The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (52 page)

In size and scope, the hubs are a modest first step. But on a number
of counts, Bell Labs represents a useful model for energy innovation—a model that’s arguably better than the Manhattan Project (for the first atomic bomb) or the Apollo program (for the first moon landing). Both aimed for a lofty but singular goal. By contrast, the creation of a clean-energy economy will be a process without end. It will involve the management of vast, sophisticated, interconnected systems, much like communications networks, that require great technological leaps forward as well as constant, incremental improvements. The Labs’ research department was conceived upon the notion of constantly looking far ahead, toward the goal of big and risky breakthroughs. The search for clean, affordable energy undoubtedly requires such dramatic advances. Yet in 2012, a host of newly fashioned inventions (in solar, wind, and tidal power, among others) already await the ingenuity of engineers who are able to develop them into innovations that are cheaper and better than what we currently use.
²⁴
And in this respect, Bell Labs’ other dimension—the ability to exhaustively develop a product and get it ready for mass manufacturing and deployment—is perhaps even more crucial. To think long-term toward the revolutionary, and to simultaneously think near-term toward manufacturing, comprises the most vital of combinations.

The need for an energy quest, as it happens, might not surprise the founders of the Labs. In the spring of 1923, an editor at the
New York Times
wrote to Frank Jewett, soon to become Bell Labs’ first president, and invited him to contribute to a symposium of ideas sponsored by the newspaper. Jewett agreed, and his four-hundred-word piece, appearing on the May 20, 1923, front page, set the tone for the edition. “Water, Energy Limited; Scientists Look to the Sun Next,” the headline read. Jewett wrote, “It seems clear that a great, if not the greatest, present day need is the development of some new source of cheap utilizable energy.” With the tools of “research and invention,” Jewett urged scientists to figure out ways to take advantage of solar or tidal power, or “fuel from the luxuriant vegetable growths of the tropics”—a predecessor, most likely, of today’s biofuels.
²⁵

The question the
Times
editor had posed to Jewett was, “What invention does the world need most?”

.   .   .   

R
ALPH
B
OWN
, the director of research who pondered the significance of the transistor as a snowstorm moved in on New Jersey on Christmas Eve 1947, would sometimes ask his colleagues: What was Bell Labs? As John Pierce recounted it, Bown would say: If we marched all the people out and destroyed the buildings and the equipment and the records, would Bell Laboratories be destroyed? Bown’s answer was no, it would not. On the other hand, he would say that if the buildings, equipment, and records remained intact but the people were removed, Bell Laboratories would be destroyed. His obvious point was that Bell Labs was a human and not a material organization. Yet perhaps it was more complicated than that. For instance, Bown never explained whether the institution’s success was a result of thousands of engineers and scientists working together, or of the few exemplars who towered above everyone else.

“Everybody has their own list,” remarks Bob Lucky, the former Bell Labs executive who succeeded John Pierce as executive director of communications sciences. On Lucky’s list are the mathematicians Claude Shannon, Steve Rice, and David Slepian. And the physicist Sol Buchsbaum, who rose to an executive position with Bell Labs in the 1970s. “Shockley of course,” he adds. “Certainly Pierce and Baker.” In Lucky’s view, the exceptional individuals lent the institution its reputation of exceptionalism. “I just don’t think they make people like the kind of people we had,” Lucky says. “Not that nature doesn’t make them, just that the environment doesn’t make them. We had these people who were bigger than life back then. And we don’t seem to have them anymore—though people might say Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.” In Lucky’s view, a list of Bell Labs’ exemplars captures the essence of the organization. “They set the examples that permeated the whole place. They created the fame and were what other people aspired to be. They were the leaders, even if they weren’t high up in management. If you knew them, you knew Bell Labs.” While it’s true that the handful of famous people overshadows tens of thousands of other people, he adds, if you take that handful away, “you don’t have Bell Labs.”

There is another way of answering Bown’s question, however. Chuck Elmendorf, John Pierce’s friend from Caltech who roomed with Pierce in New York City in the late 1930s, sees the institution of Bell Labs as far more important than what he calls “the great men.” Elmendorf asks, “How do you capture the aspects of the institution that have nothing to do with these great names? What I’m troubled about is—even though these are great names … John Pierce was practically my brother; Barney Oliver, we were buddies; hell, I learned solid-state physics sitting on the couch in Bill Shockley’s living room, because John Pierce sent me up there. I
knew
these guys. But they weren’t Bell Laboratories.” Nor, Elmendorf adds, were the other Nobel Prize winners. To him, the essence of Bell Labs was its immense and complete institutional capabilities—how it could develop anything from the tiniest element of a small electronic device to the grand plan for a national network; also, how it could develop people, turning callow college graduates into competent researchers and managers. As a result, it could solve the biggest of problems. “I worked with guys who made some tremendous contributions and you’ve never heard of them,” he says. So maybe this argument—the individual versus the institution; the great men versus the yeomen; the famous versus the forgotten—is insoluble. Or maybe the argument is easily deflected. Perhaps the most significant thing was that Bell Labs had both kinds of people in profusion, and both kinds working together. And for the problems it was solving, both kinds were necessary.

Amazement is a common thread in conversations with Bell Labs veterans. Some of the amazement is in simple observations—for instance, in the speed and capabilities of our present-day information networks, as well as in the processing power and versatility of our cellular phones. Or it comes in the realization that connectivity in today’s world is far more important than, say, fidelity. That phone calls often crackle or fade or echo is something that never would have been permissible thirty years ago, where perfect transmission and victory over noise were the ultimate goals. Some of the amazement, however, runs deeper. It resides in the fact that the world of Bell Labs is disappearing, and the contribution of
its staff is mostly forgotten. “Frankly,” Bob Lucky observes, “if you ask people on the street who invented the transistor, they don’t have the foggiest idea.”

John Pierce, the most eloquent of the Young Turks, seemed to have a deep respect for the destructive quality of new technology. Pierce carried this understanding with him from his youth until his death. Upon receiving the Japan Prize in the mid-1980s, he wrote, “However nostalgic I may be about the world of my childhood, it is gone, and so are the sorts of people who lived in it. Science and technology destroyed that world and replaced it with another.” Typical of Pierce, he could sound bloodless in public about the process of change and innovation. But confidentially, some aspects of these social disruptions seemed to rankle him.

Pierce hoped privately that the work he and his colleagues did would someday be broadly recognized. This was not a late-in-life wish; rather, it was something he considered as early as the 1950s, before the launch of Echo, before he had even reached his fiftieth birthday. “In general we are no more sentimental about the relics of science and technology than Shakespeare’s contemporaries were about his house and possessions,” Pierce wrote in an unpublished essay from 1959. “What mementos will our heirs have of our romantic present to tell them that men created the things which they take for granted?” For someone sentimental enough to actually believe that the origins of technology were worth seeking out, Pierce noted, it might be possible to find the old laboratory that Mervin Kelly shared with his friend Clinton Davisson at the West Street labs in Manhattan. You might be able to locate the room in which Davisson worked, Pierce noted, even if the walls have been moved and the configuration of the laboratory had been changed. But in the case of then-recent inventions such as the maser, which Pierce already saw as a momentous development, “it will probably be impossible a few years from now even to find the movable partitions which surrounded the work. It is clear that we build for the day and not for the ages, and what we build has a community and functional rather than an individual character.”
²⁶

There was no way around the conclusion. Pierce and his friends were
making ideas and things that would either disappear in an instant, or would be absorbed into the ongoing project of civilization. He feared that any memories of the makers would perish, too. “I am afraid that there will be little tangible left in a later age,” Pierce wrote of his world at Bell Labs, “to remind our heirs that we were men, rather than cogs in a machine.”

T
o a certain extent, my interest in Bell Labs arose out of personal experience. I grew up in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, just a few hundred yards from Bell Labs’ Murray Hill campus. From an early age, I was familiar with every building at Murray Hill. I also knew—long before I understood its significance—that the transistor had been invented there. I never imagined my parents’ decision to settle nearby would someday enrich the texture of this book, but it did, and I thank them for that twist of fate. The more important point, of course, is the debt I owe my parents, Doreen and Bud Gertner, for their love and encouragement. They were supportive of my writing career from the beginning, and never wavered (though they always worried). My father, the true scientist in the family, died unexpectedly a week before I finished this manuscript. Had he gotten the opportunity, I imagine he would have been immensely relieved to see this book complete. I am finished now, Dad.

T
HIS BOOK EXISTS ONLY
because so many people offered help along the way. Any list would need to begin with Sarah Burnes and Eamon Dolan, my agent and editor, respectively. When I walked into Sarah’s office nine years ago to talk about possible book ideas, I hadn’t imagined it would take this long. But she was willing to back an unwieldy topic, simply
because it held my interest above all other ideas, and then was able to give the proposal shape and sensibility. All this—and her wise counsel—leaves me deeply in her debt. Eamon, meanwhile, gave the manuscript itself shape and sensibility. He maintained his good humor, as well as his faith in me, over the course of many years and several neglected deadlines. I am grateful. Others at Penguin Press also provided help. Scott Moyers guided the manuscript through its final stages and offered excellent advice; Emily Graff made sure this project glided over its production and organizational hurdles.

T
HE REPORTING OF THIS BOOK
took me all over the country. In New Jersey, George Kupczak at the AT&T archives welcomed me to his offices year after year. At Alcatel-Lucent in Murray Hill, Ed Eckert, Peter Benedict, and Paul Ross were tremendously helpful. Also at Alcatel-Lucent, Gary Feldman and Jeong Kim talked with me about innovation and the future of telecommunications. At the Crawford Hill lab, Herwig Kogelnik gave me a long interview as well as a personal tour of the hill itself. Dozens of Bell Labs veterans welcomed me into their homes and allowed me to dredge up ancient history for hours on end. Several in particular—John Mayo, Morry Tanenbaum, Ian Ross, Chuck Elmendorf, Henry Pollak, Bob Lucky, and Dick Frenkiel—were especially generous with their time. Mike Noll, who long ago organized the archival papers of Bill Baker and John Pierce, was an indispensable ally in my research. Joan and Michael Frankel, the current residents of Mervin Kelly’s old house in Short Hills, New Jersey, gave me a top-to-bottom tour of their home and allowed me to wander around the backyard tulip gardens reconstructing the past. Patricia Neering gathered some of the early periodical research for this book. Gerald Dolan remastered for me an obscure and inaudible Claude Shannon interview.

In Washington, D.C., the staff at the Library of Congress helped me make my way through the papers of Claude Shannon, Vannevar Bush, and Harald Friis; in Pasadena, California, the librarians at the Huntington Library helped me navigate through the papers of John Pierce. At Stanford,
Leslie Berlin was a huge help in getting me started on the Shockley papers—an effort made even more efficient by the library’s excellent staff. I’m also obliged to the staff of the Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton; to the IEEE History Center; and to Harriet Zuckerman and the Columbia University Center for Oral History. And in Gallatin, Missouri, Dave Stark, a resourceful local historian, gave me a guided tour of the town square, introduced me around, and shared with me his own archival spadework. On the same trip, the kind women at the Daviess County Library and the Daviess County records office offered assistance and vital information.

As I worked on this book for the past five years, I also worked as a writer for the
New York Times Magazine
. My reporting for the
Times
often shaped my thinking about the innovative process and American technology. I’m especially grateful to Dean Robinson, my editor at the magazine for the better part of eight years, who somehow manages to make every story he touches better. Likewise, I’m grateful to the Sunday magazine’s editor in chief during that time, Gerry Marzorati, and to the
Times
art directors, photo editors, fact-checkers, and copy editors who worked on my features. They consistently made those stories smarter, more attractive, and more accurate. As it happens, the first story I wrote on Bell Labs appeared not in the
Times
but in
Money
magazine in 2003. Two editors encouraged me to write that feature: Bob Safian and Denise Martin. I’m grateful to both for that opportunity, and also for the manner in which they’ve encouraged my career in the time since.