The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

Introduction.
WICKED PROBLEMS

PART ONE

One.
OIL DROPS

Two.
WEST TO EAST

Three.
SYSTEM

Four.
WAR

Five.
SOLID STATE

Six.
HOUSE OF MAGIC

Seven.
THE INFORMATIONIST

Eight.
MAN AND MACHINE

Nine.
FORMULA

Ten.
SILICON

Eleven.
EMPIRE

PART TWO

Twelve.
AN INSTIGATOR

Thirteen.
ON CRAWFORD HILL

Fourteen.
FUTURES, REAL AND IMAGINED

Fifteen.
MISTAKES

Sixteen.
COMPETITION

Seventeen.
APART

Eighteen.
AFTERLIVES

Nineteen.
INHERITANCE

Twenty.
ECHOES

Acknowledgments

Endnotes and Amplifications

Sources

Selected Bibliography

Index

T
his book is about the origins of modern communications as seen through the adventures of several men who spent their careers working at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Even more, though, this book is about innovation—about how it happens, why it happens, and who makes it happen. It is likewise about why innovation matters, not just to scientists, engineers, and corporate executives but to all of us. That the story is about Bell Labs, and even more specifically about life at the Labs between the late 1930s and the mid-1970s, isn’t a coincidence. In the decades before the country’s best minds began migrating west to California’s Silicon Valley, many of them came east to New Jersey, where they worked in capacious brick-and-glass buildings located on grassy campuses where deer would graze at twilight. 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.

For a long stretch of the twentieth century, Bell Labs was the most
innovative scientific organization in the world. It was arguably among the world’s most important commercial organizations as well, with countless entrepreneurs building their businesses upon the Labs’ foundational inventions, which were often shared for a modest fee. Strictly speaking, this wasn’t Bell Labs’ intended function. Rather, its role was to support the research and development efforts of the country’s then-monopolistic telephone company, American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), which was seeking to create and maintain a system—the word “network” wasn’t yet common—that could connect any person on the globe to any other at any time. AT&T’s dream of “universal” connectivity was set down in the early 1900s. Yet it took more than three-quarters of a century for this idea to mature, thanks largely to the work done at Bell Labs, into a fantastically complex skein of copper cables and microwave links and glass fibers that tied together not only all of the planet’s voices but its images and data, too. In those evolutionary years, the world’s business, as well as its technological progress, began to depend on information and the conduits through which it moved. 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.

A new age makes large demands. At Bell Labs, it required the efforts of tens of thousands of scientists and engineers over many decades—millions of “man-hours,” in the parlance of AT&T, which made a habit of calculating its employees’ toil to a degree that made its workers proud while also keeping the U.S. government (which closely monitored the company’s business practices and long-distance phone monopoly) at bay. For reasons that are conceptual as well as practical, this book does not focus on those tens of thousands of Bell Laboratories workers. 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. Some of these names are notorious—Shockley, for instance, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 and in his later years steadfastly pursued a scientific link between race and intelligence. Others, such as Shannon, are familiar to those within a certain area of
interest (in Shannon’s case, mathematics and artificial intelligence) while remaining largely unknown to the general public. Pierce, a nearly forgotten figure, was the father of satellite communications and an instigator of more ideas than can be properly accounted for here. Kelly, Fisk, and Baker were presidents of the Labs, and served as stewards during the institution’s golden age. All these men knew one another, and some were extremely close. With the exception of Mervin Kelly, the eldest of the group, they were sometimes considered members of a band of Bell Labs revolutionaries known as the Young Turks. What bound them was a shared belief in the nearly sacred mission of Bell Laboratories and the importance of technological innovation.

The men preferred to think they worked not in a laboratory but in what Kelly once called “an institute of creative technology.” This description aimed to inform the world that the line between the art and science of what Bell scientists did wasn’t always distinct. Moreover, while many of Kelly’s colleagues might have been eccentrics, few were dreamers in the less flattering sense of the word. They were paid for their imaginative abilities. But they were also paid for working within a culture, and within an institution, where the very point of new ideas was to make them into new things.

S
HOULD WE CARE ABOUT
how new ideas begin? Practically speaking, if our cell phones ring and our computer networks function we don’t need to recall how two men sat together in a suburban New Jersey laboratory during the autumn of 1947 and invented the transistor, which is the essential building block of all digital products and contemporary life. Nor should we need to know that in 1971 a team of engineers drove around Philadelphia night after night in a trailer home stocked with sensitive radio equipment, trying to set up the first working cell phone system. In other words, we don’t have to understand the details of the twentieth century in order to live in the twenty-first. And there’s a good reason we don’t have to. The history of technology tends to remain stuffed in attic trunks and the minds of aging scientists. Those breakthrough products of past
decades—the earliest silicon solar cells, for example, which were invented at Bell Labs in the 1950s and now reside in a filing cabinet in a forlorn warehouse in central New Jersey—seem barely functional by today’s standards. 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.

Still, good arguments urge us to contemplate scientific history. Bill Gates once said of the invention of the transistor, “My first stop on any time-travel expedition would be Bell Labs in December 1947.”
¹
It’s a perceptive wish, I think. Bell Labs was admittedly imperfect. Like any elite organization, it suffered at times from personality clashes, institutional arrogance, and—especially in its later years—strategic missteps. Yet understanding the circumstances that led up to that unusual winter of 1947 at Bell Labs, and what happened there in the years afterward, promises a number of insights into how societies progress. With this in mind, one might think of a host of reasons to look back at these old inventions, these forgotten engineers, these lost worlds.

While our engineering prowess has advanced a great deal over the past sixty years, the principles of innovation largely have not. Indeed, the techniques forged at Bell Labs—that knack for apprehending a vexing problem, gathering ideas that might lead to a solution, and then pushing toward the development of a product that could be deployed on a massive scale—are still worth considering today, where we confront a host of challenges (information overloads, infectious disease, and climate change, among others) that seem very nearly intractable. Some observers have taken to calling them “wicked problems.” As it happens, the past offers the example of one seemingly wicked problem that was overcome by an innovative effort that rivals the Apollo program and Manhattan Project in size, scope, expense, and duration. That was to connect all of us, and all of our new machines, together.

“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.”
²
Some contemporary thinkers would lead us to believe that twenty-first-century innovation can only be accomplished by small groups of nimble, profit-seeking entrepreneurs working amid the frenzy of market competition. Those idea factories of the past—and perhaps their most gifted employees—have no lessons for those of us enmeshed in today’s complex world. This is too simplistic. To consider what occurred at Bell Labs, to glimpse the inner workings of its invisible and now vanished “production lines,” is to consider the possibilities of what large human organizations might accomplish.

T
he first thing they tended to notice about Mervin Kelly was his restlessness. Anyone in the town of Gallatin, Missouri, could see it. The boy was antsy, impatient—barely able to contain himself in anticipation of some future event that could not possibly arrive quickly enough. You might think he’d been born with electricity running through his veins. He was serious about his schoolwork, but his excess of energy led him to a multitude of other jobs, too. At a very young age, he made extra money assisting in his father’s store and leading cows to pasture for local farmers. At ten he began building a paper route business, and soon became an employer of other boys who did the work, rather than the one who made the deliveries. By his teenage years he was also helping his father keep the books at the shop downtown. His high school class was small—just eighteen students—but he was a striver, becoming both class president and valedictorian. His classmates called him “our Irish king.” People in Gallatin noticed that, too. The young man was intent on being in charge. And in a place where people neither walked fast nor talked fast, young Mervin Kelly did both.