The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (17 page)

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.

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.
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“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. Hadn’t Bardeen been out of luck in finding an office, for instance, and then just happened to camp out in Brattain’s laboratory? Another example: Around the time Kelly was giving his speech to the phone company executives, a metallurgist named Bill Pfann was mulling over how to raise the purity of germanium to improve it further for transistor production. Pfann had returned to his office after lunch—“I put my feet on my desk and tilted my chair back to the window sill for a short nap, a habit then well established,” he recalled. He had scarcely dozed off when he suddenly awoke with a solution. “I brought the chair down with a clack I still remember,” he said.
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Pfann envisioned passing a molten zone—a coil of metal, in effect, creating a superheated ring—along the length of a rod of germanium; as the ring moved, it would strafe the impurities out of the germanium.

Kelly would eventually tell people that Pfann’s idea—it was called “zone refining,” and was an ingenious adaptation of a technique metallurgists had used on other materials—ranked as one of the most important inventions of the past twenty-five years. Kelly didn’t tell people it resulted from a man sleeping on the job. The process allowed the Labs’ metallurgists to fabricate the purest materials in the history of the world—germanium that had perhaps one atom of impurity among 100 million atoms.
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If that was too hard to envision, the Labs executives had a handy analogy to make it even more clear. The purity of the materials produced at Bell Labs, beginning in the early 1950s, was akin to a pinch of salt sprinkled amid a thirty-eight-car freight train carrying in its boxcars nothing else but sugar.

I
t 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. The tiny device, its three wires peeking out, was sitting on the desk of Bill Shockley one day when a guest stopped in the midst of their conversation and asked what it was. “It’s a solid-state amplifier,” Shockley told his visitor. It worked like a vacuum tube, he added.
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The visitor, a rail-thin mathematician in his early thirties who was known at Bell Labs as something of a loner, listened closely. He had a gaunt face and clear gray eyes; often he gave others the impression, always unspoken, that he was amused by whatever was being said. Very few things impressed him. But he would later explain that he immediately saw the import of what Shockley was saying. It mattered little that he was looking at the transistor in its earliest incarnation, before it was manufactured, before it even had a name.

At that point in time, employees at Bell Labs were informed of the secret device on a need-to-know basis. They were taken aside and briefed on the matter only if they were working with the metallurgical team on
the purification of germanium, for instance, or if they had been drafted to work on the transistor’s development and mass production with Jack Morton. 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. Almost anyone who spent time with the quiet, courteous Shannon, going back at least a decade, seemed to walk away with a similar impression. 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.
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“He is shy, personally likable, and a man who should be handled with great care.”
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Bush’s assessment might have raised some questions—namely, why handle Shannon with great care? His thinness (five foot ten and 135 pounds) notwithstanding, it wasn’t a question of physical fragility: Shannon was athletic and energetic, never more so than when he was setting up machinery or ripping apart old electronic equipment to salvage parts for some kind of contraption he was building. Rather, it seemed to Bush and a handful of mathematicians who encountered Shannon in the late 1930s that he mightn’t be just another exceedingly bright graduate student. He was something else entirely. One professor at MIT, informed in the late 1930s that young Shannon was taking piloting lessons, considered intervening so the scientific community wouldn’t risk losing him prematurely in an air crash.
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There was, in other words, a quiet accord among the professors at MIT: People like Shannon come along so rarely that they must be protected.

At the University of Michigan and at MIT he had studied both mathematics and electrical engineering, and it wasn’t easy to say precisely where his genius resided. Some things about him actually suggested little in the way of conventional brilliance. When confronted with ordinary number problems—18 × 27, for instance—Shannon would work them out not in his head but on a blackboard.
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He wasn’t much for details;
sometimes he would solve problems in a way that showed surprising intuition but a mathematical approach that some colleagues found unsatisfactory or lacking in rigor. Above all, he almost seemed more interested in doing work with his hands than with his mind. He’d originally come east from his home state of Michigan because he had found a job listing by chance at the University of Michigan, where he was finishing his undergraduate degree. “There was this little postcard on the wall,” Shannon later recalled, “saying that M.I.T. was looking for somebody to run the differential analyzer, a machine which Vannevar Bush had built to solve differential equations.”
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He applied for the job and got it.

The analyzer was an early “analog” computer that took up an entire room and required a crew of several operators. Yet it was a great leap ahead of any previous calculating machine; it could solve complex mathematical problems with revolutionary speed. The machine had a circuit of electronic switches that controlled sets of rods, pulleys, gears, and spinning disks, which assistants like Shannon had to constantly fiddle with. In a sense Shannon was a computer programmer: He would adjust the machine’s rods and gears to correspond with the values in a numerical problem. The analyzer, set in motion, would then spit out the answer to equations not through a screen or a printout but with a mechanical pen on a sheet of graph paper.

At MIT, Shannon fell in love with his machine. And as he began working with the analyzer, he became especially intrigued by the electromechanical relays in its control circuit. These were magnetic switches that clicked open or closed when a current was applied or cut off. The open or closed position of the relays could stand in for a yes or no answer to a question. Or a string of relays could branch out in one logical direction or another, whereby the positions (open or closed) each stood for “AND” or “OR.” One could thereby answer a complicated problem or execute a complicated set of commands. Shannon began to perceive a new way to think about the design and function of such circuits. He saw that one could make sense of them through an obscure branch of mathematics based on 0s and 1s—what was known as Boolean algebra.

In the summer of 1937, Shannon left Cambridge for a few months to work at the Bell Labs office on West Street, where he continued to think about how relays, switching, and circuits fit into this notion. His choice of summer jobs was fortuitous: At the time, there was no place in the world better suited for studying electrical relays, which formed the switching backbone of the entire Bell System. With Vannevar Bush’s endorsement, Shannon wrote up his insights upon his return to MIT. “I believed it was a classic, a comment which I very seldom make,” Bush said of Shannon’s thesis. But such praise, while unusual for Bush, soon seemed modest in comparison to the wider reception of Shannon’s work. His paper demonstrated that designing logic circuits for a computer could be an efficient mathematical endeavor rather than a painstaking art. In 1939, the work won him a distinguished prize from an engineering society. “I was so surprised and pleased to receive the letter announcing the award,” he wrote to Bush, “that I nearly fainted!”
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Like so many of his future colleagues at Bell Labs, Shannon had grown up in the Midwest—in tiny Gaylord, Michigan, population 3,000, in the state’s northern tip, where by Shannon’s own account it was “small enough that if you walked a couple of blocks, you’d be in the countryside.”
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Some of the buildings in Gaylord’s modest downtown were built and owned by Shannon’s father, a businessman and probate court judge; his mother was a principal of the town’s high school. Gaylord’s closest big cities, Grand Rapids and Detroit, were more than 150 miles to the south. Shannon’s small-town innocence—
I nearly fainted!
—was unquestionably authentic. But so, too, was his lack of professional direction. 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.
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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.

.   .   .   

V
ANNEVAR
B
USH WAS
just then moving from Cambridge to Washington to assume the presidency of the Carnegie Institution—at the time the premier private endowment in the United States for funding scientific research. Soon Bush would also begin lobbying President Franklin D. Roosevelt, successfully, to take charge of the United States’ immense research and development efforts for World War II, effectively making him the most powerful scientist in the country. His stature happened to match his own healthy self-regard. Bush delighted in connecting students and friends to one another within his large social and professional web. What’s more, inquiries such as Shannon’s were useful in satisfying Bush’s broad scientific curiosity. If Bush was interested in genetics, for instance, as he told Shannon he was, then Shannon could be a proxy: The young man might consider delving into the subject of human genes, and find a way to apply his mathematical skills to an analysis. There happened to be a laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, New York—an affiliate of the Carnegie Institution, no less—where Bush suggested Shannon might work on his PhD research. Shannon agreed. “I had a very enjoyable summer working on my genetic algebra under Dr. Burks at Cold Spring Harbor and want to thank you for making it possible,” he wrote to Bush a few months after. “The work came along very well and has been accepted here at Tech as a Ph.D. Thesis.”
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This burst of professional success coincided with a change in his personal life. He had made overtures to an undergraduate from Radcliffe named Norma Levor, whom he’d met at a party in the MIT dorms. “He stood on the doorstep of his room and the living room,” she recalls. “He didn’t come in. Kind of shy. Didn’t want to get into that. I threw popcorn on him. And he said, do you want to hear some great music?” A devoted clarinet player, Shannon had a large collection in his room of jazz and Dixieland records. He and Norma quickly fell in together. At Shannon’s suggestion, they made love one evening—“he wooed me,” Norma says—in the differential analyzer room, to which Shannon had a
key. She thought that Claude, so thin, so angular, looked “Christ-like.” They married in January 1940.
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That summer, Shannon took a temporary job at Bell Labs and the two moved to an apartment on Bank Street in Greenwich Village. “I am not at all sure that that sort of work would appeal to me,” he had worried to Bush, “for there is bound to be some restraint in an industrial organization as to [the] type of research pursued.”
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But he found himself pleased with the arrangement—from his apartment he could walk to the Labs’ offices at 463 West Street in the morning and to the local jazz clubs every night. Working in the mathematical research department, moreover, turned out far more pleasant than he imagined. Mostly he was considering the design of relay circuits, which related directly to the work he had done at MIT.