The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (34 page)

In other words, telephone customers could now move around—they could be
mobile
—and the system could still find them. Eventually, this would prove to be immensely valuable. Bell Labs’ engineers had been
encouraged by the public relations department to remark to journalists that ESS had the capacity “to provide services we haven’t even thought of yet.” It was a vague throwaway line that turned out to be exactly right.

T
HE 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. And yet if you worked at Bell Laboratories, and were therefore entrusted by the United States government with the future of telecommunications, you still had to have a plan. So how much should Pierce and his colleagues wager on one idea for the future or another? And how fast could—how fast should—the future happen?

Jim Fisk, the president of Bell Labs, presided over the ESS ribbon-cutting in Succasunna. Fisk was the physicist whom Mervin Kelly had hired right out of MIT and who had made his name designing magnetrons for radar sets during the war. As an executive, he had the same unflappable posture he’d had as a young researcher—an easygoing temperament, coupled with a strong scientific mind, that had prompted his friend Bill Shockley to remark to a colleague, as Fisk was visiting the Labs in the late 1930s, “If that man gets hired, we’ll all be working for him in ten years.” Now several decades had passed. To Fisk, looking out from the early 1960s toward the future, at least three things were apparent. The first was that the system would need to get faster—an imperative that would be solved in part through electronic switching systems and touch-tone phones. Second, the system would need to send more information digitally. Soon, Bell Labs engineers would put into place a system known as T-1 that used the pulse code modulation technique that Shannon and Pierce had long ago seen as the future. Instead of waves, transmission would consist of modulating voice signals transformed into on/off pulses that were effectively the same as the strings of 1s and 0s that guided the functions of computers. “The speech in each telephone channel,” Fisk said of PCM, “is sampled at a rate of 8,000 times per second and coded signals describing each sample are transmitted to the receiving terminal
where the original speech is reconstructed.” It was in some ways the telecommunications equivalent of finely shredding a newspaper in one city, instantly sending those scraps of paper to another city, and then putting the sheets back together in such a way that no one could ever discern that the paper had once been sliced apart.

The third truth about the future was that the system would become more congested. Traffic— comprising voices, as phone subscriptions and calls continued to increase; data, as computers began conversing with one another over the phone wires; and video, as television and Picturephone devices became increasingly popular—would lead to overwhelming floods of information. How to accommodate it all? ESS would help. But ESS could only switch information and suggest a path, like a highly skilled traffic cop; you still needed to build pathways that were broad enough to
transmit
everything. A half-century-old trend suggested where those pathways might be found. “Historically,” Fisk remarked, “the progress of radio and wire communications has required the use of ever higher and higher frequencies.”
¹⁰

To the engineers at Bell Labs, the implications of this statement were fairly clear. All forms of electronic communication use electromagnetic waves. And all electromagnetic waves have a place, classified by their length, on the electromagnetic spectrum. On one end are long waves—signals like the ones broadcast from huge antennas that project songs onto AM and FM radio stations. These undulating waves might measure several meters, or even hundreds of meters. Next come shorter waves whose lengths might only be measured in centimeters or millimeters. These wavelengths are commonly used for TV signals and radar. Generally speaking, the shorter the wavelength, the higher its frequency, and the more information it can carry.

By the early 1960s, Bell Labs executives had concluded that millimeter waves would serve as the communications medium of the future. The idea at Bell Labs was to send information through such waves not by wires or broadcast towers but by means of the circular waveguide, which had been developed down in Holmdel. “A specially designed hollow pipe,” as Fisk defined it, the waveguide was just a few inches in diameter,
and lined inside with a special material that would allow it to carry very high-frequency millimeter radio wave signals. The waveguide pipe would in effect do the same thing as an intercity phone cable—known as a trunk line—but with far more capacity. Indeed, each pipe would likely carry hundreds of thousands of calls at a time.

Labs engineers had looked beyond the current waveguide and the millimeter waves it carried to even shorter infrared and visible light waves. These waves are so tiny that they must be measured in arcane units known as angstroms. In a single millimeter, there are 10,000,000 angstroms. By 1960, the Bell engineers believed that within a few decades it might be possible to send data over such wavelengths—in other words, to send data through light itself. If they could figure out how to do that, the system would be able to transmit an unimaginably huge amount of information.

D
IRECTLY OVERSEEING
B
ELL
L
ABS’
vast plans for the future were two of Jim Fisk’s deputies, Julius Molnar and William Baker. Molnar, the Picturephone’s primary champion, believed that by the year 2000, “Picturephone will be the primary mode by which people will be communicating with one another.”
¹¹
Molnar oversaw the numerous development projects at the Labs—the digital transmission lines, for instance, as well as the new electronic switching centers—while serving as Fisk’s executive vice president. He was “running the show,” as one colleague puts it, much in the way Mervin Kelly did during Oliver Buckley’s presidential tenure. A tall man with a friendly face, sparse hair, and pronounced bushy eyebrows, Molnar had been trained as a physicist at MIT before moving up through the Bell Labs ranks. He was legendary for the precision of his thinking, but also for his confidence. “He was a powerhouse,” recalls Chuck Elmendorf, John Pierce’s old Caltech friend, who was a friend of Molnar’s as well. “Julius was extremely bright, extremely competent. But the thing about him was that he
exuded
power.”

Indeed, those who knew Molnar believed that he knew more about the phone network and systems engineering than any person alive. “I can
say, in front of any Bell Labs executive, without hurting anyone’s feelings, that Julius was the greatest executive at Bell Labs,” recalls Bill Fleckenstein, who worked under Molnar and eventually became the head of the Labs’ switching development division. “He knew more about what was going on at the Labs than any of several people put together. I liked Fisk very much. But the combination of Fisk, who didn’t know a lot about what was going on in the bowels of the place, and Julius, who knew
everything
about what was going on in the bowels of the place, was a good combination.”
¹²

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. When several oral historians sat down with Baker in the mid-1980s, they asked him about his graduate school work of nearly five decades before; he spent perhaps close to an hour recalling in great detail his teachers, textbooks, and lectures. Then he recalled how each of his classmates from the late 1930s had spent their careers, and whom they had spent them with. Then he recalled the ideas and research they had produced, and why some of it mattered and some did not. 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.

John Pierce—“so smart that he frightened people,” as Pierce’s friend Ed David says—was himself only frightened by his boss Bill Baker.
¹³
Baker was neither imposing nor aggressive; he was six feet tall and about 150 pounds, wore oversized glasses, and carefully combed over his thinning hair. His broad and frequent smile contrasted with a formal and patrician manner. He favored high-collared shirts, his tie always neatly knotted, yet his sense of fashion bowed to an extreme practicality. It was as if the Great Depression had made on him a permanent mark. He wore suits until they frayed and drove an ancient Buick, much to the surprise of some of his fellow executives who parked, in designated spaces, alongside him. When the Buick broke down, as it often did, he rode the bus.

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.”

When Baker didn’t want to answer a question, he would
appear
to answer, talking in circles, always using five words where one might do, and fogging a room with a nearly impenetrable rhetorical confusion. “Every month there was a Bill Baker meeting,” recalls Henry Pollak, the director of the math department. All of Bell Labs’ directors and executive directors of research—between fifteen and twenty people—would converge at a Murray Hill conference room to talk about their most interesting and most current research results. The Bill Baker meeting would begin in the morning and sometimes last through the afternoon if necessary. Baker’s views on these results helped determine what kind of research Bell Labs would continue to fund. Invariably, after Baker had left the conference room and wandered off to some other pressing matter he would never explain or reveal, the men would regroup and try to decipher their boss’s rhetoric.

These were among the smartest men in the world, but they could
never cut through Baker’s verbiage. “What the hell did Baker say?” they would ask one another. “What the hell did Baker
mean
?”
¹⁴

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.”
¹⁵
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.”
¹⁶

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. Also, it revealed how nimble
Baker’s mind really was. “A very small number of times in my life I’ve been in the presence of somebody who didn’t necessarily answer the question I asked. They answered the question I should have asked,” Pollak says. “And Bill Baker was one of those people. And there are other people who just build a mystique and give the impression of a mystique around them. And Bill had that, too.”

His mystique, perhaps even more than his intelligence, separated Baker from his colleagues. “Nobody knows what I do,” he would sometimes say to his son. This was correct. And nobody really knew who he was.