The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (35 page)

“I
N THE SPRING OF 1913
,” Bill Baker’s mother, Helen, wrote about her family, “my husband and I yielded to that mysterious back-to-the-land urge and bought a farm.” In fact they had left New York City and bought four hundred acres, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland on the Chester River where it empties into the Chesapeake. The area, known as Quaker Neck, was located just south of the small town of Chestertown; it was so rural and remote that it was hard to find on road maps. The Baker house was an old brick colonial, built in 1768 by a Dutch immigrant named Edward Cornelius Comegys. Bill, an only child, attended a one-room schoolhouse. It was Helen’s idea that the family farm would raise turkeys, a potentially lucrative endeavor with which her son would help nearly every hour that he wasn’t at school or studying. (Mother and son were inseparable until her death, writing each other sometimes twice a day when they were apart.) In the early 1920s, turkeys were actually rare at the American dinner table. “Turkey prices were so high,” Helen Baker explained, “that few other than the rich were able to have more than the two proverbial holiday turkeys, at Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
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A bright woman with an untrained but scientific cast of mind, Helen Baker decided she would be an innovator. She would make turkeys plentiful in America as well as cheap. Though he almost never spoke of his childhood, Baker would later remark, “My mother in particular laid the basis for the broiler industry.”
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Baker boasted that her methods led to the techniques later used at industrial turkey producers like Perdue and Butterball.

From the start, raising the birds was difficult. Turkey production had suffered in the United States because the flocks were frequently stricken with parasitic diseases.
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Helen Baker began working with pathologists at Harvard and at Merck, the New Jersey–based drug company, to fashion a medical treatment to prevent the illnesses. Before he became a teenager, Bill Baker was expert in inserting a three-foot-long catheter containing a parasite-destroying iodine treatment down the throat of a writhing bird. During the immunization season, he later recalled, “it had to be done bird by bird for thousands of them.”
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The farm was an endless workday—challenges of incubation, breeding, housing, feedings—which only yielded to the Bakers’ tireless and deliberate work after a decade. By the early 1930s, the flock on Quaker Neck numbered about a thousand, and Helen, who had now renamed her breed Baker’s Bronze Beauties, had spread her theories on turkey domestication through informal gatherings all over Maryland.

Other Bell Labs scientists would attribute their laboratory aptitude to their youthful efforts to take apart car engines or rebuild radios. But in helping Helen Baker pursue the perfect turkey feed, her son had found a crude but effective introduction to the precision of chemistry. They had spent years working out the correct recipe: “40 pounds ground whole wheat, 20 pounds ground whole oats, 15 pounds whole alfalfa, 25 pounds meat scraps.” Then they added three pounds of fine charcoal, one pound ground-up shells, and one pound salt.
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Baker attended college near his home in Maryland, at tiny Washington College in Chestertown, before going on to graduate school at Princeton, where he finished a PhD in chemistry in the spring of 1939. By that fall, he had begun his job at Bell Labs. His parents sold the turkey farm and moved to New Jersey to be near him. Even as a young chemist, he retained a farm boy’s habits. Rising early, he would make notes in his journal of the weather and any unusual birds he had spotted the day before. And then, after working hard all day at the Labs, he would return home to do his chores—mow the lawn, sweep the cellar, repair the screen door.

Jim Fisk and Baker had met each other at the very start of their careers.
In early October 1939, just after they arrived at the West Street offices, they’d been seated next to each other in the orientation photo for new employees, an incoming class that at that time numbered only a few dozen. Mervin Kelly had hired both of them. But from the beginning of his career, Baker viewed the world somewhat differently than Fisk. Baker, after all, was not a physicist but a chemist—someone who perceived that progress, the means of moving science and technology forward, was really the struggle to understand the composition of materials and fashion new and better ones whenever possible. Materials, he would later say, represented “the grand alliance of engineering and science.”
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To Baker, chemistry was the discipline that made a global communications network feasible. He would often cite examples. By substituting the lead sheathing on telephone cables with a synthetic plastic created by Bell chemists, the Bell System saved “more than the total research budget of Bell Labs for the decade in which the innovation was worked out.”
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At one point Baker commissioned a study on the switch to plastic sheathing to satisfy his curiosity. The study concluded that the changeover saved the company about $2.5 billion. It also determined that if phone engineers had continued to sheathe telephone cable with lead, “it would require 80 percent of the total lead produced in the U.S.”
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Baker’s arrival at the Labs in the late 1930s roughly coincided with the arrival of its future intellectual stars—Shockley, Shannon, Pierce, and Fisk, among others—the men who were sometimes referred to by their colleagues as the Young Turks. As Baker later told the
New Yorker
, the Young Turks “came to Bell with an interest in attacking the hard, fundamental questions of science—something that not many people thought could be done in a place like this.” In those days, Baker explained, it was assumed that such studies were done at the world’s great universities. But Shockley and Pierce used Bell Labs’ resources to create “a new kind of science—one that was ‘deep’ but at the same time closely coupled with human affairs.” In Baker’s view, the Young Turks succeeded for the first time in bridging the gap between the best science of the academy and the important applications that a modern society needed.
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Baker, too, was a Young Turk. Part of his early fame went back to Bell
Labs’ involvement in the war effort, just after Pearl Harbor, when the supply lines of natural rubber to the United States were blocked. “The Germans were supposed to have had synthetic rubber,” Baker recalled some years later, “which was a frightening hypothesis if true because we didn’t.” Without rubber, it would be difficult to carry on mechanized warfare—no tanks, no jeeps, no aircraft. “You couldn’t have a lot of those things without rubber,” he said, “and our domestic economy would have collapsed as well.” Government officials asked Baker and some other Bell Labs chemists to travel to Akron, Ohio, in December 1942 and meet at the city’s Mayflower Hotel with a number of other industrial scientists. The men in Akron—then the center of the U.S. rubber industry and the headquarters of Goodyear and Firestone—agreed to use various promising rubberlike compounds and in two years created a vast new industry that could produce hundreds of thousands of tons of a durable, synthetic rubber.
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Baker succeeded spectacularly at his job of overseeing scientific planning and quality control: The scientists met all their production goals. He also discovered a synthetic polymer known as “micro-gel” that proved crucial to improving the manufacturing process for the synthetic rubber. In the years after the war, his rise at Bell Labs was meteoric. In 1953, when he was thirty-eight years old,
Fortune
magazine put Baker on its list of the “Ten Top Young Scientists in U.S. Industry.” Another man on the list was Baker’s colleague Claude Shannon, also thirty-eight at the time. Two years later, Kelly called Baker into his office and promoted him to vice president of Bell Labs in charge of research.

As they rose to influence, the web of relationships among the Young Turks was hard to discern. There was little doubt that Baker and Fisk, the most accomplished administrators in the group, admired each other; their lengthy private memos to each other from the 1950s attest to a mutual respect and deep trust. Baker and his research deputy John Pierce were even closer, though their temperaments differed greatly: Pierce was antic and impatient, whereas Baker was poised and diplomatic. The two nevertheless discovered that they were companionable. “Both were raised as only children,” Mike Noll, who worked with them, points out. “And both had doting, intelligent mothers.” Pierce’s private memos to Baker, technical
notes scribbled on small sheets of paper during the 1950s and 1960s, along with Baker’s letters to Pierce in the 1970s, suggest a mutual dependency.
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Pierce, in proposing why some research ideas could prove important, helped Baker perceive the future; Baker, in turn, ever enthusiastic about new knowledge and seeing Pierce as a tireless instigator of ideas, was willing to push for Pierce-driven efforts such as the Echo satellite or computer music. In Baker’s yearly reviews of Pierce—always suggesting the maximum raise possible—he characterized Pierce as a vital asset to Bell Labs, a scientist of international renown.
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Baker’s view of Shannon, meanwhile, approached awe. He regarded Shannon as the single individual who had laid down the theoretical basis for the information age. “On the tenth anniversary of the transistor,” Baker recalled to an interviewer in the mid-1980s, “we had a big event here in 1958 or so, and we were all speaking in the [Murray Hill] auditorium. They were saying how [the transistor] would endure in history forever, and I said, ‘Yes, and after it’s forgotten in a few thousand years, communication theory will still be with us.’” The comment was telling. The public Bill Baker smiled often and doused his audience in a downpour of oratory and flattery. The private Bill Baker was not always so diplomatic. When Bill Shockley won the Nobel Prize, for instance, Baker sent to him in California a congratulatory telegram more verbose and effusive than any other Shockley received—wishing him “warmest felicitations” on his distinction. “We think with pride and honor of the part your gifted mind has played in making science at large, and communications science particularly, stand where they do.”
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But in May 1957, when Mervin Kelly sent Baker an advance copy of Shockley’s actual Nobel speech, Baker took Shockley’s grab for credit as an affront. “It is the expected egocentric and rambling discourse that unfortunately signifies Bill’s preoccupations these days,” Baker told Kelly. In a private letter to Jim Fisk a few years later, Baker seemed to enjoy passing on the gossip about the collapse of Shockley’s transistor business on the West Coast. “You may know the Shockley saga has come full cycle in which he has been appointed the Alexander M. Poniatoff professor of engineering science at Stanford,” Baker wrote. The new owners of Shockley’s transistor
shop had now “snatched
all
production and development operations away from the Shockley Laboratory in order to consolidate them at Waltham, Massachusetts. Shockley is identified as remaining a consultant to the research activities in the Shockley Laboratory, but, of course, I do not know what will come further in connection with this money loser.”
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D
ESPITE
B
AKER’S APPARENT SOCIABILITY
, no one at the Labs ever socialized with him. Though he served on many corporate and academic boards, his colleagues in those rarefied circles were no closer to him. “I talked to him on the phone many times,” remarked a fellow Rockefeller Institute board member, Fred Seitz—the same Fred Seitz who had once shared a rollicking drive across the country from California with Bill Shockley as the two headed to graduate school in the East. But Seitz never went to Baker’s house. “He kept his life very private,” Seitz added.
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More than three decades after a career during which he spent years working closely with Baker as his second in command at Bell Labs, Ian Ross would still wonder: How did Baker actually fill his days? “I never really knew what he did,” Ross remarks.

Often Baker went to Washington, D.C. He was first drawn toward government work by Oliver Buckley, the Bell Labs president who preceded Mervin Kelly. After Kelly had refused the post of science advisor to Truman, it was offered to Buckley, who accepted. “I was invited to accompany [Buckley] to Washington,” Baker later explained, “but felt that the impending emergence of the solid-state electronics-transistor era was so preemptive that I should stick with it here. The transistor’s discovery in 1948 rather confirmed that view.”
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Nevertheless, when he became vice president of research at Bell Labs a few years later, Baker began forging contacts with some of Washington’s wise men of science—Lee DuBridge, for instance, who succeeded Buckley as Truman’s science advisor, and James Killian, the president of MIT.

By that point, it seemed a given that presidents and vice presidents of Bell Labs would contribute their time and opinions to the government’s cold war intelligence endeavors. Jim Fisk, following closely in the
footsteps of Jewett, Kelly, and Buckley, had already been pulled into Washington affairs through his earlier work on the Atomic Energy Commission. In the mid-1950s, Fisk was working with a technology advisory group to President Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1956, Fisk responded to Eisenhower’s request to set up a separate commission to figure out how to gather better information about the Soviet Union by suggesting Baker for the assignment. “There was the presumption that the Soviets had become undecipherable, that we would not have enough warning to respond defensively to their threats,” Baker recalled.
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The result was the Ad Hoc Task Force for the Application of Communications Analysis for National and International Security, otherwise known as the Baker Committee. The committee’s conclusions would be directed to the then five-year-old National Security Agency, a new unit within the Department of Defense charged with securing the country’s information networks and deciphering foreign intelligence. NSA’s very existence was then considered a national secret. So Baker was organizing a committee that did not officially exist to write a top secret report about how to improve an organization that didn’t officially exist either.