The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (16 page)

John Bardeen, the most careful of men, referred to his transistor work as a “discovery” of “transistor action”; he and Brattain had effectively observed in their experiment how a current applied to a slightly impure slice of germanium could hasten the movement of microscopic holes inside and thus amplify a signal. An invention, by contrast, usually refers to a work of engineering that may use a new scientific discovery—or, as is sometimes the case, long-existing ones—in novel ways. Shockley considered the transistor device, in its various forms (both point-contact and junction, for instance), to be an invention. If there was any doubt, he asserted, the legal protections ultimately awarded to these devices verified their status. The U.S. patent office wasn’t in the business of licensing discoveries, only inventions.

To those with an open mind, of course, the transistor could be considered a breakthrough of both science and engineering—in effect both a discovery and an invention. What seemed fair to say, though, was that the transistor was not yet an innovation.

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.
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And they began to fill a descriptive gap. 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.

The Labs executives were familiar with the difficulties ahead. Funding and resources necessary for the transistor’s innovation would not be a problem—being attached to the world’s biggest monopoly took care of that. Still, a product like the transistor could ultimately fail for technical reasons (if it proved unreliable) or for manufacturing reasons (if it proved difficult to reproduce consistently or cheaply). Also, it might be the case that there was no market for a new device: Why not continue to keep
using vacuum tubes if they remained cheaper and more dependable than point-contact transistors?

In the late 1940s, finding a market for the new device may have been the least of the Labs’ concerns. “If they could be made, they could be sold,” the technology historians Ernest Braun and Stuart Macdonald noted about the new transistor. “If nobody else bought them, certainly the vast Bell empire itself would form an adequate market.”
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Thus it was the technical and production hurdles that seemed most formidable. And for all its publicity, the new point-contact transistor was useless as a practical device. A wave of the hand or a spell of humidity could alter its performance; it was so delicate and unpredictable that it would sometimes cease working if someone slammed a door nearby. “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.”
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By Kelly’s orders, the transistor’s innovation involved a handoff from Shockley’s group in the research department to a team in the Labs’ much larger development department. The development expert who was chosen for this responsibility—a brilliant, bullying, hard-drinking engineer named Jack Morton—not coincidentally had the admiration of both Kelly and Shockley. Morton, then thirty-five years old, had arrived at Bell Labs, like so many others, from a small midwestern school in the mid-1930s. Morton remembered a meeting with Kelly, who called him into his office in the midsummer of 1948 to say, “Morton, I think you know something about transistors. Don’t you?” Morton summoned his courage and replied that he knew they were pretty important.

“No time to waste,” Kelly told him. “I’m going to Europe for the next month, Morton, and when I get back I’d like to see your recommendations as to how we should go about developing this thing. Goodbye.”
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Morton would eventually think more deeply about the innovative process than any Bell Labs scientist, with the possible exception of Kelly. In his view, innovation was not a simple action but “a total process” of interrelated parts. “It is not just the discovery of new phenomena, nor the
development of a new product or manufacturing technique, nor the creation of a new market,” he later wrote. “Rather, the process is all these things acting together in an integrated way toward a common industrial goal.”
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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.
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But these realizations would come together later. After hearing Kelly’s orders to produce a road map for transistor production, Morton spent the next twenty-nine days in a state of terror. On the thirtieth he settled on a development plan.

B
Y THE SUMMER OF 1949
, Morton’s team, in conjunction with the Labs’ metallurgists, had fabricated five thousand working germanium transistors. Many were given to the military or as complimentary samples to academics. Nearly a thousand were used at Bell Labs to study the properties of germanium. To Morton, the essential challenges in manufacturing the devices were “reliability,” “reproducibility,” and “designability.” He planned to set up a production line at a Western Electric plant in Pennsylvania, but before that could happen he had to improve the consistency of the germanium. One problem with the early devices was that the germanium was cut from a polycrystalline ingot. In this ingot, the multiple crystals created imperfections within the structure that compromised transistor performance. The ideal material to slice up for transistors would be a perfect single crystal, with all the atoms in the germanium arranged in symmetrical and uninterrupted order, like apple trees stretching hither and yon in an infinite orchard. The problem was that nature didn’t provide perfect single crystals.

In late 1949, the Bell Labs metallurgist Gordon Teal had an idea of how to make large single crystals of germanium in a device he designed that resembled a drill press. By dipping a tiny “seed” of pure germanium into a “melt” of the element, and then slowly, gently “pulling” it from the
melt, Teal believed he could fabricate a large and perfect crystal that could in turn be cut into pieces for better point-contact transistors. Teal’s bosses were skeptical, so he worked in secret on his process at Murray Hill, on borrowed equipment in a borrowed laboratory, from 5 p.m. in the afternoon until 3 a.m.
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Eventually his methods worked so well that Jack Morton gave Teal his full support. Perhaps more important, the advances in crystal pulling soon allowed Teal and his colleague Morgan Sparks to grow junction transistors for Shockley—the device Shockley had theoretically predicted several years before, beginning with his late-night scribbling in the Chicago hotel on New Year’s Eve. Shockley later acknowledged that the two materials scientists had provided “the essential missing ingredient” that made his idea possible.

By the summer of 1951, Jack Morton’s team had thus readied Bardeen and Brattain’s point-contact transistor for large-scale production. The manufacture of the device roughly coincided with Shockley’s demonstration of the first junction transistors at a public unveiling at the West Street auditorium. The newest invention, hailed as clearly superior to the point-contact transistor in terms of its efficiency and performance (it used only one-millionth of the power of a typical vacuum tube), was “a radically new type of transistor which has astonishing properties never before achieved in any amplifying device.”

Shockley, much to his delight, was now the public face of Bell Laboratories’ research as well as the personification of the three-year-old transistor age. His fabled research group that had given rise to the device—
one of the greatest research teams ever pulled together on a problem
, as Brattain had put it—had largely collapsed, however. John Bardeen, frustrated by Shockley’s muscular efforts to monopolize the Labs’ semiconductor research, had decided to leave for a professorship at the University of Illinois at Urbana. Walter Brattain, too, had made his displeasure with Shockley known.

One afternoon, Mervin Kelly invited Brattain over to his home in Short Hills to discuss the matter. They likely met in Kelly’s study, where he saw all his visitors—a large and stately room, clad in dark wood paneling, with a large fireplace and big windows that looked out over Kelly’s
backyard tulip gardens.
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A servant could be summoned through the push of a button on the floor. Brattain listed his frustrations with the Labs and with Shockley, whom Kelly depended on as a conduit for information. Some of Brattain’s complaints came as a surprise to Kelly, yet the boss swung back anyway with a powerful backhand. “He’s a tough customer,” Brattain would later recall with some respect. “I stated my case, and [he] pretty thoroughly knocked me down on every question I raised.” But when Brattain mentioned to Kelly that he knew precisely when Shockley invented the junction transistor, the tone changed. In veiled terms Brattain was suggesting to Kelly that he and Bardeen could somehow complicate the transistor patents based on the fact that their invention came well before Shockley’s, and “if we ever went on the stand in a patent fight” they could not lie about what they knew.
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Thereafter, Kelly made sure that Brattain was blessed with a nearly unfettered freedom at Bell Labs. Brattain was no longer involved in the transistor work, but he no longer had to report to Shockley, whom he now considered intolerable as a manager. Apparently, there was an S.O.B. in the solid-state group after all.

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OT LONG AFTER
the transistor’s unveiling at the West Street auditorium, the Labs began to spread its new invention around. 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. The top managers had already agreed that they were compelled to share and license the transistor device. The political logic—the appeasement of government regulators—was overwhelming. And an open-door policy had other advantages, too. Bell Labs’ breakthrough burnished its reputation as a national resource. For those doubting that the monopoly granted to AT&T, its parent company, would result in any large-scale scientific and public benefits, here was contravening proof.
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In the late 1940s, the Labs executives were simply content to pass out samples of the new device without explaining how they were made. Indeed,
as Kelly traipsed through northern Europe in the summer of 1948—the trip he took after telling Jack Morton he wanted to hear a production plan when he got back—he handed out transistors like a beneficent grandfather passing out gifts of hard candy.
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By September of that year, Oliver Buckley, the Labs’ president, was writing to Kelly, then staying at the Savoy Hotel in London, to say that the Labs would soon send out samples to academic and industrial scientists. “The plan,” Buckley wrote to his deputy, “is to make a gift of two Transistors put up in a nice little box marked as a gift from the Laboratories.”
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The invention hadn’t made a whit of difference yet in the machinery of the world, of course. From a public relations perspective, though, the little transistor was a godsend.

By the time Jack Morton had ironed out some of the production problems with the point-contact transistor in the early 1950s, the Labs was ready to move ahead in licensing the technology. 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. And in 1951 and 1952, the Labs began sponsoring multiday conventions at Murray Hill, attended by hundreds of scientists and engineers from around the world, who were interested in licensing transistor rights. At the conventions, Jack Morton gave the guests a brief overview of the transistor and Gerald Pearson followed with a brief tutorial on transistor theory. The next two days were given to in-depth presentations on different types of transistors and their applications. The cost for licensing the transistor technology was $25,000. A free exception was made for companies that wanted to use the devices for hearing aids. This was in deference to AT&T founder Alexander Graham Bell, who had spent much of his career working with the deaf.

“I
T IS THE BEGINNING
of a new era in telecommunications and no one can have quite the vision to see how big it is,” Mervin Kelly told an audience of telephone company executives in 1951. Speaking of the transistor, he
added that “no one can predict the rate of its impact.” Kelly admitted that he wouldn’t see its full effect before he retired from the Labs, but that “in the time I may live, certainly in 20 years,” it would transform the electronics industry and everyday life in a manner much more dramatic than the vacuum tube. The telecommunications systems of the future would be “more like the biological systems of man’s brain and nervous system.” The tiny transistor had reduced dimensions and power consumption “so far that we are going to get into a new economic area, particularly in switching and local transmission, and other places that we can’t even envision now.”
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It seemed to be some kind of extended human network he had in mind, hazy and fantastical and technologically sophisticated, one where communications whipped about the globe effortlessly and where everyone was potentially in contact with everyone else.