The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (29 page)

In November 1944 Pierce traveled to England, on a trip sponsored jointly by Bell Labs and the U.S. Navy. Over the course of an exhausting four-week stretch he visited twenty different British industrial labs and
government research installations. Mostly he was trying to assess for the United States the state of the art of tube development in England.
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In the midst of the trip he sought out Kompfner. He was searching out new technologies, not new friendships, but here he encountered a man who was perhaps closer to himself in sensibility, quickness, and intelligence than anyone else he would ever meet. Kompfner made an indelible impression on everyone. He had begun his career as a trained architect and had drifted toward physics and inventing only because he found it interesting. He was less eccentric than Pierce, and more worldly. Buffed with a European polish, Kompfner was blessed with an uncommon wit and elegance. He was a world-class storyteller and a superb skier. But like Pierce, he could be blunt and dismissive of ideas or people he considered ignorant. He always spoke his mind to Pierce, who would in time seek Kompfner’s advice on almost all of his ideas.

Pierce later liked to say that “Rudi invented the traveling wave tube and I discovered it”—a quip Kompfner enjoyed and never disputed. Pierce brought Kompfner’s design back to Bell Labs and started working on a prototype. At the unveiling of the device to the press in 1946, the traveling wave tube was hailed as an invention that could make possible a coast-to-coast network “over which 10,000 telephone conversations may go simultaneously, or all the television programs needed for all the video stations likely to be operating in this country in years to come.” The
New York Times
report quoted an unattributed source at Bell Labs, quite possibly Pierce, noting that perhaps for the first time, “radio men will have created a device that eventually may provide the means of setting up more channels for long-distance communications than they will know what to do with.”
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In fact, the new tube wasn’t quite ready for that. And as it turned out, Pierce—along with a team of engineers and scientists that included Kompfner, who joined Bell Labs in 1951—spent the next thirteen years investigating, testing, and perfecting various kinds of traveling wave tubes. Pierce had been correct in some respects about the traveling wave tube’s potential. But as he came to understand, inventions don’t necessarily
evolve into the innovations one might at first foresee. 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.”
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W
E 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. This work was in addition to his lengthy technical memoranda (distributed internally at Bell Labs) and his papers (published in various engineering journals) describing his vacuum tube research. 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.
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Pierce would later describe himself as a “writerholic,” and indeed his literary output was prodigious. It was also done in haste. “I am rather alarmed at your habit of sending finished articles before we have had a chance to discuss them,” an editor at
Scientific American
told him in 1949.
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Manuscripts were frequently rejected by publishers and, in the case of Pierce’s nonfiction work, riddled with minor errors.
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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. There were hundreds. His factual mistakes, however, were not something he worried much about. In 1950 he wrote a book on traveling wave tubes, pouring “everything I knew about the subject” into the text. He made many small
errors, he later conceded, but had gotten the gist of things right. And that was what he thought most important. With what seemed like amusement, he noted that the corrections amounted to a stack of papers a quarter of an inch thick. “There was,” he acknowledged, “about one correction for every page of the book.”
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Pierce’s closest friends recognized that his wry, skeptical, and crusty exterior concealed the warm inner core of a romantic. Sometimes a person visiting Pierce in his office would find him reading poetry; sometimes they would find him reading poetry in another language. A devotee of verse—in college he had organized a group of students and then convinced a professor to read all of
Paradise Lost
to them aloud—he often tried to write poems, usually with stilted and unsuccessful results. His science fiction, meanwhile, was imaginative and promising, and something he worked on far more diligently. He and Shannon often discussed their favorite stories and traded books. Pierce often admitted that he perceived in writing and publishing—and in writers themselves—a kind of glamour. In fact, while he was in England in 1944 visiting Rudi Kompfner, he decided in London to look up one of his literary idols, the author H. G. Wells. Pierce didn’t know Wells, or anybody who knew him. But he explained in a note to the author that he and his traveling companion, an accomplished Bell Labs engineer named Homer Hagstrum, were important American scientists visiting London—at the time an exaggeration—and would like to meet. Wells invited the two for tea in his house, and Pierce and Hagstrum complied.

It was a dreary November afternoon, thick with London fog. “He sort of appeared at the door, in a huge dressing gown, with the collar turned up around the neck,” Pierce wrote in notes he jotted down just after the meeting. Wells was sick, with a bad cough, but he was hospitable. The men sat down in the dining room, at a large table laid with doilies, and a tea service arrived by dumbwaiter. Pierce jumped up to pour the tea, only to realize that “I didn’t know how to go about it.” Did one put the milk in first, or the tea? Wells gave him instructions, and the men settled down to eat toast and cakes and cucumber sandwiches. Pierce let Wells
know that one of his science fiction concepts—an atomic bomb—was coming true: America was building one. He had deduced this from the way most of the country’s good physicists were disappearing and being directed to secret laboratories around the country. Pierce told Wells that he and his fellow engineers joked that promising scientists had been “body snatched.” But Wells was largely uninterested in what Pierce was saying. He wanted to talk about politics—among other things, Churchill, Roosevelt, and race in America.
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Pierce was happy to talk about whatever Wells preferred. Afterward, when Pierce and Hagstrum left the house and headed home in the fog, he concluded that he was “feeling rather bad about the whole imposition.” Wells had struck him as being both old and tired.
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The meeting didn’t diminish Pierce’s desire to write, however. In the 1930s and 1940s, Karl Darrow, a gifted writer and explainer employed by Bell Labs, had translated in various journals the new ideas of quantum mechanics for a younger generation of physicists. In many respects, Pierce picked up in the 1950s where Darrow left off, but instead of technical journals his venue was books and magazines for a general audience. Often Pierce’s books on technology weren’t nearly as accessible as he imagined; frequently they were disorganized and dense with mathematics. Nevertheless, in addition to his book on traveling wave tubes, he wrote general-interest books, some of them fairly successful, about cathode-ray tubes, electromagnetic waves, acoustics, communications infrastructure, information theory, and transistors. 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.

He thought of something else, though. In 1952, Pierce wrote a nonfiction essay for
Astounding Science Fiction
entitled “Don’t Write: Telegraph.” The piece explored the idea of sending messages to and from the moon. Pierce later noted, “What struck me then was how much easier it would be to communicate between the moon and the earth than across the United States—if only one could put the apparatus in place.” Microwaves travel vast distances in straight lines, which is ideal in space. Here
on earth, however, they can’t follow the curvature of the planet. To send microwave signals across the United States, therefore, as the phone company was now doing with its nationwide system of relay towers, required stations every thirty miles or so. “The truth,” Pierce wrote, “is that you could order equipment for an Earth-Moon link from any of several manufacturers.”

Slowly, the idea evolved in his mind. 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. A terrestrial signal could be directed toward the orbiting satellite in space; the satellite, much like a mirror, could in turn direct the signal to another part of the globe. Pierce didn’t consider himself the inventor of this idea; it was, he would later say, “in the air.” 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. Clarke never developed the idea any further and quickly lost interest in it. “There seemed nothing more that could be said until technical developments had validated (or invalidated) the basic concept,” he later wrote. In Pierce’s talk, however, he made some detailed calculations about satellites. He concluded that orbiting relays might not be financially viable over land; in the United States, the Bell System already had an intricate system of coaxial cables and microwave links. The oceans were a different story. The new cable that Bell Labs was planning for the Atlantic crossing in 1954 would carry only thirty-six telephone channels at tremendous expense and tremendous risk of mechanical failure. A satellite could satisfy the need for more connections without laying more cable.

One academic in the audience that day in Princeton suggested to Pierce that he publish his talk, which he soon did in the journal
Jet Propulsion.
“But what could be done about satellite communications in a practical way?” Pierce wondered. “At the time, nothing.” He questioned whether he had fallen into a trap of speculation, something a self-styled pragmatist
like Pierce despised. There were no satellites yet of any kind, and there were apparently no rockets capable of launching such devices. It was doubtful, moreover, whether the proper technology even existed yet to operate a useful communications satellite. As Pierce often observed ruefully, “We do what we can, not what we think we should or what we want to do.”

I
deas 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.”
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Flexner was speaking of the biological sciences; he had seen how the individual fruits of research might have little use—and little clarity—but could accrue over time to create a grand idea. The same might be said about any branch of the sciences, or about many of the large projects in the planning stages at Bell Labs. The transatlantic cable, for instance, which had been on the drawing boards for several decades until a variety of developments made it technologically feasible as well as cost-effective, was a good example. For communications satellites, the main idea had come too early. But was Pierce decades early, or just a few years?

Already, by the time he had given his talk in Princeton, some of the elements needed to create a satellite were available. The transistor—rugged and miserly in its power requirements—was in wide production. It could undoubtedly be useful in an orbiting satellite, Pierce realized. The traveling wave tube, now moving out of its development stage, could likewise be valuable, since it could amplify a multitude of telephone or
television channels simultaneously. Much of the challenge in creating satellite communications lay not in the satellites themselves but in building an adequate system for transmitting and receiving signals from the ground, as well as a system for tracking the satellite as it moved across the sky. In this regard, a third existing technology appeared vital. It was the horn antenna, which had been designed by Bell Labs’ Harald Friis at the rural Holmdel lab in southern New Jersey. Horn antennas were already a crucial component in microwave towers across the country: They allowed for the reception of signals in a focused manner that greatly reduced surrounding noise and interference. There was no reason to think they couldn’t be adapted for satellite communications.

By late 1956, about two years after Pierce’s talk at Princeton, some other necessary elements for his idea had sprung into existence. Pierce realized that the batteries in an orbiting satellite would wear out unless the satellite could tap into a dependable and inexhaustible power source. Bell Labs’ silicon solar cell had been celebrated until the silicon strips had proven too expensive and too inefficient for use in rural phone installations. But satellites seemed to be the perfect problem for this solution. Since there was no other way to recharge a satellite’s batteries in space, the expense or inefficiency of solar cells was no hindrance.