic technologies. But putting young men like Shockley in a management position devastated some of the older Labs scientists. Addison White, a younger member of the technical staff who before the war had taken part in Shockley’s weekly study group, told Hoddeson he nevertheless considered it “a stroke of enormously good management on Kelly’s part.” He even thought it an act of managerial bravery to strip the titles from men Kelly had worked with for decades. “One of these men wept in my office after this happened,” White said. “I’m sure it was an essential part of what by this time had become a revolution.”
• The point of the new effort, in case it was hard to see through the jargon, was “the obtaining of new knowledge that can be used in the development of completely new and improved components” of communications systems. At the end of the six-page document, Kelly noted that he did not anticipate that the solid-state work would bring immediate results to the telephone business. On the other hand, he reasoned, the research was “so basic and may well be of such far-reaching importance” to the business that it was imperative that the phone company supply the funding.
• IN LATER YEARS, it would become a kind of received wisdom that many of the revolutionary technologies that arose at Bell Labs in the 1940s and 1950s owed their existence to dashing physicists such as Bill Shockley, and to the iconoclastic ideas of quantum mechanics. These men could effectively see into the deepest recesses of the atom, and could theorize inventions no one had previously deemed possible. More fundamentally, however, the coming age of technologies owed its existence to a quiet revolution in materials. Indeed, without new materials—that is, materials that were created through new chemistry techniques, or rare and common metals that could now be brought to a novel state of ultrapurity by resourceful metallurgists—the actual physical inventions of the period might have been impossible. Shockley would have spent his career trapped in a prison of elegant theory.
• “We had such specific requirements that ordinary raw materials had an agonizing time meeting them,” William Baker, who joined the Labs as a chemist just before World War II, explained.9 The solution, as Baker described it, was to literally create new types of matter.
• Progress, in both technology and business, depended on new materials, and new materials were scattered about the earth in confusion. There were substances that might be useful on their own or combined into compounds—that alone comprised an infinite number.
• Silvery and lustrous in appearance, germanium was so rare that one Bell Labs scientist remarked that before 1940 only a handful of people in the world had actually ever seen it.17 Moreover, it was until that time considered largely useless. A Bell Labs metallurgist named Gordon Teal had wondered if therein resided its virtue. “A research man,” he later remarked, “is endlessly searching to find a use for something that has no use.”
• “It was probably one of the greatest research teams ever pulled together on a problem,” Walter Brattain would later say. When he first reviewed the list of who would be working with silicon and germanium in the new solid-state group with Shockley at Murray Hill—roughly every month, the Labs’ staff received typed organizational charts of their department’s personnel—Brattain read it over twice. There isn’t an S.O.B. in the group, he thought to himself, pleased with the prospect of joining in. Then after a minute he had a second thought: Maybe I’m the S.O.B. in the group.
• Bardeen—with thinning dark hair, a medium build, and a soft physicality that belied his athleticism—wasn’t just quiet. He barely spoke. And when he did speak it was often in something best described as a mumble-whisper.
• Brattain realized that when Bardeen did choose to interpret data or ask a question, a profundity was likely to tumble forth. The group recognized this not long after. When Bardeen talked, everyone else immediately stopped to listen.
• Their work together was further buoyed by the exchange of ideas within the larger solid-state group, which would gather sometimes once a day—and at least once a week—in meetings often led by Shockley, to exchange thoughts and review experiments. “I cannot overemphasize the rapport of this group,” Brattain said. “We would meet together to discuss important steps almost on the spur of the moment of an afternoon. We would discuss things freely. I think many of us had ideas in these discussion groups, one person’s remarks suggesting an idea to another.”
• Shockley would later identify this development as a breakthrough and the beginning of what he called “the magic month.” In time, the events of the following weeks would indeed be viewed by some of the men in terms resembling enchantment—the team’s slow, methodical success effecting the appearance of preordained destiny. For men of science, it was an odd conclusion to draw. Yet Walter Brattain would in time admit he had “a mystical feeling” that what he ultimately discovered had been waiting for him.
• Any Bell scientist knew about the spooky and coincidental nature of important inventions. The origins of their entire company—Alexander Bell’s race to the patent office to beat Elisha Gray and become the recognized inventor of the telephone—was the textbook case.
• “Transistor,” the memo noted, was “an abbreviated combination of the words ‘transconductance’ or ‘transfer,’ and ‘varistor.’”
• AT&T maintained its monopoly at the government’s pleasure, and with the understanding that its scientific work was in the public’s interest. An audacious move to capitalize on the transistor, should it turn out to be hugely valuable, could well invite government regulators to reexamine the company’s civic-mindedness and antitrust status.
• If anyone really wanted to know what the scientists had accomplished over the past few years, they would need a world-class understanding of metallurgy, quantum physics, and electrical engineering.
• When the breakthrough came in December, Shockley would admit to a complex set of reactions—“I must confess to a little disappointment that I hadn’t been more personally involved in it,” he later admitted.
• “The management style was, and remained for many years, to use the lightest touch and absolutely never to compete with underlings,” recalls Phil Anderson, a physicist who joined Bell Labs soon after the transistor was developed. “This was the taboo that Shockley transgressed, and was never forgiven.”21 To Addison White, another manager who years before had been a privileged member of Shockley’s solid-state study group, the forces that drove Shockley to compete were clear to those who knew him. White said, “I’ve never encountered a more brilliant man, I think. And he just wasn’t going to sacrifice that in the interests of the members of his group.”
  • Shockley totally sounds like the kind of guy that would drive his eight smartest employees to rebel against him.
• The solid-state group that Shockley led had been built upon the principles of an open exchange of ideas, and Shockley had apparently ignored those principles.
• THE UNVEILING of the two most important technologies of the twentieth century—the atomic bomb and the transistor—occurred almost exactly three years apart.
• Most newspapers couldn’t discern the value of the tiny device. The New York Times, in a famous lapse of editorial judgment, relegated a report on the West Street demonstration to a four-paragraph mention on page 46, in a column called “The News of Radio.”
• THE LANGUAGE that affixes to new technologies is almost always confusing and inexact. If an idea is the most elemental unit of human progress, what comes after that?
• The term “innovation” dated back to sixteenth-century England. Originally it described the introduction into society of a novelty or new idea, usually relating to philosophy or religion. By the middle of the twentieth century, the words “innovate” and “innovation” were just beginning to be applied to technology and industry.
• If an idea begat a discovery, and if a discovery begat an invention, then an innovation defined the lengthy and wholesale transformation of an idea into a technological product (or process) meant for widespread practical use. Almost by definition, a single person, or even a single group, could not alone create an innovation. The task was too variegated and involved.
• “Making a few laboratory point-contact transistors to prove feasibility was not difficult,” Ralph Bown explained. “But learning how to make them by the hundreds or thousands, and of sufficient uniformity to be interchangeable and reliable, was another problem.”
• One of Morton’s disciples, a Bell Labs development scientist named Eugene Gordon, points out that there were two corollaries to Morton’s view of innovation: The first is that if you haven’t manufactured the new thing in substantial quantities, you have not innovated; the second is that if you haven’t found a market to sell the product, you have not innovated.
• In later years, corporations would give calculated thought and effort to this process, which would become known as the diffusion of new technology. The executives at Bell Labs, however, were making things up as they went along.
• Shockley, seemingly immune to normal human fatigue and now without question the most eminent solid-state physicist in the world, had already written and published a five-hundred-page book—Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors—that would serve for decades as a definitive guide to scientists and engineers working with the new materials.
• There had been whispers in the electronics industry about whether Bell Labs’ enthusiasm over the transistor was overblown; the reported difficulty in manufacturing the devices only added to the skepticism. Whether it was a shortcoming or an advantage, Kelly’s confidence was almost certainly rooted in his early experiences. He remembered the endless days and nights constructing vacuum tubes in lower Manhattan, the countless problems in the beginning and then the stream of incremental developments that improved the tubes’ performance and durability to once-unimaginable levels. He could remember, too, that as the tubes became increasingly common—in the phone system, radios, televisions, automobiles, and the like—they had come down to price levels that once seemed impossible. He had long understood that innovation was a matter of economic imperatives. As Jack Morton had said, if you hadn’t sold anything you hadn’t innovated, and without an affordable price you could never sell anything. So Kelly looked at the transistor and saw the past, and the past was tubes. He thereby intuited the future.
  • Limitations of practical scale or obvious use cases have always elicited skepticism. Looking at cost curves of the past are how you intuit the future.
• At the same time, there was one cautionary point he wanted to relate to fellow phone company executives. The transistor and other research projects at the Labs were hard work. Goals were set carefully, and then achieved by the process of experiment and calculation. “Bell Labs is no ‘house of magic,’” Kelly warned, echoing the headline of a recent magazine story about the Labs that he had found repellent.42 “There is nothing magical about science. Our research people are following a straight plan as a part of a system and there is no magic about it.” People rarely disagreed with Kelly to his face. But to visitors, and sometimes to scientists, too, Bell Labs nevertheless was taking on a slightly magical air. And it was hard to deny that wholly unscientific factors—serendipity and chance, for example—played a part in the Labs’ innovations.
• It might have been said in 1948 that you either grasped the immense importance of the transistor or you did not. Usually an understanding of the device took time, since there were no tangible products—no proof—to demonstrate how it might someday alter technology or culture. But a few people could see it right away.
• But Shockley, who was notorious for the speed with which he judged colleagues as his intellectual inferiors, believed that his guest that day, Claude Elwood Shannon, was exceptional, a scientist vital to the Labs’ reputation as an intellectual vanguard. Shannon deserved to know what the solid-state team had done.
• He was known to be retiring and eccentric. But above all, he was known to be special. “A decidedly unconventional type of youngster,” Shannon’s advisor at MIT, the engineering dean Vannevar Bush, described his young student a decade earlier.
• As word spread, Shannon’s slender and highly mathematical paper, about twenty-five pages in all, would ultimately become known as the most influential master’s thesis in history.9 In time, it would influence the design of computers that were just coming into existence as well as those that wouldn’t be built for at least another generation. But this was off in a far distant future. Still only twenty-three years old, and not at all certain what to do with himself, the young man wrote to Vannevar Bush to ask what he should work on next.
• In early 1939, he had hinted to Vannevar Bush in a letter that he had begun thinking about communications and the methods by which “intelligence” moves from place to place. In a sense, he’d been thinking about these things for most of his young life. As a boy he’d had a job delivering newspapers, he’d also delivered telegrams for Western Union, and he’d even set up a private telegraph line to a friend’s house using a wire strung along a fence. Some years later as a student at the University of Michigan, Shannon had read a paper by a Bell Laboratories engineer named Ralph Hartley entitled “Transmission of Information” that made an enormous impression on him. Hartley had proposed ways to measure and think about the rate and flow of information from sender to receiver. Perhaps there were deeper and more fundamental properties, Shannon now wondered, that were common to all the different kinds of media—telephony, radio, television, telegraphy included.13 In his letter to Bush, he hadn’t gone far beyond what Hartley had put forward years earlier, but he hinted that he might, under the right circumstance and given some time, be able to work out some kind of overarching theory about messages and communications.
• By the early 1940s, when Fry asked Shannon to join his department, many Bell mathematicians were focused on the wartime problem known as fire control. Their challenge was to work out the complex mathematics behind the automatic firing of large guns that were trying to protect against enemy attacks—essentially, to create primitive computers that would gather information, largely through radar scans, on the location, speed, and trajectory of an incoming German rocket or plane. Their computers would immediately calculate the future position of the rocket or plane so that it could be intercepted and exploded in midair by shells or bullets. It took years to make this system workable, but it ultimately changed modern warfare. A defining moment came in 1944 during the defense of Great Britain against Hitler’s V-1 rockets, known as “buzz bombs.” Along the English Channel, one Bell System historian noted, these gun directors intercepted 90 percent of the V-1 rockets aimed at London.
• Shannon summarized his war work on secret communications in a 114-page opus, “A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography,” which he finished in 1945. The paper was immediately deemed classified and too sensitive for publication, but those who read it found a long treatise exploring the histories and methodologies of various secrecy systems.
• Indeed, he later calculated that English was about 75 to 80 percent redundant. This had ramifications for cryptography: The less redundancy you have in a message, the harder it is to crack its code.
• ALL WRITTEN AND SPOKEN EXCHANGES, to some degree, depend on code—the symbolic letters on the page, or the sounds of consonants and vowels that are transmitted (encoded) by our voices and received (decoded) by our ears and minds. With each passing decade, modern technology has tended to push everyday written and spoken exchanges ever deeper into the realm of ciphers, symbols, and electronically enhanced puzzles of representation.
• “I am very seldom interested in applications,” he later said. “I am more interested in the elegance of a problem. Is it a good problem, an interesting problem?”
• What he’d been working on at home during the early 1940s had become a long, elegant manuscript by 1947, and one day soon after the press conference in lower Manhattan unveiling the invention of the transistor, in July 1948, the first part of Shannon’s manuscript was published as a paper in the Bell System Technical Journal; a second installment appeared in the Journal that October.28 “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”—“the magna carta of the information age,” as Scientific American later called it—wasn’t about one particular thing, but rather about general rules and unifying ideas. “He was always searching for deep and fundamental relations,” Shannon’s colleague Brock McMillan explains. And here he had found them. One of his paper’s underlying tenets, Shannon would later say, “is that information can be treated very much like a physical quantity, such as mass or energy.”
• One shouldn’t necessarily think of information in terms of meaning. Rather, one might think of it in terms of its ability to resolve uncertainty. Information provided a recipient with something that was not previously known, was not predictable, was not redundant. “We take the essence of information as the irreducible, fundamental underlying uncertainty that is removed by its receipt,” a Bell Labs executive named Bob Lucky explained some years later.
• Shannon suggested it was most useful to calculate a message’s information content and rate in a term that he suggested engineers call “bits”—a word that had never before appeared in print with this meaning. Shannon had borrowed it from his Bell Labs math colleague John Tukey as an abbreviation of “binary digits.” The bit, Shannon explained, “corresponds to the information produced when a choice is made from two equally likely possibilities. If I toss a coin and tell you that it came down heads, I am giving you one bit of information about this event.”
• The upshot was that by measuring the information capacity of your channel and by measuring the information content of your message you could know how fast, and how well, you could send your message. Engineers could now try to align the two—capacity and information content.
• Even fifty years later, this idea would leave many engineers slack-jawed. “To make the chance of error as small as you wish?” Robert Fano, a friend and colleague of Shannon’s, later pointed out. “How he got that insight, how he even came to believe such a thing, I don’t know.” All modern communications engineering, from cell phone transmissions to compact discs and deep space communications, is based upon this insight.
• Shortly thereafter communication theory became more commonly known as information theory. And eventually it would be recognized as the astounding achievement it was. Shannon’s Bell Labs colleagues came to describe it as “one of the great intellectual achievements of the twentieth century”; some years later, Shannon’s disciple Bob Lucky wrote, “I know of no greater work of genius in the annals of technological thought.”
• When he was in the office at Murray Hill he would often work with his door closed, something virtually unheard of at Bell Labs. And yet that breach, too, was permissible for Claude Shannon. “He couldn’t have been in any other department successfully,” Brock McMillan recalls. “But then, there weren’t many other departments where people just sat and thought.”
• In a math department that thrived on its collective intelligence—where members of the staff were encouraged to work on papers together rather than alone—this set him apart. But in some respects his solitude was interesting, too, for it had become a matter of some consideration at the Labs whether the key to invention was a matter of individual genius or collaboration. To those trying to routinize the process of innovation—the lifelong goal of Mervin Kelly, the Labs’ leader—there was evidence both for and against the primacy of the group.
• And yet Kelly would say at one point, “With all the needed emphasis on leadership, organization and teamwork, the individual has remained supreme—of paramount importance. It is in the mind of a single person that creative ideas and concepts are born.”
• Of course, these two philosophies—that individuals as well as groups were necessary for innovation—weren’t mutually exclusive. It was the individual from which all ideas originated, and the group (or the multiple groups) to which the ideas, and eventually the innovation responsibilities, were transferred.
• In the midst of Shannon’s career, some lawyers in the patent department at Bell Labs decided to study whether there was an organizing principle that could explain why certain individuals at the Labs were more productive than others. They discerned only one common thread: Workers with the most patents often shared lunch or breakfast with a Bell Labs electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. It wasn’t the case that Nyquist gave them specific ideas. Rather, as one scientist recalled, “he drew people out, got them thinking.” More than anything, Nyquist asked good questions.
• His genius was roughly equivalent with prescience. There was little doubt, even by the transistor’s inventors, that if Shockley’s team at Bell Labs had not gotten to the transistor first, someone else in the United States or in Europe would have soon after. A couple of years, at most.43 With Shannon’s startling ideas on information, it was one of the rare moments in history, an academic would later point out, “where somebody founded a field, stated all the major results, and proved most of them all pretty much at once.”44 Eventually, mathematicians would debate not whether Shannon was ahead of his contemporaries. They would debate whether he was twenty, or thirty, or fifty years ahead.
• Much like his work on cryptography and information, it combined philosophical and mathematical elements, exploring the purpose of a chess machine as well as the logical theory behind its possible mechanisms. It also contained something unusual: an explanation that was meant to clarify why computer chess, a radical notion in 1949, could prove useful. “It is hoped that a satisfactory solution of this problem will act as a wedge in attacking other problems of a similar nature and of greater significance.”2 If you could get a computer to play chess, in other words, you could conceivably get it to route phone calls, or translate a language, or make strategic decisions in military situations. You could build “machines capable of orchestrating a melody,” he suggested. And you might be able to construct “machines capable of logical deduction.” Such machines could be useful as well as economical, he offered; they could ultimately replace humans in certain automated tasks.
• He would acknowledge that building devices like chess-playing machines “might seem a ridiculous waste of time and money. But I think the history of science has shown that valuable consequences often proliferate from simple curiosity.”3 “He never argued his ideas,” Brock McMillan says of Shannon. “If people didn’t believe in them, he ignored those people.”
• Here, then, was a picture of Claude Shannon, circa 1955: a man—slender, agile, handsome, abstracted—who rarely showed up on time for work; who often played chess or fiddled with amusing machines all day; who frequently went down the halls juggling or pogoing; and who didn’t seem to care, really, what anyone thought of him or of his pursuits. He did what was interesting. He was categorized, still, as a scientist. But it seemed obvious that he had the temperament and sensibility of an artist.
• At around this point in his career, Shannon was beginning to publish less. Perhaps it would have been impossible to keep up the extraordinary run he’d had in the 1940s; perhaps, too, a torrent of ideas still rushed through his mind but he was less interested, as he later conceded, in writing any of them down. “We’ve got boxes full of unfinished papers,” Betty would remark to visitors.18 Many years later Shannon would leave behind these half-written papers along with scraps of ideas and mathematical scribbles that were titled “good problems”—but with no indication as to whether he had ever found it worth his time to discover good answers.
• In London, late in the afternoon on March 23, 1950, Kelly gave a polished version of the lecture about Bell Labs in front of the Royal Society, making every effort to speak more slowly. Even sixty years after the fact, it is worth pausing to consider what Kelly was trying to do in the London speech, for he not only tried to explain the empire he was building, but why he was building it. Only good manners kept him from suggesting to a packed auditorium that Bell Labs was the world’s foremost example of a place where scientists pursued creative technology. Echoing Shannon’s ideas on the subject, Kelly told his audience in London that “the telephone system of the United States could be viewed as a single, integrated, highly technical machine in which electrical currents that are very small and complex in wave form are sent from any one of more than 40 million points to any one of all the others.”3 Bell Labs helped maintain and improve that system, he said, by creating an organization that could be divided into three groups. The first group was research, where scientists and engineers provided “the reservoir of completely new knowledge, principles, materials, methods and art.” The second group was in systems engineering, a discipline started by the Labs, where engineers kept one eye on the reservoir of new knowledge and another on the existing phone system and analyzed how to integrate the two. In other words, the systems engineers considered whether new applications were possible, plausible, necessary, and economical. That’s when the third group came in. These were the engineers who developed and designed new devices, switches, and transmissions systems. In Kelly’s sketch, ideas usually moved from (1) discovery, to (2) development, to (3) manufacture.
  • Look up the talk
• At the Labs this was sometimes known as going to “the guy who wrote the book.” And it was often literally true. The guy who wrote the definitive book on a subject—Shockley on semiconductors, John Tukey on statistics, Claude Shannon on information, and so forth—was often just down the hall.
• Physical proximity, in Kelly’s view, was everything. People had to be near one another. Phone calls alone wouldn’t do. Kelly had even gone so far as to create “branch laboratories” at Western Electric factories so that Bell Labs scientists could get more closely involved in the transition of their work from development to manufacture.
• “There is a certain logic in the reasoning that methods which have produced much new knowledge are likely to be the best to produce more new knowledge,” the science historians Ernest Braun and Stuart Macdonald wrote some years after Kelly’s 1950 speech. “Though there is also something paradoxical in the thought that there should be established methods of creating the revolutionary.”
• Working in an environment of applied science, as one Bell Labs researcher noted years later, “doesn’t destroy a kernel of genius—it focuses the mind.”
• “You get paid for the seven and a half hours a day you put in here,” Kelly often told new Bell Labs employees in his speech to them on their first day, “but you get your raises and promotions on what you do in the other sixteen and a half hours.”
• And with his 1950 speech in London, Kelly began to move from manager to statesman, an emissary of industrial science who took every opportunity to consider, in speeches to academic audiences and professional groups all over the United States, how Bell Labs’ work fit into the future of American science.
• penetrate. A countervailing belief, however, little noted at the time but discussed privately among military leaders and AT&T executives—and eventually with Attorney General Clark and President Truman—was that a company that the U.S. government depended upon to help build up its military during the cold war was arguably worth far more intact than apart.25 In a private letter, Leroy Wilson, the president of AT&T, pointed out the contradiction. “We are concerned by the fact that the anti-trust suit brought by the Department of Justice last January seeks to terminate the very same Western-Electric–Bell Laboratories–Bell System relationship which gives our organization [its] unique qualifications.” The Attorney General’s office, in other words, seemed to be fighting to break up AT&T at the same time the Department of Defense was moving to capitalize on its broad expertise.
• “Telephone technology has much in common with that of new weapons systems,” Kelly remarked as the Nike installations were being built.32 The new missiles, outfitted with several antennas, were guided by a complex control system, both in the air and on the ground, that involved radio detection and guidance and required, according to one assessment, approximately 1.5 million parts.
• Jack Morton, the transistor’s development chief, had shepherded the device through the Labs’ development process to the point that it had begun to infiltrate the mainstream economy. It had also moved outside of Ma Bell. The company’s executives—wary of the regulatory implications of hoarding the technology to itself, and also convinced that production costs of transistors would decrease much faster if the semiconductor industry was large and competitive—had licensed its patents to a number of other companies, including Raytheon, RCA, and GE.
  • Facebook strategy with Llama and AI
• “In the transistor and the new solid-state electronics,” Bello concluded, “man may hope to find a brain to match atomic energy’s muscle.”
• Within the consumer electronics industry, there seemed to be general accord that the transistor’s greatest value would be in computers and communications devices. But so far very few transistors had been integrated into the phone system, and those that had—to generate pulses for nationwide dialing in an office in Englewood, New Jersey, and to help route phone calls automatically in an office in Pittsburgh3—were more like demonstration projects than actual technological overhauls. Long ago, the dream of an electronic switch had prompted Kelly’s initial push on semiconductors. As the Fortune story pointed out, a switching office with 65,000 electromechanical relays could do “slightly less than 1,000 switching operations a second.” Transistors—using a fraction of the power and lasting far longer—could potentially do a million.
  • Invention races far ahead of practical implication
• Any element within the system was designed (by Bell Labs) and built (by Western Electric) to last thirty or forty years. Junking a functional part before its time had to be economically justifiable. And if it wasn’t justifiable on economic grounds, it had to be justifiable on technological grounds.
  • A far cry from todays planned obsolescence
• The Labs’ managers had already begun planning for new transistorized phones and an electronic switching station that, as it turned out, would take nearly twenty years to fully deploy.
• On Wall Street, brokers called the dependable AT&T a “widows-and-orphans” stock; if you couldn’t rely on anyone else, you could rely on Ma Bell. The paradox, of course, was that a parent corporation so dull, so cautious, so predictable was also in custody of a lab so innovative. “Few companies are more conservative,” Time magazine said about AT&T, “none are more creative.”
  • Perhaps more unique than any company in history. Even Google, eventually, strangled its AI efforts.
• If the transistor industry were potentially as enormous as Fortune magazine envisioned, germanium’s scarcity (and its high price) could at some point limit the industry’s growth.
• Like many of his fellow researchers at the Labs, Fuller had a background that should never have led him into a distinguished life in science. A slim and scholarly-looking man, the son of a bookkeeper who was raised in a poor family in Chicago, Fuller as a teenager had experimented diligently with his wireless radio and home chemistry set. He never imagined he would go to college. But then his high school physics teacher thought otherwise.
• “Finally, one night, I went back into the lab because my wife was having a bridge game,” he recalls, and by trying a blunt method—in his lab notebook he wrote, will try direct approach—he melted an aluminum wire “through” the thin top layer. He made a good contact. It was late on the evening of March 17, 1955. When he took some instrument readings, he was shocked to see that the device performed better than any germanium transistor then in existence. In his notebook he wrote, This looks like the transistor we’ve been waiting for. It should be a cinch to make. “Right away,” he recalls, “I knew that this would be very manufacturable.”
• What was striking but almost always overlooked about its invention, Fuller later recalled, was that all three inventors of the device were working in different buildings. “The solar cell just sort of happened,” he said. It was not “team research” in the traditional sense, but it was made possible “because the Labs policy did not require us to get the permission of our bosses to cooperate—at the Laboratories one could go directly to the person who could help.”
• In 1956, Daryl Chapin figured that it would cost the average homeowner nearly $1.5 million to buy enough Bell solar cells to power his house.20 By one of Kelly’s fundamental dictums of innovation—something that could do a job “better, or cheaper, or both”—the cost of the cells and the results in Georgia suggested solar power was not going to be a marketable innovation anytime soon. Sometimes, in describing a new invention that seemed technically brilliant but impractical, industrial scientists would quip that they had found “a solution looking for a problem.” The silicon solar cell needed a problem, as yet unimagined, to appear.
• Thwarted by Kelly, Shockley appealed to people even more powerful. In one instance, he even went to the president of AT&T. When he got nowhere, Ross recalls, “he said, the hell with that, I’ll go set up my own business, I’ll make a million dollars that way. And by the way, I’ll do it out in California.”
• As yet there wasn’t much in the way of technology out in Palo Alto. Mostly it was apricot orchards and undeveloped land, but it had been Shockley’s hometown for most of his childhood. Also, there was Stanford University, where he had a booster named Frederick Terman, the school’s provost. Come to the Valley, Terman had told Shockley, and he could help him find an office in a new industrial park for young, innovative companies.
• In addition to the ocean cable and the military defense systems and the Nobel Prize, Kelly’s management had been validated in The Organization Man, William Whyte’s influential 1956 book that analyzed the conformity of America’s corporate culture and the merits of creative thinking. “If ever there were proof of the virtues of free research, General Electric and Bell Labs provide it,” Whyte wrote, pointing in particular to the achievements of thinkers like Claude Shannon. “Of all corporations’ research groups these two have been the two outstandingly profitable ones … of all corporation research groups these two have consistently attracted the most brilliant men. Why? The third fact explains the other two. Of all corporation research groups these two are precisely the two that believe in ‘idle curiosity.’”
• November 1958 Fortune story that christened Kelly’s shop as “The World’s Greatest Industrial Lab.” Francis Bello, who had written on Shannon’s information theory and the transistor, had spent months at Murray Hill chronicling almost every aspect of its research and development.
• Digital information as Shannon envisioned it was durable and portable. In time, any company could code and send a message digitally, and any company could uncode it.
• Later he would say that during these years he saw “a glimmer of the dawning of the idea that things can be understood, and that learning, in science at least, is understanding.”
• Though he was eventually the subject of a long profile in the New Yorker, Pierce was inclined to describe his career as a procession of fortunate events rather than the product of his own restless intellect.
• He considered the experience equivalent to being cast adrift without a compass. “Too much freedom is horrible,” he would say in describing his first few months at the Labs. Indeed, he eventually came to believe that freedom in research was similar to food; it was necessary, but moderation was usually preferable to excess.
• Pierce’s other hero at Bell Labs was none of those things. He was a dreamer as well as an unrepentant futurist; and he was someone with no aspirations whatsoever to manage people or wield power. That would be Pierce’s good friend in the mathematics department, Claude Shannon.
• AN INSTIGATOR is different from a genius, but just as uncommon. An instigator is different, too, from the most skillful manager, someone able to wrest excellence out of people who might otherwise fall short. Somewhere between Shannon (the genius) and Kelly (the manager), Pierce steered a course for himself at Bell Labs as an instigator.
• Humans all suffered from a terrible habit of shoving new ideas into old paradigms. “Everyone faces the future with their eyes firmly on the past,” Pierce said, “and they don’t see what’s going to happen next.”
  • #Forecasting - Back to the future and fax machines
• WE KNOW SO MUCH about John Pierce’s opinions on Bell Labs and innovation because his career as a technologist was complemented, almost from the start, by his career as a writer. He had made great strides after the publication of his 1929 book on gliders. By the late 1940s, as he was becoming immersed in his work on traveling wave tubes, he was turning out essays, science fiction stories, lectures, and books.
• Some of Pierce’s writing was published under his own name; some of it, however, was done under the pseudonyms John Roberts and j.j. coupling, the latter of which he borrowed on a whim from the physics literature (a j-j coupling described the spin and orbital functions of electrons), so that he would not have to seek clearance from the Bell Labs publications department, a sometimes formidable obstacle, each time he wanted to disseminate one of his new ideas.
  • Anon accounts in the 50s named after physics nerdisms
• The rejections of his stories must have stung him terribly. A publicly unsentimental man, Pierce nevertheless kept in his files until his death what appeared to be every rejection letter he’d ever received.
• He would say that instead of naming the transistor, he wished he had actually invented it. He also remarked that rather than writing about information theory, he wished that he, rather than Shannon, had thought of it.
  • Do something worth writing about or write something worth reading.
• In October 1954, he was invited to give a talk about space in Princeton at a convention of the Institute of Radio Engineers. Pierce decided he would discuss an idea he had for communications satellites—that is, orbiting unmanned spaceships that could relay communications (radio, telephone, television, or the like) from one great distance to another.
• In fact, unbeknownst to Pierce, Arthur Clarke had written an obscure paper about ten years before suggesting that a small number of satellites, orbiting the earth at a height of about 22,300 miles, could connect the continents.
• Ideas may come to us out of order in point of time,” the first director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, Simon Flexner, once remarked. “We may discover a detail of the façade before we know too much about the foundation. But in the end all knowledge has its place.”
• But all of these concerns may have been magnified by Kelly’s opposition to the kind of innovation that might later be described as “discontinuous.”14 Bell Labs had just completed the successful transatlantic cable; the future of communications to Europe and beyond appeared to reside in new and better cables. These would be incremental innovations. In such a vision of the future, orbiting satellites weren’t only a risky and unproven technology; they were also—at least to a telephone executive with a well-defined, step-by-step ten-year plan for improving the system—a strange sideways leap.
• As Pierce would later say, Jakes’s word was law. At times the younger man would remark to Pierce, empathetically, that it must have bothered him that he didn’t get to run Echo’s day-to-day operations. “I don’t know what I said, but it certainly wasn’t the full truth,” Pierce later wrote. “The Echo ground terminal would never have got built or worked had I been the project engineer. Through a mixture of ineptitude or boredom, I would have flubbed.”
  • Some want to be the guy. Others want to be the guy that “the guy” counts on.
• His point was that satellites, only a year after Echo, had progressed from an intriguing experiment to a cutthroat business. A number of multinational corporations—RCA, General Electric, ITT, among others—had already made clear their intentions, as Fortune magazine put it in July 1961, to install “the great cable in space.”
• “There was pell-mell competition to see who would get done first,” Eugene O’Neill, Telstar’s project engineer, would recall, noting that the tight deadlines and financial pressures were a departure for Bell engineers accustomed to working on a more orderly schedule and with a focus on quality and durability rather than speed.
• Echo was done on a shoestring, at a cost of less than $2 million, with a staff of about three dozen men. Telstar—the rocket launch alone, billed by NASA to AT&T, cost $3 million—was a development project that required the work of more than five hundred Bell Labs scientists and engineers. Echo was a big shiny balloon with a small radio beacon; Telstar had fifteen thousand parts.
• Nothing in the satellite could be allowed to fail, moreover, for as hard as it was to repair an undersea cable, it would be impossible, in a world that had yet to send a man into space, to fix a satellite.
• Pierce was confident—one of his hallmark traits. He found it continually astonishing that a complex apparatus such as the phone system even worked, but on individual projects he rarely doubted the capability of his fellow Bell engineers.
• Congress and the Kennedy administration, concerned about ceding the control of space communications entirely to the private sector and worried, too, about AT&T’s immense size and aggressiveness, had already pushed all private companies out of the international satellite business.
• Pierce had long been frustrated by Washington’s bureaucracy. (NASA officials, in turn, had also been frustrated by AT&T, which they believed had unfairly monopolized credit for Echo and Telstar.)
• Pierce had become more and more involved with electronic and computer-generated music. Along with his colleague Max Mathews, Pierce and some Labs researchers had compiled an album of computer-programmed music, released by Decca Records, that they’d created on a primitive IBM 7090 computer.
  • Technology has its moment
• In speeches and television appearances during the years defined mostly by Echo and Telstar, he sometimes impressed people as a kind of philosopher of communications. In his view, it wasn’t so much that technologies were changing society; rather, a new web of instantaneous information exchanges, made possible largely by the technologies of Bell Labs, was changing society.
• For corporations, world’s fairs are public relations opportunities. But the fair was not an exercise in cynicism. It was a legitimate chance to display some of the ideas in the company’s technological pipeline, a pipeline usually clogged with more inventions and ideas than the business side of the phone company could ever hope to implement.
• New York’s fair would dwarf Seattle’s. The crowds were expected to be immense—probably somewhere around 50 or 60 million people in total.
• There were also concerns as to whether the nation was ready. But the response of visitors to the New York fair—usually a line of people were waiting to try the Picturephones—suggested a substantial degree of public curiosity, and perhaps even enthusiasm.
• The “switching art,” as it was known at Bell Labs, was suitably captured by a specialized technical jargon describing relays, registers, translators, markers, and so forth and a bevy of convoluted, mind-twisting flow charts. Those who had mastered the switching art were members of a technological priesthood.
• Bell engineers were asked by Bell management—ever wary of the federal government’s order to stay out of the computer business—to describe the ESS only as “computer-like.” (The internal memo warned, “Do not call ESS a computer,” instead suggesting that ESS be described as “a large digital information processor.”)
• THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY is never particularly easy to discern. That was why John Pierce never ceased to point out that anyone in the business of making predictions was destined to make a humiliating false step.
  • #Forecasting
• It was hard to say whether Bill Baker, the head of Bell Labs’ research division, knew what was going on in the bowels of the place. He did not, as a matter of course, tell people what he knew. He had nevertheless gathered a vast storehouse of information about Bell Labs’ operations. Every day at lunch he would sit down with the first person he spotted in the cafeteria, whether he was a glassblower from the vacuum tube shop or a metallurgist from the semiconductor lab—“Is it okay if I join you?” he would ask politely, never to be refused—and would gently interview the employee about his work and personal life and ideas. “At the end of any conversation,” Baker’s friend and colleague Mike Noll recalls, “you would then realize that he would know everything about you but you would know absolutely nothing about him.” His memory was as remarkable as his opacity.
  • Connect to Gordon B. Hinckley’s ability to extract any information from his conversational partner
• Colleagues often stood amazed that Baker could recall by name someone he had met only once, twenty or thirty years before. His mind wasn’t merely photographic, though; it worked in some ways like a switching apparatus: He tied everyone he ever met, and every conversation he ever had, into a complex and interrelated narrative of science and technology and society that he constantly updated, with apparent ease.
• He was thrifty with everything but words. Verbosity had long been Baker’s defining characteristic. “A speech is a different format than writing,” Bob Lucky explains, “but not with Baker. His speech was perfect grammatical sentences. He talked like a writer, and normal people don’t do that. His cadence, his prosody, he was an amazing speaker—but always you had no idea what he said, even as you were mesmerized by the way he said it.”
• Eventually they realized that when Baker showed modest enthusiasm—if something sounded very good to him—he didn’t particularly like it. “If he really liked something,” his colleague Irwin Dorros recalls, “then he would use about ten adjectives: that is a terrifically outstanding and superb contribution that has exceeded all expectations, or something like that.”
• As Ian Ross, who later became Baker’s deputy, and ultimately Bell Labs’ president, recalls, “The story Baker used to tell—not about himself, but it fitted him—was that there are two men sitting in a meeting where a man is making a presentation. And when the man finishes, one guy in the back turns to the other and says, ‘What was he talking about?’ And the other says, ‘I don’t know, he didn’t say.’ And that was Baker. He could speak for ten minutes and you hadn’t the vaguest idea of what he said. It was habitual. And I think it was willful. He wanted to obfuscate.”
• There could be exceptions. “He could be very blunt, and he could be very clear when he wanted to be clear,” recalls Bill Keefauver, who headed Bell Labs’ legal department during Baker’s tenure. At those rare moments, Baker’s equanimity would ebb away and reveal a kind of merciless, probing intelligence. At one of his monthly meetings, Henry Pollak recalls, the director of chemical research was taking a turn to give a presentation on some recent experiments. “He used an innocent sentence,” Pollak recalls, “something like, ‘and this particular aspect is completely understood.’ And Baker didn’t say anything, he just started asking him questions. He started with one thing, and then he asked a question about his answer, and then he asked questions about his answer to that, and so on—until he just demolished the guy. It was that statement—this particular thing is completely understood. He was trying to show him that it wasn’t understood at all. And he didn’t say, ‘Oh, you don’t want to say things like that.’ He just cut him down, six inches at a time.”
• To Pollak, this was a demonstration not of Bill Baker’s cruelty but of his acumen—in this case to push his deep belief that science rests on a foundation of inquiry rather than certainty.
• Baker, after all, was not a physicist but a chemist—someone who perceived that progress, the means of moving science and technology forward, was really the struggle to understand the composition of materials and fashion new and better ones whenever possible. Materials, he would later say, represented “the grand alliance of engineering and science.”
• Baker’s arrival at the Labs in the late 1930s roughly coincided with the arrival of its future intellectual stars—Shockley, Shannon, Pierce, and Fisk, among others—the men who were sometimes referred to by their colleagues as the Young Turks.
• “we had a big event here in 1958 or so, and we were all speaking in the [Murray Hill] auditorium. They were saying how [the transistor] would endure in history forever, and I said, ‘Yes, and after it’s forgotten in a few thousand years, communication theory will still be with us.’”
• It was a “wondrous coincidence,” as Bill Baker described it, “that all of human knowledge and experience can be completely and accurately expressed in binary digital terms.”
• Kilby or Noyce could not have understood the full implications either—personal computers, portable phones, deep space exploration, all of the things that defined the kind of future that John Pierce would write about in his memos and essays. But in just a few years’ time, the integrated circuit would represent something new for Bell Labs: a moment when a hugely important advance in solid-state engineering, though built upon the scientific discoveries at the Labs, had occurred elsewhere. Such a development perhaps suggested that the landscape of competitiveness in American electronics, something that Mervin Kelly had written about in the closing days of World War II, was now very much a reality. At the very least, it proved that even the great technical minds at Bell Labs, Jack Morton especially, could misjudge the future. “We had all the elements to make an integrated circuit,” Tanenbaum adds. “And all the processes—diffusion, photolithography—were developed at Bell Labs. But nobody had the foresight except Noyce and Kilby.”
• Rudi Kompfner, Pierce’s deputy and close friend, shared that sense of urgency. And so Kompfner, with Pierce’s and Bill Baker’s endorsement, started making a list. “He went around the world at that time, in 1960, trying to find good people—that’s all he wanted, good people,” recalls Herwig Kogelnik. “And then he would try to persuade them to switch their disciplines to take on what he called ‘laser and optical communications research.’” Even within the scientific community, the terms were new and strange.
• “Think of all this bandwidth!”—a line that inspired Kogelnik to switch from plasma to lasers. “I had invested many, many years in plasma physics. And he persuaded people like me to totally throw away their past and start in a new field.”
• The future, in other words, still looked the same to Baker as it had to Fisk at the beginning of the decade: the Picturephone, waveguides, electronic switching. These were the Bell System’s bets, and they were sticking with them.
• In retrospect, of course, the evolution of technology looks like an ever-ascending staircase, with one novel development set atop another, leading incrementally and inevitably to all the benefits of modern life.
• No one was keeping an actual ledger during the 1960s on how well Bell Labs was doing in planning for the next century, but had they been, they might have put electronic switching and the laser work in the column of spectacular and prescient successes. During those same years, there were other achievements at Bell Labs that would, in time, alter the world.
• But nobody could offer such a mitigating rationale to explain the waveguide and Picturephone, two interrelated and fabulously expensive follies.29 It seems worth considering not only how those endeavors failed, but what those failures represented. Innovators make different kinds of mistakes. The waveguide, for instance, might be considered a mistake of perception. It was an instance where a technology of legitimate promise is eclipsed by a breakthrough elsewhere—in another corporate department, at another company, at a university, wherever—that solves a particular problem better. It was perhaps understandable, moreover, that a breakthrough in the creation of pure glass fibers wouldn’t come from an organization such as Bell Labs, where materials scientists were experts on the behaviors of metals, polymers, and semiconductor crystals. Rather, it would come from a company like Corning, with over a century of expertise in glass and ceramics. Mistakes of perception are not the same as mistakes of judgment, though. In the latter, an idea that developers think will satisfy a need or want does not. It may prove useless because of its functional shortcomings, or because it’s too expensive in relation to its modest appeal, or because it arrives in the marketplace too early or too late. Or because of all those reasons combined. The Picturephone was a mistake in judgment.
  • #Post-Mortem
• OFFICIALLY, the Picturephone rollout began with a trial at the Westinghouse Corporation in Pittsburgh, starting in February 1969; during the summer of that year Bell Labs devoted an entire issue of its magazine, the Bell Laboratories Record, to explain the science and engineering of the new launch. The possible impacts of the Picturephone, Julius Molnar suggested in an introductory note, could well be seismic: By lessening the need for shopping trips or for conducting in-person business, “there will be less need for dense population centers,” as well as reduced traffic. “Picturephone is therefore much more than just another means of communication,” Molnar wrote. “It may in fact help solve many social problems.”
• According to Irwin Dorros, one of the Bell Labs executives involved in the launch, the team working on the Picturephone had never doubted its eventual success. “Groupthink,” as Dorros puts it, had infiltrated the endeavor. Yet as the Picturephone’s demise became more evident, even its most ardent proponents began to ask why it was failing and why they hadn’t anticipated that outcome.
• “To start up a service, you have to think about: I have one, you don’t have one—so I can’t talk to you,” Irwin Dorros says. “So I can only talk to you if you have one. So how do you get a critical mass of people that have them?” Many years later, a computer engineer named Robert Metcalfe would surmise that the value of a networked device increases dramatically as the number of people using the network grows. The larger the network, in other words, the higher the value of a device on that network to each user.36 This formulation—sometimes known as Metcalfe’s law—can help explain the immense appeal of the telephone system and Internet. However, the smaller the network, the lower the value of a device to each user. Picturephone’s network was minuscule. Price cuts didn’t seem to be working. And so its value was vanishingly small, with little prospect of any increase.
  • #[[Network Effects]]
• Not all the directors and vice presidents, however, liked the service. Rudi Kompfner, for instance, positioned a still photograph of himself in front of his set—in John Pierce’s admiring recollection, the image showed Kompfner to be remarkably attentive and invariably interested in whatever was being said—so that he could move about his office during a chat.
• The newfound popularity of video chats over the Internet might seem to validate this view. But to an innovator, being early is not necessarily different from being wrong.
• Over the past decade or so, some of the phone company’s problems had become problems of business rather than technology: Several new companies, most of them using innovations developed by Bell Labs, were trying to compete in both telephone equipment sales and long-distance services. These competitors were helped in the late 1960s and early 1970s by a burgeoning philosophy, now finding adherents among politicians and lawyers in Washington, D.C., that American consumers would be better served through competition rather than a tight federal control of industry. The U.S. Congress was already getting poised to loosen the rules that had long governed the airline, railroad, and securities businesses. In the argot of the day, these industries would soon be “deregulated.” Should telecommunications be next? The dilemma was whether it remained in Americans’ best interests to have a regulated phone monopoly such as AT&T—a monopoly that had “an end-to-end responsibility” for telephone service—or whether the phone giant should be dismantled in the expectation of more competition, lower costs, and perhaps an even greater rate of innovation.
• In the view of Ross and others, such efforts probably helped delay a variety of antitrust actions. Ross recalls, “Kelly set up Sandia Labs, which was run by AT&T, managed by us, and whenever I asked, ‘Why do we stay with this damn thing, it’s not our line of business,’ the answer was, ‘It helps us if we get into an antitrust suit.’ And Bell Labs did work on military programs. Why? Not really to make money. It was part of being invaluable.”
• John deButts considered AT&T’s vast communications network to be unique in all the world. No one else could replicate it; no one else could run it. Its construction and maintenance, done over the course of a century, had been Herculean. Its electronic architecture was the product of genius and hard work. He was correct in all these respects. He did not seem to grasp, however, how quickly technology could now be replicated, in part thanks to Bell Labs’ widely available patents.
• Bob Lucky recalls a day in the early 1970s when several AT&T executives were discussing with Bell Labs executives the prospect of upstart companies offering long-distance service. “You don’t have to worry about this,” the AT&T executive assured them, “because we have the network. No one else has the network.” For a short while, at least, that was true. They didn’t realize at the time that anyone could build a network.
• Frenkiel accepted a dollar bill on his first day in exchange for his future patent rights. It was the same ritual that new Bell Labs employees had enacted for decades. But by Frenkiel’s own account, he soon came to realize that he had joined an organization that differed from its myth. The Black Box represented one aspect of this evolution. More to the point, the thrust of the work at Bell Labs seemed to have shifted decisively to big projects involving hundreds of people. Frenkiel’s Bell Labs didn’t seem to have anything to do with heroic research on a new amplifier, done by a few men in a hushed lab. It was about large teams attacking knotty problems for years on end.
• It was Engel’s understanding that to get ahead at Bell Labs, “you were supposed to work on more than you were asked to work on.”6 It was necessary, in other words, not only to do your assigned work but to devote 20 or 30 percent of your time to another project.
• Indeed, a marketing study commissioned by AT&T in the fall of 1971 informed its team that “there was no market for mobile phones at any price.” Neither man agreed with that assessment.
• “You have to understand,” Joel Engel says of the entire effort, “we were all very young, we were unscarred by failure. So we always knew it was going to work.”
• ENGEL WAS PUT IN CHARGE of the group planning the cellular system design. He would later look back and see the early 1970s as a perfect example of what engineers sometimes call “steam engine time.” This term refers to the Scottish engineer James Watt, the inventor of the first commercially popular steam engine, whose name is also memorialized in the term we use to measure power. In the late 1700s, Watt made startling improvements upon more basic ideas of how to use compressed steam to run heavy machinery. The knowledge needed to make such an engine had by then coalesced to the point that his innovation was, arguably, inevitable.
• Popular technologies spread quickly through society; inevitably, they are duplicated and improved by outsiders. As that happens, the original innovator becomes less and less crucial to the technology itself. “I think they knew that,” says John Mayo, a legendary engineer who began working at Bell Labs in the 1950s and rose to become its president some years after the litigation had ended. An intriguing question, at least to Mayo, is why the leadership that preceded him at Bell Labs—Jewett, Kelly, Fisk, Pierce, Baker, and the rest—nonetheless decided to invest so heavily and so consistently in research and in exploring what he calls “the unknown.” They were not forced to; other government-run phone companies around the world did not. Arguably, Bell Labs could have existed as a highly competent development organization without doing much in the way of basic or applied research. In Mayo’s view, “it’s not clear what possessed them to do such a unique thing, because in the long term it clearly was not something that assured their future.”
• Drucker believed that Bell Labs’ technical contributions over the course of fifty years had essentially made its continued existence untenable. “Bell Laboratories’ discoveries and inventions,” he wrote, “have largely created modern electronics.” As those discoveries and inventions had spread around the world, however, they had made telephone technology indistinct.
• Or the Labs could take a “far bolder, but also far riskier course” by going into business for itself, making money from its patents and products. It could become a kind of unique and monolithic brain trust, one that did research for AT&T but also for any company or part of the government that was willing to pay for access to its people and resources. “Nothing like this has ever been done,” Drucker noted. “And no one knows whether it could succeed.”
  • #[[Skunk Works]]
• “We were moving faster than Bell Labs would,” Gunther-Mohr says, noting that Bell Labs had a thirty-year schedule for applying its inventions to the phone network. IBM was attempting to best its competitors as quickly as possible.
• It was Kelly’s habit to single out researchers whose work or manner impressed him. “His evaluation and identification of people had a profound effect on their careers,” Emmanuel Piore, IBM’s chief scientist, once remarked. Yet it seems likely these men and women never knew it. An unseen hand, Kelly’s own, had plucked them out as IBM’s future scientific leaders.
  • Talent identification
• Kelly did not want to begin a project by focusing on what was known. He would want to begin by focusing on what was not known. As Pierce explained, the approach was both difficult and counterintuitive. It was more common practice, at least in the military, to proceed with what technology would allow and fill in the gaps afterward. Kelly’s tack was akin to saying: Locate the missing puzzle piece first. Then do the puzzle.
• Still, it was the men Shockley hired for his California venture—proof of his uncanny ability to spot talent—who actually went on to create the Valley’s extraordinary wealth. In the process, several became billionaires.
  • Talent identification. There is a Pay it Forward element that goes along with talent identification. If you can spot sharp people that’s great, but whether you benefit from it will depend on if they go on to hate you or revere you.
• In his recollection, working for Shockley was largely an exercise in frustration. In a Time magazine story he authored some years after the fact, Moore recalled that Shockley “extended his competitive nature even to his working relationships with the young physicists he supervised.
• The young men under Shockley now understood what Bell Labs’ research staffers had long known: Shockley was an exceedingly poor manager, or perhaps something worse.
• Several Bell Labs veterans recall that the difference between Shockley’s own scores and other Bell Labs employees was not significant. It must have been a blow to Shockley’s self-esteem.
• Years before the transistor was invented, Elmendorf had sat on Shockley’s living room couch while Shockley patiently tutored him on the principles of solid-state physics. Several years after that, Shockley had again tutored Elmendorf, this time on the principles of radar. Now, Elmendorf recalls, his old friend who at one time ate, slept, and breathed physics—a teacher who was “decent, wonderful, pleasant”—wanted only to talk about race and genetics. Like other colleagues from long ago, Elmendorf found Shockley both single-minded and intolerable.
• The great tragedy of Bill Shockley’s life, Ian Ross remarks, was that he did almost nothing of scientific worth after leaving Bell Labs. Arguably, his successes were as a teacher and as an impresario of talent—that is, in assembling the team at Shockley Semiconductor that ultimately drove the success of America’s computer chip industry. “Had he stayed in that environment,” Ross says of Bell Labs, “it would have been a very different story.”
  • The same way that a founder and a market create a unique outcome, so too does the combination of an intellectual and an environment.
• AFTER MOVING FROM BELL LABS to MIT in the late 1950s, Claude Shannon continued to publish important papers on communications. But his most productive years as a mathematician were behind him. Like Shockley, he had left the Bell cocoon; the difference, perhaps, was that Shannon understood the implications. “I believe that scientists get their best work done before they are fifty, or even earlier than that,” he told an interviewer late in life. “I did most of my best work while I was young.”
• Shannon nonetheless remained interested in the implications of his work. His speeches from that era suggest a man quietly convinced that information—how it moved, how it was stored, how it was processed—would soon define global societies and economies. A few years after he entered academia, in 1959, he lectured to an audience of students and faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. “I think that this present century in a sense will see a great upsurge and development of this whole information business,” Shannon remarked. The future, he predicted, would depend on “the business of collecting information and the business of transmitting it from one point to another, and perhaps most important of all, the business of processing it—using it to replace man at semi-rote operation[s] at a factory … even the replacement of man in the things that we almost think of as creative, things like doing mathematics or translating languages.”
• With information theory, Shannon had never had any intention of changing the world—it had just worked out that way. He had pursued the work not because he perceived it would be useful in squeezing more information into undersea ocean cables or deep space communications. He had pursued it because it intrigued him.
• “I don’t know how history is taught here in Japan,” he told the audience when he traveled there in 1985 to give an acceptance speech, “but in the United States in my college days, most of the time was spent on the study of political leaders and wars—Caesars, Napoleons, and Hitlers. I think this is totally wrong. The important people and events of history are the thinkers and innovators, the Darwins, Newtons, Beethovens whose work continues to grow in influence in a positive fashion.”
• “I didn’t adapt well to Cal Tech,” he later admitted. “Not that there was anything wrong. For years and years I’d had it too easy. There were very few times when it mattered where I was. I had very few obligations to be at a particular place at a particular time to do a particular thing at Bell Labs.”
• As he saw it, the work at the Labs was vital; it was required to improve the network. “People cared about everything,” he said of colleagues there. On the contrary, he noted, in the university “no one can tell a professor what to do, on the one hand. But in any deep sense, nobody cares what he’s doing, either.”
• His advice to his students in California was that the key to a good life was to be lucky and smart.
• What pushed Baker from private regrets about the state of telecommunications to forthright disapproval was the Telecommunications Act of 1996. A huge and complex piece of federal legislation, the Telecom Act altered the structure of the communications business by allowing, among other things, the former regional telephone companies (now known as the Baby Bells) to compete nationally with AT&T and MCI. In short order, the 1996 rules created a mad frenzy for telecom equipment and network infrastructure, resulting in absurd stock valuations for some of the companies involved, as well as fraud and malfeasance.
• To be sure, companies, or parts of companies, can collapse or vanish into liquidation with great rapidity. Bell Labs was more an example of how an organization could endure through a process of downsizing and adaptation. True to Peter Drucker’s analysis, over the course of twenty years following the breakup, Bell Labs became a respectable industrial lab. The tragedy to Bill Baker was that it also, slowly and steadily, ceased being essential to America’s technology and culture.
• In 1986, for instance, the challenges that lay ahead remained indistinct. John Pierce, watching the fate of his old employer from his perch in California, set down some thoughts at the time in a letter to a friend. As Pierce saw it, the great laboratories of the twentieth century had a clear purpose: “Someone depended on them for something, and was anxious to get it. They were really needed, and they rose to the need.”
• “It is just plain silly,” he wrote, “to identify the new AT&T Bell Laboratories with the old Bell Telephone Laboratories just because the new Laboratories has inherited buildings, equipment and personnel from the old. The mission was absolutely essential to the research done at the old Laboratories, and that mission is gone and has not been replaced.”
• Everything Bell Labs had ever made for AT&T had been channeled into a monopoly business. “One immediate problem for which no amount of corporate bulk can compensate is the firm’s lack of marketing expertise,” one journalist, Christopher Byron of Time, noted. It was a wise point. Bell Labs and AT&T had “never really had to sell anything.”
• Government regulation, as AT&T had learned, could be immensely difficult to manage and comply with. But markets, they would soon discover, were simply brutal.
• What’s more, a company that had always focused on building things to last three or four decades was now engaged in a business where products and ideas became dated after three or four years.
• In 1995, a Bell Labs researcher named Andrew Odlyzko, who worked as a manager in the mathematics department, circulated a paper he had written that considered what was happening to American technology and, in effect, the world of Bell Labs. Odlyzko pointed out that while it was easy to blame the narrowing ambitions on shortsighted management that aimed to turn a buck more quickly, the actual forces involved were somewhat more complex. “Unfettered research,” as Odlyzko termed it, was no longer a logical or necessary investment for a company. For one thing, it took far too long for an actual breakthrough to pay off as a commercial innovation—if it ever did. For another, the base of science was now so broad, thanks to work in academia as well as old industrial laboratories such as Bell Labs, that a company could profit merely by pursuing an incremental strategy rather than a game-changing discovery or invention.
  • Fascinating. Revisit
• When Odlyzko wrote his paper, a small company called Netscape had just gone public, with a valuation that astounded the business world. And yet Netscape’s innovative product—a viewing browser for the World Wide Web—was largely the beneficiary of scientific and engineering advances that had been steadily accruing through academic, military, and government-funded work (on switching and networks, especially) over the past few decades.
• To put it darkly, the future was a matter of short-term thinking rather than long-term thinking. In business, progress would not be won through a stupendous leap or advance; it would be won through a continuous series of short sprints, all run within a narrow track. “In American and European industry,” Odlyzko concluded, “the prospects for a return to unfettered research in the near future are slim. The trend is towards concentration on narrow market segments.”
• By a number of measures—patents and awards, for instance—the company still retained a first-rate industrial laboratory with a skilled staff. And from the start, the prospects for Lucent and Lucent’s Bell Labs were considered promising. The company would design and build the next generation of wireless and wireline equipment. But things went even better than expected, and Lucent’s first few years proved to be the kind of fairy tale that the business press and financial investors adore. As wireless phone services boomed, and as the Internet exploded in popularity, so, too, did the need for telecommunications equipment in the United States and abroad. A host of companies embarked on an extraordinary buildout of the country’s telecommunications and data infrastructure; Lucent, in turn, began reaping enormous profits. Just two years after it split from AT&T, Lucent’s stock valuation— $98.5 billion—was higher than its onetime parent. The next few years became known variously as the telecom boom and the dotcom (a nickname for new web-based companies) boom. The assumption, as one financial columnist described it, was “that the explosive proliferation of dotcoms would send endlessly expanding amounts of data, voice and video streaming across larger and larger networks.”6 At its peak, Lucent was valued at $270 billion. Bell Labs, in turn, enjoyed ample funding. It seemed like another golden age of communications research was on the wing. Things fell apart quickly. By 2000, it was understood that the predicted demand for telecommunications switching and transmission equipment was a fantasy. To compound Lucent’s problems, it was soon discovered that the company’s profits had been inflated by a practice of helping outside companies finance purchases of its equipment. The subsequent fallout was devastating. Lucent’s revenue plunged. Its stock price, which had peaked at about $84 a share, fell below $2. The company slashed tens of thousands of jobs, including thousands within Bell Labs. Some researchers and engineers were cast off when the company, desperate to alleviate its losses, divided the Bell Labs’ inheritance into even more parts—to smaller companies that took the name Agere and Avaya, for instance. Others were unceremoniously laid off. In the New Jersey suburbs, workers found they were embarrassed to wear Lucent shirts or hats to the store. In previous years, as the company’s stock price climbed, they would receive slaps on the back. Now they were greeted with angry reprisals of “What happened?” or “I lost a lot of money.” In the end, the company reduced its workforce from a high of 150,000 to about 40,000. And in its omnibus efforts to cut costs and energy consumption, every other light inside the vast buildings at Murray Hill was turned off. The acres of lawns in front of the buildings were mowed less frequently. Meanwhile, the remaining employees—at the company whose engineers perfected the telephone—were asked to limit their calls at work.
• In 2002, a panel of experts concluded that a prominent Bell Labs researcher, J. Hendrik Schon, had published a series of papers relying on fraudulent data.
• It was arguable that the scientific misconduct was Schon’s alone, and not an indictment of Bell Labs. But it was difficult to believe such an incident could have occurred years before. “What does the Schon scandal mean?” an interviewer from the New York Times asked a young physicist named Paul Ginsparg. “The demise of Bell Labs by becoming corporate,” Ginsparg replied.
• Kim, however, didn’t want Bell Labs to be a citadel of science and scholarship. He wanted it to be a hotbed of entrepreneurial thinking. He did not downplay the challenges of reviving the laboratory. “I did not take this job because it was easy,” he said of his work to reinvent the Labs. “I took this job because it was difficult.”
• It seems likely that the Black Box at Holmdel will ultimately disappear. The building’s almost two million square feet of space were designed for workers of a bygone age who were pursuing a mission of universal connectivity that now seems largely completed.
• According to the U.S. Space Objects Registry, as of late 2010, Telstar—the first active satellite—is no longer functional. Yet it still orbits the earth. An exquisite machine requiring a year of nonstop work by hundreds of engineers, it is now a rotating piece of space junk.
• Has access to so much information not only expanded our lives but contracted them? The bustling town square in Gallatin, Missouri, where a hundred years ago Mervin Kelly worked in his father’s hardware store and confronted the counterpoint between the present and the future, is now an assemblage of empty storefronts. The hardware store and old telephone exchange is now a vacant building, with a few telltale hanks of telephone wire dangling from a dilapidated corner mount. There are a variety of reasons for the decline of small-town America. But when all kinds of communications and entertainment are delivered to your home, there are fewer and fewer reasons to go into town and exchange greetings in person.
  • Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? (T.S. Eliot)
• Some technology journalists, notably the writer Nicholas Carr, have asked recently whether an increasing reliance on instant communications and Internet data is eroding our need, or ability, to think deeply. “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” Carr writes. “My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.”
• At least in the communications industry, the greatest innovative challenge on the horizon, Kim says, is “to organize information in a way that allows you to live the way you want to live, to take time off with your kids without fear you’re going to miss out on something.”
• It proves Kelly’s belief that even as new technology solves one problem, it creates others. To follow this line of reasoning, the contemporary iterations of Bell Labs may have to solve some of the problems created by the solutions of the old Bell Labs.
  • Progress should be a never ending cycle of solving problems and then turning around and setting out to solve the problems created by those solutions. Unfortunately we’ve become too concerned with the problems created by progress that we would rather just not progress at all. One example, Tucker Carlson saying he would immediately outlaw driverless semi-trucks because of how many jobs they would take. That mentality, instead of a trust and willingness to solve the problems created, is a stagnant mindset.
• THE PURPOSE OF INNOVATION is sometimes defined as new technology. But the point of innovation isn’t really technology itself. The point of innovation is what new technology can do. “Better, or cheaper, or…
• John Pierce gave a slightly more elaborate explanation. “The only really important thing about communication is how well it serves man,” he said. “New gadgets or new technologies are important only when they really make good…
• Put another way, a new technology can put more money in our pockets, and it can allow us to do things—call across the country, send email, write software, design skyscrapers, model pharmaceuticals—in ways that were never possible before. The results can be manifested in new products and civilizing comfort, as well as by economic growth. “The history of modernization is in essence a history of scientific and technological progress,” Wen Jiabao, the premier of China, said recently. “Scientific…
• A recent report by the National Academy of Sciences argues that the United States, by consistently underinvesting in its education system and in scientific research over the past few decades, seems to have forgotten this lesson—a lesson that in many respects the country demonstrated for the rest of the world during the second half of the twentieth century. “While only four percent of the [U.S.] work force is composed of scientists and engineers…
• One can only speculate about how Kelly, Pierce, Baker, and the rest would react to the most acclaimed American innovations of recent years—iPhones, say, or Google searches or Facebook. They would likely see them as vital, sophisticated tools for the information age. A more provocative question, however, is whether they would perceive them as paths to the future, as many economic commentators often do. Regrettably, the language that describes innovations often fails to distinguish between an innovative consumer product and an innovation that represents a leap in human knowledge and a new foundation (or “platform,” as it is often described) for industry. In an effort to…
• Do we yet have the scientific base—akin to the “substantial gains” of transistors or lasers or optical fiber—on which to build that future economy? Or are we still living off the dividends from ideas that were nurtured, and risks that were taken, a half century ago?
• But Kelly believed the most valuable ideas arose when the large group of physicists bumped against other departments and disciplines, too. “It’s the interaction between fundamental science and applied science, and the interface between many disciplines, that creates new ideas,” explains Herwig Kogelnik, the laser scientist. This may indeed have been Kelly’s greatest insight.
• The Labs also needed a narrower focus on products and short- or medium-term goals. The new industrial lab had to succeed not only in engineering, but in business, too.
• Eugene Kleiner, moreover, a founding partner at the premier venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, was originally hired by Bill Shockley at his ill-fated semiconductor company. But the Silicon Valley process that Kleiner helped develop was a different innovation model from Bell Labs. It was not a factory of ideas; it was a geography of ideas. It was not one concentrated and powerful machine; it was the meshing of many interlocking small parts grouped physically near enough to one another so as to make an equally powerful machine.
• Terman is often credited as the father of Silicon Valley. (Shockley, by comparison, is sometimes called the Moses of Silicon Valley, since his failures prevented him from entering the Valley’s promised land of wealth and influence.)
• Without any way to predict the difficulty of obtaining new knowledge, and without any tools to assess its market value, how could someone bet money on it? As one venture capitalist for Kleiner Perkins puts it, “We don’t fund science experiments.”
• John Pierce did not flatter himself so much as to think that success in basic or applied research—those big leaps in scientific knowledge—were necessarily more heroic than development. “You see, out of fourteen people in the Bell Laboratories,” he once remarked, “only one is in the Research Department, and that’s because pursuing an idea takes, I presume, fourteen times as much effort as having it.”
• “You may find a lot of controversy over how Bell Labs managed people,” John Mayo, the former Bell Labs president, says. “But keep in mind, I don’t think those managers saw it that way. They saw it as: How do you manage ideas? And that’s very different from managing people. So if you hear something negative about how John Pierce managed people, I’d say, well, that’s not surprising. Pierce wasn’t about managing people. Pierce was about managing ideas.
• Mayo continues, “There are a lot of people that just don’t see the kind of things that are going to happen or likely to happen. They would prefer to invest in incremental improvements, and to have wonderful picnics, and make this quarter’s earnings without strain.”
• But the problem Pierce wrestled with that day was how to decouple Bell Labs’ success from its circumstances. “Bell Labs functioned in a world not ours,” he noted. The links between government and business were different in that era; the monopoly was deemed acceptable as well as vital. And the compensation scale for its researchers and managers could never suffice in the modern economy. In Pierce’s era, the top officer at Bell Labs made about twelve times that of the lowest-paid worker; in the late 1990s, it was more typical at large American firms for the CEO to make one hundred times the salary of the lowest-paid worker.
• Pierce, to put it simply, was asking himself: What about Bell Labs’ formula was timeless? In his 1997 list, he thought it boiled down to four things: A technically competent management all the way to the top. Researchers didn’t have to raise funds. Research on a topic or system could be and was supported for years. Research could be terminated without damning the researcher.
• What seems more likely, as the science writer Steven Johnson has noted in a broad study of scientific innovations, is that creative environments that foster a rich exchange of ideas are far more important in eliciting important new insights than are the forces of competition.18 Indeed, one might concede that market competition has been superb at giving consumers incremental and appealing improvements. But that does not mean it has been good at prompting huge advances (such as those at Bell Labs, as well as those that allowed for the creation of the Internet, for instance, or, even earlier, antibiotics). It’s the latter types that pay to society the biggest and most lasting dividends.
• COMPARING THE INFORMATION BUSINESS of Kelly’s era to that of the present can be enlightening as well as tricky. How do the technology giants of today—companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, or Facebook—measure up to Bell Labs? To be sure, there are similarities. All of these companies have carved out a near-monopoly status in various electronic hardware or computer software markets. All are sitting on enormous reserves of cash—tens of billions of dollars in some cases—that they could invest at will on research or new ideas. All of these companies seem intent on controlling, or at least dominating, our communications markets. All of these companies meanwhile employ some of the finest engineers and computer scientists on the planet. And to house those employees, corporate executives have built citadels on expansive, grassy campuses—informal, creative environments that reward innovative thinking with financial rewards and (thanks to the easy proliferation of software) speedy product rollouts. Google has even picked up on an old Bell Labs tradition: It encourages workers to spend part of their time—up to 20 percent—on a project that captures their interest, just as Joel Engel did when he planned a cellular phone system in Holmdel’s Black Box in the late 1960s. Still, the contrasts between these organizations and Bell Labs are crucial. “This was a company that literally dumped technology on our country,” the physics historian Michael Riordan has said of Bell Labs. “I don’t think we’ll see an organization with that kind of record ever again.”21 The expectation that, say, Google or Apple could behave like Bell Labs—that such companies could invest heavily in basic or applied research and then sprinkle the results freely around California—seems misplaced, if not naive. Such companies don’t exist as part of a highly regulated national public trust. They exist as part of our international capital markets. They are superb at producing a specific and limited range of technology products. And at the end of the day, new scientific knowledge matters far less to them than the demands—for leadership, growth, and profits—of their customers, employees, and shareholders.
• Perhaps information technology, then, is the wrong place to look for a new Bell Labs. We might do better to poke around in other parts of the economy. One place to consider is a complex of buildings set amid a 689-acre campus some thirty miles north of Washington, D.C. Known as Janelia Farm, the campus serves as an elite research center for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Janelia opened in 2006 with the intent of attacking the most basic biomedical research problems; it is patterned after Bell Labs and backed by a multibillion-dollar endowment. The primary goal is to understand consciousness and how the human brain processes information, but the approach to innovation is familiar: a close, interdisciplinary exchange of ideas between the world’s brightest science researchers, all of whom are given ample funding and tremendous freedom. The directors of Janelia urge their researchers to take risks and to flirt with failure as they “explore the unknown.” There are no classes to teach, no papers to grade, no federal grants to pursue. And while the scale of the research effort is smaller than at the Labs—Janelia is home to about three hundred researchers and a hundred visiting scholars—it’s difficult not to conclude, just as Kelly might have, that it’s very much an institute of creative technology. By early indications, too, the results at Janelia and Howard Hughes outshine the results of academics working within the existing structure for federally financed medical research.
• “I believe that to solve the energy problem,” Chu said in 2009 at a U.S. Senate committee hearing, “the Department of Energy must strive to be the modern version of Bell Labs in energy research.”
• The need for an energy quest, as it happens, might not surprise the founders of the Labs. In the spring of 1923, an editor at the New York Times wrote to Frank Jewett, soon to become Bell Labs’ first president, and invited him to contribute to a symposium of ideas sponsored by the newspaper. Jewett agreed, and his four-hundred-word piece, appearing on the May 20, 1923, front page, set the tone for the edition. “Water, Energy Limited; Scientists Look to the Sun Next,” the headline read. Jewett wrote, “It seems clear that a great, if not the greatest, present day need is the development of some new source of cheap utilizable energy.” With the tools of “research and invention,” Jewett urged scientists to figure out ways to take advantage of solar or tidal power, or “fuel from the luxuriant vegetable growths of the tropics”—a predecessor, most likely, of today’s biofuels.25 The question the Times editor had posed to Jewett was, “What invention does the world need most?”
• RALPH BOWN, the director of research who pondered the significance of the transistor as a snowstorm moved in on New Jersey on Christmas Eve 1947, would sometimes ask his colleagues: What was Bell Labs? As John Pierce recounted it, Bown would say: If we marched all the people out and destroyed the buildings and the equipment and the records, would Bell Laboratories be destroyed? Bown’s answer was no, it would not. On the other hand, he would say that if the buildings, equipment, and records remained intact but the people were removed, Bell Laboratories would be destroyed.
• In Lucky’s view, the exceptional individuals lent the institution its reputation of exceptionalism. “I just don’t think they make people like the kind of people we had,” Lucky says. “Not that nature doesn’t make them, just that the environment doesn’t make them. We had these people who were bigger than life back then. And we don’t seem to have them anymore—though people might say Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.” In Lucky’s view, a list of Bell Labs’ exemplars captures the essence of the organization. “They set the examples that permeated the whole place. They created the fame and were what other people aspired to be. They were the leaders, even if they weren’t high up in management. If you knew them, you knew Bell Labs.” While it’s true that the handful of famous people overshadows tens of thousands of other people, he adds, if you take that handful away, “you don’t have Bell Labs.”
• So maybe this argument—the individual versus the institution; the great men versus the yeomen; the famous versus the forgotten—is insoluble. Or maybe the argument is easily deflected. Perhaps the most significant thing was that Bell Labs had both kinds of people in profusion, and both kinds working together. And for the problems it was solving, both kinds were necessary.
• John Pierce, the most eloquent of the Young Turks, seemed to have a deep respect for the destructive quality of new technology. Pierce carried this understanding with him from his youth until his death. Upon receiving the Japan Prize in the mid-1980s, he wrote, “However nostalgic I may be about the world of my childhood, it is gone, and so are the sorts of people who lived in it. Science and technology destroyed that world and replaced it with another.” Typical of Pierce, he could sound bloodless in public about the process of change and innovation. But confidentially, some aspects of these social disruptions seemed to rankle him.
• “In general we are no more sentimental about the relics of science and technology than Shakespeare’s contemporaries were about his house and possessions,” Pierce wrote in an unpublished essay from 1959. “What mementos will our heirs have of our romantic present to tell them that men created the things which they take for granted?”
• There was no way around the conclusion. Pierce and his friends were making ideas and things that would either disappear in an instant, or would be absorbed into the ongoing project of civilization. He feared that any memories of the makers would perish, too. “I am afraid that there will be little tangible left in a later age,” Pierce wrote of his world at Bell Labs, “to remind our heirs that we were men, rather than cogs in a machine.”
• Mervin Kelly, around the time of his 1958 retirement from Bell Labs. “He is most certainly an empire builder,” a White House advisor wrote in a private memo just after World War II, when Kelly turned down the offer of becoming the U.S. president’s first science advisor.