The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (4 page)

The transcontinental line, complete with several new vacuum tube repeaters placed strategically in stations along the route, was finished in time for the Pacific exposition, which had been pushed back to 1915. Harold Arnold had improved the design so that the repeaters looked like spherical bulbs, with the three crucial elements inside, sitting upon a base from which three wires emerged. The continental link itself consisted of four copper wires (two for directing calls in each direction) that were strung coast-to-coast by AT&T linemen over 130,000 wooden poles. As a public relations stunt, Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor who had long since stopped having any day-to-day responsibilities at the company he founded, was stationed in New York to speak with his old assistant, Thomas Watson, in San Francisco.

“Mr. Watson, come here, I want you,” the old man quipped, paraphrasing what he had said to Watson on the day the two discovered the working telephone in Boston nearly forty years before.

“It would take me a week to get there now,” Watson replied.

It was a wry bit of stagecraft. For AT&T, it was also an encouraging sign that Vail’s notion of universal service might indeed be possible—at least for customers who could afford to pay about $21 (about $440 in today’s dollars) for a three-minute call to California.
¹⁹

For Frank Jewett, meanwhile, the cross-country link proved that his cadre of young scientists could be trusted to achieve things that might at first seem technologically impossible. That led him to redouble his efforts to hire more men like Harold Arnold. Jewett kept writing to Harvey Fletcher, Millikan’s former graduate student who was now in Salt Lake City, sending him every spring for five consecutive years a polite and persuasive invitation to join AT&T. In 1916, Fletcher finally agreed to leave Brigham Young and come work for Jewett. Millikan, meanwhile, didn’t stop serving as the link between his Chicago graduates and his old friend. In late 1917, responding to an offer from Jewett for $2,100 a year, Mervin Kelly, now done counting oil drops, decided that he would come to New York City, too.

F
letcher and Kelly were joining a company whose size and structure seemed positively bewildering. AT&T was not only a phone company on its own; it contained within it a multitude of other large companies as well. Each region of the country, for instance, had its own local phone company—New England Telephone, for example, or Pacific Bell. These organizations were owned in large part by AT&T and provided service for local phone customers. But these so-called local operating companies didn’t manufacture the equipment to actually make phone service work. For that there was Western Electric, another subsidiary of AT&T. On its own, Western Electric was larger than almost any other American manufacturing corporation. Its factories built the equipment that consumers could see (such as cables and phones), as well as equipment that was largely hidden from sight (such as switchboards). Finally, there was a third branch of AT&T. Neither the local phone companies nor Western Electric maintained the long-distance service that connected different regions and states together. For that, there was AT&T’s Long Lines Department. Long Lines built and provided long-distance service to customers.

Both AT&T and Western Electric had large engineering departments.
There was a certain amount of duplication—and sometimes friction—between the two. Generally speaking, the standards and long-term goals of the Bell System were determined by engineers at AT&T. Western Electric’s engineers, in turn, invented, designed, and developed all new equipment and devices.
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In 1916, the year before Fletcher and Kelly arrived, Frank Jewett was appointed the chief of Western Electric’s engineering division, which put him in charge of about a thousand engineers. Western’s main building was located on West Street in New York City, on the western fringe of Greenwich Village, in an immense thirteen-story yellow-brick redoubt that looked out over the tugboat and ferry traffic of New York Harbor. The engineers on the waterfront comprised a twentieth-century insurgency in a receding nineteenth-century world. The fragrance of coffee beans drifted through the large sash windows of the plant from the roasting factories nearby. A rail line, serving the busy harbor docks, stretched north and south along West Street in front of the building. “The trains ran along West Street carrying freight to the boats,” an employee there in the 1920s recalls. And oftentimes, “at dusk, a man with a lantern on horseback led the trains.”
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Under Jewett, Western engineers worked mainly in expansive open rooms floored with maple planks and interrupted every few dozen feet by square stone pillars that supported the building’s massive bulk. The elevators were hand-operated. All told, the rambling West Street plant comprised over 400,000 square feet—a figure that did not include the building’s rooftop, which was also used by chemists for testing how various lacquers and paints and metals withstood the elements. In their first days at the Western Electric shop, Kelly and Fletcher encountered a small city of men, along with a number of female assistants. Vast rooms of the building were dedicated to diagramming new devices for production—men in crisp white shirts, sleeves rolled above their elbows, bent over rows and rows of drafting tables. Before a device was ready for the drafting room, though, it would have to pass through a lengthy and rigorous development process. West Street was a warren of testing labs for phones, cables, switches, cords, coils, and a nearly uncountable assortment of
other essential parts. There were chemical laboratories for examining the properties of new materials, such as alloys for wire and sheathing for cables; there were numerous shops, meanwhile, cluttered with wires and dials and batteries, where legions of employees spent their days testing the effects of electrical currents and switching combinations or investigating new patterns of circuitry. Large sections of the labs were also devoted to the perfection of radio transmission, for it was believed (by Jewett’s boss, John J. Carty, especially) that wireless transmission would be a thing of the future, a way “to reach inaccessible places where wires cannot be strung,” or a way to someday create a commercial business linking New York to, say, London.

There was no real distinction at West Street between an engineer and a scientist. If anything, everyone was considered an engineer and was charged with the task of making the thousands of necessary small improvements to augment the phone service that was interconnecting the country. Yet the company now had a small division of men working in the department of research with Harold Arnold. This department was established just after Arnold began his work on a cross-country phone repeater; it had grown slowly and steadily in the time since. Frank Jewett and John J. Carty viewed the research team as an essential part of the phone company’s business strategy.
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These young scientists, many of whom came through Millikan, were encouraged to implement Theodore Vail’s long-term vision for the phone company—to look beyond the day-to-day concerns that shaped the work of their fellow engineers (to think five or ten years ahead was admirable) and focus on how fundamental questions of physics or chemistry might someday affect communications. Scientific research was a leap into the unknown, in other words. “Of its output,” Arnold would later say of his group, “inventions are a valuable part, but invention is not to be scheduled nor coerced.” The point of this kind of experimentation was to provide a free environment for “the operation of genius.” His point was that genius would undoubtedly improve the company’s operations just as ordinary engineering could. But genius was not predictable. You had to give it room to assert itself.

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J
OINING
W
ESTERN
E
LECTRIC
, even as a PhD in physics, entailed indoctrination in the phone company’s ways. In Harvey Fletcher’s first year he was taught to climb telephone poles, install telephones, and operate switchboards. Kelly’s experiences must have been similar, but his arrival also coincided with the company’s deepening involvement in building equipment for the military during the final years of World War I. He and his wife, Katherine, lived in a small apartment on Edgecombe Avenue in upper Manhattan, where she would look out the window each day to follow the construction of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, located on a hill a few dozen blocks south. Kelly, meanwhile, began work in Harold Arnold’s division by sharing a lab office with a physicist named Clinton J. Davisson, whose friends called him Davy. Davisson was an almost spectral presence at the Labs. Taciturn and shy, he was physically slight. “His weight never exceeded 115 pounds,” Kelly recalled, “and for many years it hovered around 100.” Kelly believed Davy was quiet for a reason. He needed to minimize superfluous activity or argument so he could husband his “low level” of energy. Only by doing so, Kelly believed, could Davy direct it, vigorously, toward experimentation.

The two men were a peculiar contrast: the antic and robust Kelly paired with the wraithlike and slow-moving Davisson. Yet it didn’t take long for Kelly to discover he was impressed. Davisson was a midwesterner, too—he was born in Bloomington, Illinois—and like Kelly he owed a debt to Millikan at Chicago, who had championed his career and had helped him win academic appointments at Purdue and Princeton before he came to Western Electric. Also, Davisson was a gifted experimentalist who had an almost unwavering commitment to what Kelly would later define as basic research—that is, research that generally had no immediate application to a product or company effort but (as in Davy’s case) sought fundamental knowledge regarding the deeper nature of things, such as the behavior of electrons.

At Western Electric, Davisson’s passion, not to mention his manner, made him something of an oddity. Industrial labs were less interested in
basic research—that was better left to the academics—than in
applied
research, which was defined as the kind of investigation done with a specific product or goal in mind. The line wasn’t always distinct (sometimes applied research could yield basic scientific insights, too), but generally speaking it was believed that basic research preceded applied research, and applied research preceded
development
. In turn, development preceded
manufacture.

In Kelly and Davisson’s first years of 1917 and 1918, the military demanded workable technology in Europe—radio sets, cable lines, and phones produced in mass quantities and built to a higher standard than the ones used in the home market so as to withstand the stresses of battle. Kelly and Davisson were assigned to work on resilient vacuum tubes, which were still so new to communications that they hadn’t yet entered mass production. “The relatively few that were required for extending and maintaining [phone] service,” Kelly would remember, “were made in the laboratories of the [Western Electric] Engineering Department.” Thus on West Street the tubes needed to be designed and built, with the help of a team of expert glassblowers, and then tested for defects, one at a time. It was a development shop, in other words, with an eye on rapid deployment for urgent military needs. Until the end of the war, there wouldn’t be time for applied research, let alone basic research.

Kelly and Davisson worked together “in an atmosphere of urgency,” as Kelly recalled.
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“The rapid tempo of the work, with the necessity of accepting partial answers and following one’s nose in an empirical fashion, were foreign to [Davisson’s] way of doing things.” Still, Davisson seemed to accept the cut-and-try approach, along with the switch from research to development, without complaint. In a way, he and Kelly had largely regressed to the old inventive traditions of Edison. But in the process Kelly was learning some things about Davisson. If the Western Electric engineers in the tube shop confronted a baffling question, they would approach Davy, who would give a deep and thoughtful and ultimately convincing response—though it sometimes took him days to do so. Increasingly, Kelly recalled, he and the rest of the staff went to Davy as a matter of last resort. Western’s physicists, like Kelly, could easily
understand whether a new tube, or a new tube design, worked or failed, in other words. But they couldn’t always easily understand why.

Davisson decided to stay at West Street when the war ended. He was allowed to carve out a position as a scientist who rejected any kind of management role and instead worked as a lone researcher, or sometimes a researcher teamed with one or two other experimentalists, pursuing only projects that aroused his interest. He seemed to display little concern about how (or whether) such research would assist the phone company. And he planned his experiments with such rigor and unhurried meticulousness that his output was considered meager, though in truth Davisson’s work was often interrupted by his colleagues’ questions. Frank Jewett had no illusions that his Western Electric shop was in the business of increasing human knowledge; they were in the business of increasing phone company revenues. By allowing Davisson a position on staff, though, Jewett and his deputy Harold Arnold recognized that Davy had financial value. If he was helpful to the researchers working on real-world problems, he was worth keeping around.

“He was perhaps my closest friend,” Kelly later wrote. The two men ended up living a mile apart, in Short Hills, New Jersey, and whenever Davisson was ill with some unspecified malady—a common occurrence—Kelly would visit. “Invariably I would find him in dressing gown, writing pad on his knee and pencil in hand, smoking his pipe and puzzling over his problem.” Davisson used to tell people he was lazy, but Kelly believed otherwise: “He worked at a slow pace but persistently.” Years later, Kelly noted that Davy might well be called “the father of basic research” at Bell Labs. It was another way of saying that early on, long before either man had gained power or fame, Kelly recognized in Davisson not only a friend and gifted scientist but a model for what might come later.