The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (37 page)

Kilby or Noyce could not have understood the full implications either—personal computers, portable phones, deep space exploration, all of the things that defined the kind of future that John Pierce would write about in his memos and essays. But in just a few years’ time, the integrated circuit would represent something new for Bell Labs: a moment when a hugely important advance in solid-state engineering, though built upon the scientific discoveries at the Labs, had occurred elsewhere. Such a development perhaps suggested that the landscape of competitiveness in American electronics, something that Mervin Kelly had written about in the closing days of World War II, was now very much a reality. At the very least, it proved that even the great technical minds at Bell Labs, Jack Morton especially, could misjudge the future. “We had all the elements
to make an integrated circuit,” Tanenbaum adds. “And all the processes—diffusion, photolithography—were developed at Bell Labs. But nobody had the foresight except Noyce and Kilby.”

I
N THE MID-1950S
, Bell Labs hired back Charles Townes—Charlie to everyone at Bell Labs—the inventor of the maser. Townes was still a professor at Columbia, but he now visited Murray Hill regularly as a paid consultant. He had first come to Bell Labs in 1939, on that sinuous detour that took him as a young man through the American Southwest and Mexico and then back to the West Street labs in New York City; in the orientation photo for new employees from that year, he is standing two rows behind a young Bill Baker and Jim Fisk. The connections to the Labs went even deeper, though: Townes’s brother-in-law, Arthur Schawlow, had joined Bell Labs and was now working as a researcher at Murray Hill, and the two men, whose wives were sisters, were quite close. One day in the fall of 1957, Townes and Schawlow had lunch together at Murray Hill and began talking about the maser, the device that had been used to amplify faint satellite signals in John Pierce’s Echo experiment. The maser worked by bombarding, or “pumping,” a crystal or gas with electromagnetic energy; a resulting reaction ensued (what was called a “stimulated emission”) and a tightly focused beam of tiny, millimeter-length electromagnetic waves was released by the crystal or gas.

To understand where this might lead required understanding communication signals—the wavelengths at which they travel and how that related to the transmission of information. The same line of reasoning still applied:

The shorter the wavelength, the higher the frequency.

The shorter the wavelength and the higher the frequency, the greater the capacity to hold information.

When Townes and Schawlow talked about other possible ideas that day in 1957, they wondered if they could alter the output of the maser to produce even shorter waves than those in the millimeter range. Schawlow later recalled that he had been thinking of ways to make infrared
masers, though he hadn’t gotten very far. But then Townes told Schawlow he had been thinking along the same lines.
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If they could produce infrared light, it was conceivable, too, that they might be able to build something that could produce even smaller waves than infrared—that is, light waves that existed in what is called the visible spectrum. The result of the collaboration between Townes and Schawlow was a paper, written in the summer of 1958, outlining the principles of the laser. The brothers-in-law received a patent, issued in 1960, for their invention.
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As scientists, Townes and Schawlow were probing into the unknown for new knowledge. But as employees of the Bell System, even at that early stage, they were aware of the practical reasons for pursuing a laser at Bell Labs. As John Pierce later explained, “The laser is to ordinary light as a broadcast signal is to static.” Ordinary light radiates in a chaotic and scattershot manner. The laser does not. From the perspective of a communications engineer, it is
coherent
—meaning it is intense and ordered and nearly all one frequency, which are important qualities for carrying information. “In principle it makes it possible to do everything with light that one does with radio waves,” Pierce added. What’s more, the great advantage is that the “bandwidth” of such light—which is related to its capacity—“is hundreds or thousands of times greater than we now have.” The very title of the Townes and Schawlow patent suggested a clear direction.
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Bell Labs’ claim for the laser was that it was a new method for communication.

The first working laser—the name came from a man named Gordon Gould, a former associate of Townes, who also made a successful legal claim to the invention—was not built at Bell Labs. Nor was it built by Schawlow and Townes. Rather, it was developed at Hughes Aircraft, in Malibu, California, by an engineer named Ted Maiman. In Maiman’s design, which began functioning in mid-May 1960, a flash of bright light stimulated a small pink ruby that emitted a short and powerful pulse of focused light. The Maiman laser didn’t prove that the laser was guaranteed to have any practical value—that question was unresolved and still far off in the distance. But it did prove that the laser could actually exist beyond the theory outlined by Townes and Schawlow. Indeed, almost as
soon as the optical researchers at Bell Labs heard of Maiman’s work, they built a near-exact copy of Maiman’s device to replicate and verify his results.
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At around the same time, another group of researchers at Murray Hill—Ali Javan, Donald Herriott, and William Bennett—were trying to build a different kind of device. On December 13, 1960, the men succeeded in operating a laser that used a gas medium of helium and neon, rather than a ruby. Aided by a series of mirrors that could focus the energy emitted by the stimulated gases, the men succeeded in creating a narrow beam of light. Most important, it wasn’t a pulse; it was a steady and continuous beam.
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The day after Javan’s team got their laser working, a team of Labs engineers used the focused beam of light to carry a telephone call.
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That sort of thing made AT&T executives actually sit up and pay attention.

T
HE LASER WAS NOT
so much a single invention. Rather, it was the result of a storm of inventions during the 1960s. Noteworthy improvements (like a new design) or variations (like getting a new material to “lase”) followed one after another in rapid succession. Sometimes only a few days separated the announcements of new developments. “The whole business of [lasers] is one of these things you just can’t afford to let go,” John Pierce told an interviewer around that time. “You can’t clearly see that it will be of any use in communication. I mean, we certainly can’t
guarantee
that. But it has that potentiality.” Pierce added that “when something as closely related to signaling and communication as this comes along, and something is new and little understood, and you have the people who can do something about it, you’d just better do it, and worry later just about the details of why you went into it.”

Rudi Kompfner, Pierce’s deputy and close friend, shared that sense of urgency. And so Kompfner, with Pierce’s and Bill Baker’s endorsement, started making a list. “He went around the world at that time, in 1960, trying to find good people—that’s all he wanted, good people,” recalls Herwig Kogelnik. “And then he would try to persuade them to switch
their disciplines to take on what he called ‘laser and optical communications research.’ ” Even within the scientific community, the terms were new and strange. Kogelnik was finishing up his PhD at Oxford when Kompfner showed up one day during his worldwide recruiting tour. Kogelnik was a plasma physicist, which meant he studied the physics of certain gases. Rudi Kompfner didn’t care. His simple argument to Kogelnik on the day they met was that the young man should think of the high frequency of light and what that could mean in terms of its capacity for information. Colleagues all recall the charm as well as the passion that animated Kompfner. To Kogelnik, he just said, “Think of all this bandwidth!”—a line that inspired Kogelnik to switch from plasma to lasers. “I had invested many, many years in plasma physics. And he persuaded people like me to totally throw away their past and start in a new field.”
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Simply put, if the Bell scientists could figure out how to use light’s vast capacity to transmit phone calls, data, and TV, they could avoid future worries about congestion.
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What was also attractive were the
economics
of optical transmission. For decades, the Bell System had realized that it was far more cost-efficient to mix together many hundreds of conversations on an intercity copper cable—by a complex technical means, the signals could be sent together at a higher frequency and then teased apart at the receiving ends. Sending more information and sending it more economically were often the same thing.

But as the 1960s wore on, this possibility seemed increasingly remote. Several years after Townes and Schawlow outlined the laser in their paper, a variety of ticklish problems, as one Bell Labs research director described them, remained unsolved.
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For starters, there were a host of technical challenges in finding the best laser materials with the most useful frequencies for communications. At the same time, Bell engineers were still working on a technology that could modulate voice and data signals and then “impress” those signals upon the laser beam. Above all, there were nagging questions about transmission. Without question, light could carry voice and data—but how would it be sent around the country? Through the air? In a hollow pipe? In September 1960, just a
few months after the ruby laser was invented, several scientists at Bell Labs succeeded in sending a pulse of laser light twenty-five miles through the air from Crawford Hill in Holmdel to the Murray Hill labs.
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The laser group then began to realize that the earth’s atmosphere creates all types of interference. “Rain, snow and fog can cause heavy power losses,” a Bell Labs director, Stewart Miller, explained in
Scientific American
. That left another possibility—the waveguide, those hollow pipes, beset with problems and still in development, that were ultimately supposed to relieve the future traffic on the Bell System by carrying millimeter radio waves long distances. They could conceivably carry light waves, too. But sending light through a waveguide would be immensely difficult: The beam would have to go around turns and up hills and down hills and remain perfectly focused within the walls of the hollow pipe.
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An intercity waveguide might have to do this for hundreds of miles. Nobody at Bell Labs—not Fisk, not Baker, not Pierce, not Kompfner—seemed to think this was imminent. Light waveguides were, at best, a next-generation technology.
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There was, perhaps, another option. It was the idea of a scientist well outside the elite ranks of Bell Labs. In 1966, an engineer named Charles Kao, employed in England by International Telephone and Telegraph, visited the Labs to talk about a technology he was researching in Europe. Kao had recently delivered a paper at an engineering conference in London suggesting that transparent glass fibers, carrying waves of light, might solve the transmission problem. Some of the scientists at Bell Labs had already toyed with this possibility. It had long been clear to engineers that thin glass strands could transport light for short distances; such fibers, in fact, were already being used in medicine, where they were proving useful for gastrointestinal examinations. But those working in the communications field doubted that glass fibers could transport signals the much greater distances the phone system required. The glass just wasn’t clear enough. A signal would be lost—technically speaking, it would scatter and attenuate—after only a few dozen meters. Fibers were, as the engineers put it, too “lossy.”

Kao was more optimistic. He had spent the past few years in Europe
doing deep exploratory research, and he had determined there was no fundamental reason why strands of exceedingly pure glass couldn’t carry signals substantial distances. His paper was partly theoretical. Glass of the sort Kao was talking about didn’t really exist; even the clearest glass on earth would effectively absorb or scatter light and thus kill a signal in a few dozen meters. But Kao hadn’t said that pure glass would replace wires or waveguides immediately. He had only concluded it was
possible
.

He was also liberated to some extent from the pressures that shaped the views of the Bell Labs scientists. Labs upper management had bet the future on waveguides, but Kao had not. The fiber optic historian Jeff Hecht would later point out that Kao (unlike the accountants at AT&T) had no incentive to make years of investment, in both time and effort, pay off. What’s more, there was a pull on Kao in a different direction. Innovations are to a great extent a response to need. Phone engineers in Europe—Kao included—weren’t looking for a complex new technology, such as the waveguide, for intercity communication. They needed
intracity
communication. Generally speaking, Europe’s metropolitan areas were both denser than America’s and closer to other metro areas. The British telecom planners, Jeff Hecht notes, “wanted better technology to send signals between local switching centers that typically were a few miles apart. They wanted something easy and inexpensive to install in heavily developed areas, not high priced, huge capacity systems to span vast distances.”
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When Kao visited Bell Labs and urged the people there to follow up on this line of research, the optical team under Kompfner heeded him. “I remember very well that day,” says Tingye Li, who would eventually help lead Bell Labs’ optical research efforts and would become a close friend of Kao’s. “We were having a picnic on top of Crawford Hill and he joined us. I had not met him before.”
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Kao would later say that he received a skeptical welcome at Bell Labs; but Li and several researchers who were there at the time recall it differently. “I don’t think anyone pooh-poohed it,” recalls Ira Jacobs, who would later become deeply involved in the Labs’ fiber optics development. “But I think there were a lot of people who thought it would move slowly.”
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As the 1960s wore on, Kompfner’s
group became increasingly interested in the possibilities of fiber, and by 1969 there was a fiber research program up and running.
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