The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (42 page)

A
ROUND THAT TIME
, Frenkiel and Porter met a systems engineer named Joel Engel, who had just joined the Holmdel office. Engel—bright, opinionated, and energetic—soon noticed that even though Frenkiel and Porter were working on the Metroliner system, they were fixated on the questions from the previous year, when they had put forward the basic ideas for a larger mobile phone service. It was Engel’s understanding that to get ahead at Bell Labs, “you were supposed to work on more than you were asked to work on.”
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It was necessary, in other words, not only to do your assigned work but to devote 20 or 30 percent of your time to another project. At the time Engel was assigned to work on Bell Labs’ paging systems; AT&T was now selling a bulky, bricklike box, known as “Bell Boy,” that doctors or other busy professional people could use to alert them with a buzz that someone had called them. That buzzing urged a
Bell Boy user to get to a pay phone and call their office in case there was an emergency. To a systems engineer, the Bell Boy was not terribly interesting. Engel, as a result, was soon drawn into Frenkiel and Porter’s spare-time obsession. “We would meet,” he recalls, “the three of us, and we would grab a conference room and stand around a blackboard and draw hexagons.”

The three men standing by the blackboard in Holmdel, New Jersey, in early 1968 did not have grandiose plans. “We were not visionaries,” Engel says of the early cellular meetings. “We were techies. If there was a vision it was primarily as a business service. Real estate agents. Doctors who made house calls.” The men believed that if they could get the system to work, the economics of cellular service could be compelling: A trucking service, for instance, could boost its efficiency with a fleet of phones in its vehicles. Increased productivity would justify the cost of the phones. The men around the blackboard were thinking car phones. Perhaps small handheld phones would emerge at some point, but not for decades yet.

In the summer of 1968, the FCC officially informed the Bell System that it might be interested in hearing what it might do if some of the channels being used by UHF television were reapportioned. Though Bell Labs engineers had already been warned by Chuck Elmendorf at AT&T, in Engel’s recollection the reaction to the FCC’s invitation was tinged with panic. Some of the old-timers at Bell Labs doubted, from looking at the early plans of Frenkiel, Porter, and Engel, that such a cellular system would work. “Microwaves don’t travel in hexagons,” Engel recalls hearing. There was further concern that the system wouldn’t be able to “find” a mobile phone subscriber and connect a call to them. Nevertheless, the FCC’s invitation represented an extraordinary opportunity for AT&T. The company had waited twenty years for this. Porter, Frenkiel, and Engel estimated that it would take about three years to deliver a cellular plan, which turned out to be correct.

“We got a lot less attention than you would think,” Frenkiel recalls of the efforts to create the cellular system. “We were really just another project.” Indeed, to stroll around inside the Black Box at that time, one
would not have imagined that a mobile telephone system was an on-ramp to the future. The thing about Bell Labs, Frenkiel remarks, was that it could spend millions of dollars—or even $100 million, which was what AT&T would spend on cellular before it went to market
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—on a technology that offered little guarantee it would succeed technologically or economically. Indeed, a marketing study commissioned by AT&T in the fall of 1971 informed its team that “there was no market for mobile phones at any price.” Neither man agreed with that assessment. Though Engel didn’t perceive it at the time, he later came to believe that marketing studies could only tell you something about the demand for products that actually exist. Cellular phones were a product that people had to imagine might exist.

“You have to understand,” Joel Engel says of the entire effort, “we were all very young, we were unscarred by failure. So we always knew it was going to work.” Not all of the AT&T executives were as optimistic. But anyone worrying that the cellular project might face the same disastrous fate as the Picturephone might see that it had one advantage. A Picturephone was only valuable if everyone else had a Picturephone. But cellular users didn’t only talk to other cellular users. They could talk to anyone in the national or global network. The only difference was that they could move.

E
NGEL WAS PUT IN CHARGE
of the group planning the cellular system design. He would later look back and see the early 1970s as a perfect example of what engineers sometimes call “steam engine time.” This term refers to the Scottish engineer James Watt, the inventor of the first commercially popular steam engine, whose name is also memorialized in the term we use to measure power. In the late 1700s, Watt made startling improvements upon more basic ideas of how to use compressed steam to run heavy machinery. The knowledge needed to make such an engine had by then coalesced to the point that his innovation was, arguably, inevitable. By the 1970s, the mobile business was ready to happen, Engel was sure, even if the marketers had their doubts. The technology was there.
It was now just a matter of who was going to do it, and how fast they could make it work. “It was,” he says, “steam engine time for cellular.”

The FCC’s decision to consider proposals for mobile radio had been the spark. But a number of other technologies made it steam engine time, too. To Engel’s colleague Dick Frenkiel, it seems unlikely that the early cellular pioneers at Bell Labs could have actually implemented their designs in the 1950s. “Cellular is a computer technology,” Frenkiel points out. “It’s not a radio technology.” In other words, engineering the transmission and reception from a mobile handset to the local antennas, while challenging, wasn’t what made the idea innovative. It was the system’s logic—locating a user moving through the cellular honeycomb, monitoring the signal strength of that call, and handing off a call to a new channel, and a new antenna tower, as a caller moves along. One necessary piece of hardware for this logic was integrated circuits, those silicon chips on which a tiny circuit and thousands of transistors could be etched. They had only been developed a few years before Frenkiel’s mobile work at the Labs. And then, as the cellular team at Bell Labs began working on its FCC proposal, a Santa Clara, California, semiconductor company named Intel—formed by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, both refugees from Bill Shockley’s first semiconductor company—began producing a revolutionary integrated circuit called the 4004 microprocessor. Measuring only one-eighth by one-sixteenth of an inch, and containing 2,300 transistors, the 4004 was essentially a tiny, powerful computer. It was the first generation of devices that, when inserted into a mobile phone unit, could do a host of essential and highly complex calculations.

What also made cellular possible were the phone network’s new electronic switching stations, or ESSs. In 1964, when Bell Labs had opened its first ESS center in Succasunna, New Jersey, the public relations department had urged Bell engineers to explain that the ESS had the ability “to provide services we haven’t even thought of yet.” Six years later, Frenkiel and Engel and the rest of the Bell Labs cellular team were envisioning what those services might be. A cellular phone would need to send a digital signal every few seconds to the nearest base station antenna. The base station would in turn send that information to a mobile switching center.
But really that was just the start. A vast amount of data needed to go back and forth, almost constantly, between the mobile phones, the base stations, and the mobile switching center. The switching system would have to communicate with the base stations so as to keep track of who was where. In addition, Frenkiel explains, “every few seconds, signal strength data would have to be taken at surrounding base stations to find out if a better one now existed.” If another base station had a stronger signal, the computerized system would hand the call off to the next cell. The catch was that before a call could be handed off, the switching system had to identify a channel in the new cell, set up that call, and send a message to the mobile so it could switch frequencies. As Frenkiel remarks, the ESS was invented to be a central office switch, meaning it was created to simply direct calls between landline phones.
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“But it’s sitting there and it’s got the ability to be
programmed
for something no one ever expected it to do—all those instantaneous decisions that were never necessary. And now we come along to say we need to do locating and handoffs. And also, by the way, we need to keep track of the health of every base station in the system, we need trouble reports, we need to gather data for traffic.” The ESS—a switching system with a powerful computer embedded within it—could do all these things.

Frenkiel, Engel, and Porter could identify these challenges, but they couldn’t solve them. As systems engineers, they were looking at a big project in a comprehensive but somewhat general way. Systems engineers consider all the standards and technologies and economics necessary to make a project work. They worry, moreover, about how to integrate a complex new technology with the rest of the system. Cellular phones were an ideal case, since the new technology had to (1) work, (2) work affordably, and (3) work seamlessly with the rest of the existing phone network. What the systems people couldn’t do was actually make those projects function the way they dreamed.

Help came from several different directions. Bill Jakes, the lead engineer on John Pierce’s Echo experiment, had already been asked by Pierce to look deeper into the science of microwaves.
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He was in the research department; he was therefore looking for new knowledge. When
Jakes set out to work on the cellular research, he bought a van with Bell Labs money and hired a driver. Then he and some colleagues piled in the back with recording equipment and headphones, and the van drove thousands of miles along the highways and byways of New York and New Jersey. “We went everywhere,” Jakes recalls, “through tunnels, up on top of hills, in woods, near lakes. All day long, day after day after day.” Their goal, in part, was to study the effect of obstructions on transmission and reception. Over the course of months, they puzzled over why microwaves behaved one way in a particular situation, and another way in a different situation. The radio transmission problems involving a moving vehicle and a cellular system, Jakes later wrote, were “so difficult they challenge the imagination.”
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T
HE WORLD IS FULL OF NOISE
. It blocks our attempts to talk with one another. Claude Shannon had philosophized about this, but to radio engineers in the field, noise is a slightly different phenomenon. You think about noise not so much as an idea that interrupts a message containing information. You think about noise as clicks and static and fadeouts—a physical or electrical problem that must be overcome by engineering or by savvy. Urban noise is often more intrusive than rural noise. Car engines and trains and legions of electronic devices create bursts and blizzards of interference. Also, there are big buildings, throwing shadows over reception areas or bouncing signals unpredictably to and fro. Even in the countryside, though, noise can interfere with radio transmissions. There are highway overpasses and high-tension wires; there are mountains and trees.

“The guys who made cellular real,” as Dick Frenkiel says, were recruited from the Bell Labs Whippany office, where most of the work was military-related. These men were from the development department, the place at Bell Labs that actually made ideas and new knowledge into innovations. For the cellular project, their job was to build the components—low-power antennas, experimental phone sets, and so forth—that the systems team had described. They would spend most of the 1970s worrying about noise and interference of one type or another. A small but
typical concern: How high do you actually need to place an antenna to make it work? One of the early engineers in the cellular development group was named Gerry DiPiazza. He was not the sort of Ivy League type that clogged the hallways of the Murray Hill research labs. Rather, he was an engineer’s engineer, who had gone to a local New York City school and had attended “Kelly College,” the Labs’ continuing education program. He had essentially lifted himself up through the Bell Labs ranks by his bootstraps.

By 1968, DiPiazza’s career with the Labs had already involved a surreal tour of duty in the South Pacific. In the early 1960s, Bell Labs had established a tiny laboratory outpost, totaling about forty people, on a remote coral atoll, only about 820 acres in size, known as Kwajalein.
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It was part of the Marshall Islands and had been the site of a significant battle during World War II. A largely secret installation, where engineers now worked on radar communications and antiballistic systems known as Nike-Zeus missiles, Kwajalein, or “Kwaj,” as the Bell Labs employees called it, was several thousand miles southwest of Hawaii. In 1965, a Bell Labs vice president had recommended that DiPiazza go there as a good career move, and DiPiazza agreed. He and his wife packed their belongings and their young children. They had never ventured far from New Jersey. They boarded a jet for San Francisco, then a propeller plane to Hawaii, then another propeller plane to Kwaj. They landed on a small airfield in the tropics amid stifling humidity. “We were greeted by a family with a truck, and we were driven to a household,” DiPiazza recalls. “We were given dinner. And then we were taken to a concrete duplex home. All the furniture was rattan. It was unkempt and hot. It needed to be rehabbed. There were rat droppings in the crib. My wife cried all night, and I did, too. She looked at me and asked, ‘What did you get us into?’ ”
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His family was allowed to fly home for a two-week vacation, but only after DiPiazza had worked on Kwajalein for 510 days.

Kwaj was not only isolated. It was strange. A local Marshallese population traveled to the island each morning on U.S. military launches to work as merchants and maids. The island’s king and landlord carried around with him his rent money—purportedly a million dollars, paid by
the U.S. government—in a bag. Bones of Japanese soldiers, now dead for at least twenty years, turned up regularly on the beaches. On the main street of town was a grocery store where everything was sold frozen, even the milk and meat. There were few cars; instead, DiPiazza and his wife rode their bikes everywhere. And in time, they grew to like it. A tight camaraderie existed among the families there, and the leisure pursuits—sailing, swimming, and free movies—helped pass the time. Most important, DiPiazza’s work on highly sophisticated radar systems held his interest.
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Bell Labs and Western Electric were testing the capabilities of the radar systems against target-practice missiles shot toward Kwajalein from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. At the time, military strategists were concerned that foreign missiles would be built to scatter a cloud of foil decoys—they called it chaff—before detonating. The foil confused radar defenses and obscured the warhead inside the chaff cloud. DiPiazza’s job was to develop techniques that allowed U.S. radar to discriminate between the decoys and the actual explosive, so that a U.S. missile could take out the enemy warhead.