The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (55 page)

20 Interview of Walter Brattain by Alan Holden and W. J. King, 1964, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD;
www.aip.org/history/ohilist
.

21 Author interviews; see also Brinkman et al., “A History of the Invention of the Transistor and Where It Will Lead Us.”

22 Interview of James Fisk by Lillian Hoddeson, June 24, 1976, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD;
www.aip.org/history/ohilist
.

23 Shockley, “The Invention of the Transistor—An Example of Creative-Failure Methodology.”

24 Walter Brattain, interviewed by Harriet Zuckerman, 1964, as part of her larger study of the research careers of Nobel laureates in the sciences, Columbia Oral History Research Office. See Harriet Zuckerman,
Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States
(New York: Free Press, 1977), and the enlarged edition (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 1996). Quoted by permission of Dr. Zuckerman.

25 Interview of Walter Brattain by Alan Holden and W. J. King, AIP.

26 Walter Brown, author interview.

27 William Shockley, “The Invention of the Transistor—An Example of Creative-Failure Methodology,” draft version, July 31, 1973. AT&T archives.

1
William Shockley, “The Invention of the Transistor—An Example of Creative-Failure Methodology,”
Electrochemical Society Proceedings
98, no. 1 (1998).

2
Interview of Walter Brattain by Alan Holden and W. J. King, 1964, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD;
www.aip.org/history/ohilist
.

3
Ibid.

4
Walter Brattain, interviewed by Harriet Zuckerman, 1964, as part of her larger study of the research careers of Nobel laureates in the sciences, Columbia Oral History Research Office. See Harriet Zuckerman,
Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States
(New York: Free Press, 1977), and the enlarged edition (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 1996).

5
William Keefauver, former Bell Labs patent attorney, author interview.

6
In Shockley’s recollection, it was Harvey Fletcher, not Ralph Bown, who issued this challenge.

7
Walter Brattain, interviewed by Harriet Zuckerman, 1964. By permission of Dr. Zuckerman.

8
Bell Telephone Laboratories, “Memorandum for File: Terminology for Semiconductor Triodes,” May 28, 1948. AT&T archives.

9
Ralph Bown, “Memorandum to Those Working on Surface States Phenomena,” July 16, 1948. AT&T archives.

10 Memorandum, “BTL Confidential,” May 27, 1948. AT&T archives.

11 J. H. Scaff, “The Role of Metallurgy in the Technology of Electronic Materials,”
Metallurgical Transactions
(March 1970).

12 W. Shockley, letter to Robert Gibney, June 29, 1948. AT&T archives.

13 “Press Release from Bell Telephone Laboratories: A.M. Papers of Thursday, July 1, 1948.” AT&T archives.

14 J. Bardeen and W. H. Brattain, “A Semi-Conductor Triode.” AT&T archives.

15 Quoted in Shirley Thomas,
Men of Space
, vol. 4 (Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1962), p. 175.

16 William Shockley, interviewed by John L. Gregory on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the transistor, April 1972.

17 Shockley, “The Invention of the Transistor—An Example of Creative-Failure Methodology.”

18 Interview of Walter Brattain by Charles Weiner, May 28, 1974, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD;
www.aip.org/history/ohilist
.

19 Shockley, “The Invention of the Transistor—An Example of Creative-Failure Methodology.”

20 Bell Labs document, March 23, 1953. AT&T archives.

21 Phil Anderson, “Physics at Bell Labs, 1949–1984,” unpublished. Given to the author by Anderson.

22 Interview of Addison White by Lillian Hoddeson, September 30, 1976, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD;
www.aip.org/history/ohilist
.

23 Shockley, “The Invention of the Transistor—An Example of Creative-Failure Methodology.”

24 Richard Rhodes,
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), p. 655. Rhodes notes that the Trinity core could not have been larger “than a small orange.” While he put the weight at eleven pounds, other descriptions of the plutonium core have ranged higher—up to fourteen pounds, and the size of a softball.

25 Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson,
Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 164.

26 Letter, Jay W. Forrester to Ralph Bown, July 22, 1948. AT&T archives.

27 Letter, Ralph Bown to Jay W. Forrester, July 26, 1948. AT&T archives.

28 A discovery of similar import occurred in the early 1960s at Bell Labs, when Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered the cosmic microwave radiation that remained from the Big Bang. The men later won the Nobel Prize for their work. Jansky would have almost certainly been considered for the prize, too, had he not suffered an early death, in 1950, at the age of forty-five. After Jansky’s death, a lingering and insoluble disagreement arose over Bell Labs’ suggestion that Jansky move on from his discovery and redirect his research to more practical matters. Jansky’s brother, C. M. Jansky, has made the case that Bell management’s orders not only were shortsighted but were implemented against Jansky’s wishes. Jansky’s supervisor Harald Friis has disagreed.

29
Oxford English Dictionary
, 2nd ed. See “innovate” and “innovation,” vol. 8, pp. 997–98. Usually, for science mandarins such as Frank Jewett, the chairman of the Labs and head of the National Academy of Sciences, the descriptive language for innovation in the World War II era, and immediately thereafter, was “ingenuity,” “invention,” and “development.” Though it may well have been used earlier, the first reference I came across to the word “innovate” in the Bell Labs literature was in a 1958 speech by Jack Morton and in the 1959
Bell Laboratories Record
touting the Labs’ involvement in the military’s Distant Early Warning (DEW) line. For further reference, see
chapter 9
, endnote 4.

30 Ernest Braun and Stuart Macdonald,
Revolution in Miniature: The History and Impact of Semiconductor Electronics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 5.

31 Ralph Bown, “The Transistor as an Industrial Research Episode,”
Scientific Monthly,
January 1955.

32 Jack A. Morton, “From Research to Technology,”
International Science and Technology
, May 1964.

33 Jack A. Morton, “The Innovation Process,” date unknown. AT&T archives.

34 Eugene I. Gordon, “Morton’s Legacy,”
New Jersey Council News
, 1991; also author interviews.

35 Michael Wolff, “The R&D ‘Bootleggers’: Inventing Against the Odds,”
IEEE Spectrum
, July 1975.

36 “Kelly’s favorite room” is from an author interview with Robert Von Mehren, Kelly’s son-in-law; the description of the “stately room” comes from my visit to the actual house in Short Hills.

37 Interview of Walter Brattain by Charles Weiner, AIP.

38 Ralph Bown had already explained the technical reasons for spreading the invention around. An internal Bell Labs memo written a decade after the transistor became a commercial product noted that the large semiconductor industry, “with its center of gravity outside the Bell System,” was the deliberate result of a policy that the Labs’ managers settled on in the months after the invention. By involving engineers around the world in the evolution of the device—making it better, cheaper, more reliable—the hope was that everyone would profit from the advances, especially the Bell System.

39 Ralph Bown, letter to M. J. Kelly, Baur au Lac Hotel, Zurich, Switzerland, August 20, 1948. AT&T archives.

40 Oliver Buckley to M. J. Kelly, Savoy Hotel, London, England, September 15, 1948. AT&T archives.

41 M. J. Kelly, “Remarks Before Bell System Lecturer’s Conference,” October 2, 1951. AT&T archives.

42 Milton Silverman, “Ma Bell’s House of Magic,”
Saturday Evening Post
, July 1947. The publication of the feature sparked an internal correspondence between Bell Labs executives, all of whom viewed the story critically.

43 William G. Pfann, “Some Remarks on the Discovery of Zone Melting,” May 3, 1965. AT&T archives.

44 Mervin J. Kelly, “Semiconductor Electronics: A New Technology—A New Industry,” 1958. AT&T archives.

1
Claude Shannon, Kyoto Prize acceptance speech, 1985. Shannon Collection, Library of Congress. See also Anthony Liversidge, “Profile of Claude Shannon,” in
Claude Elwood Shannon Collected Papers
, reprinted (in a slightly different form) from
Omni
magazine, August 1987. Used by permission of Liversidge.

2
Vannevar Bush, letter to Professor E. B. Wilson, Harvard School of Public Health, December 15, 1938. “As he appeared to have great promise, and moreover appeared to be a decidedly unconventional type of youngster, I made it possible for him to go on with his studies.” Shannon Collection, Library of Congress.

3
Vannevar Bush, recommendation for Claude Shannon for a National Research Fellowship, undated, circa late 1939. Shannon Collection, Library of Congress.

4
Erico Marui Guizzo, “The Essential Message: Claude Shannon and the Making of Information Theory” (master’s thesis, MIT, 2003).

5
Len Kleinrock, a former student of Shannon’s, author interview.

6
Liversidge, “Profile of Claude Shannon.”

7
Claude Shannon, letter to Dr. V. Bush, December 13, 1939. Shannon Collection, Library of Congress.

8
Liversidge, “Profile of Claude Shannon.” Biographical facts relating to Shannon’s father are in a personal letter Shannon wrote, October 20, 1981, to Ms. Shari Bukowski: “[My father] was born in Oxford, New Jersey in 1862, came to Ovid, Michigan when very young and was raised and graduated there. He was a traveling salesman for a period
and came to Gaylord shortly after 1900. There he bought a furniture and undertaking business, and, having confidence in Gaylord’s future, built the Shannon Block and Post Office building on Main Street.” Shannon Collection, Library of Congress.

9
Robert McEliece,
Claude Shannon, Father of the Information Age
, directed and written by Doug Ramsey, produced by Ramsey and Mike Weber;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2Whj_nL-x8
. In a profile of Shannon in his
Collected Papers
(New York: IEEE Press/John Wiley & Sons, 1993), the book’s editors, N. J. A. Sloane and Aaron D. Wyner, refer to H. H. Goldstine’s book
The Computer from Pascal to Von Neumann
, which described the thesis as “one of the most important master’s theses ever written … a landmark in that it helped to change digital circuit design from an art to a science.”

10 Claude Shannon, letter to Dr. V. Bush, December 13, 1939. Shannon papers, Library of Congress.

11 Norma (Levor) Barzman, author interview.

12 Claude Shannon, letter to Dr. V. Bush, March 8, 1940. Shannon Collection, Library of Congress.

13 Claude Shannon, letter to Dr. V. Bush, February 16, 1939. “Off and on I have been working on an analysis of some of the fundamental properties of general systems for the transmission of intellegence [
sic
], including telephony, radio, television, telegraphy, etc.” Shannon,
Collected Papers
, p. 455.

14 Claude Shannon, oral history conducted in July 1982 by Robert Price, IEEE History Center, New Brunswick, NJ.

15 Claude Shannon, interview with Robert Price, December 20, 1983. Shannon said: “… a lot of information theory … I had worked out before, during the five years between 1940 and 1945. Much of that work I did at home.” Shannon’s penciled manuscripts: author’s review, Shannon Collection, Library of Congress.

16 Betty Shannon, author interview.

17 T. C. Fry, oral history, unpublished. Interviewed by H. O. Pollak and D. M. La Porte. Author’s copy, p. 4.

18 Ibid., p. 55.

19 Ibid., p. 33.

20 Henry Pollak, author interview.

21 M. D. Fagen, ed.,
A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System: National Service in War and Peace
(1925–1975)
(Bell Telephone Laboratories, 1975), p. 172.

22 Claude Shannon, oral history with Robert Price, IEEE.

23 David Hagelbarger, author interview.

24 David Kahn, a historian of cryptography, has noted, “Shannon’s insight, his great contribution to cryptology, lay in pointing out that redundancy furnishes the ground for cryptanalysis.” Essentially, Shannon’s analysis had “given an explanation for the constancy of letter frequency … he has thus made possible, for the first time, a fundamental understanding of the process of cryptogram solution.” David Kahn,
The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communications from Ancient Times to the Internet
(New York: Scribner, 1996), p. 748.

25 Like many innovations in the Bell System, the precise history of PCM includes competing claims. AT&T has maintained, somewhat unpersuasively, that it was an early, albeit unrecognized invention of P. M. Rainey of Western Electric in 1926. But most accounts credit the invention to A. H. Reeves of International Telephone and Telegraph in 1938. Shannon’s primary contribution to the technology is in B. M. Oliver, J. R. Pierce, and C. E. Shannon, “The Philosophy of PCM,” in
Collected Papers.

26 An internal history of Bell Laboratories described two major reasons for PCM in slightly more technical terms: First, its traffic capacity could be high. The pulses and
codes of a PCM system “can be very short in duration,” allowing for the “multiplexing” of other signals (audio as well as video) in the intervals between. Also, it would be easier to preserve the quality of a digital signal, since “the uniform pulse coded samples may be exactly reconstructed at regenerators along a line so that there need be no accumulation of impairments with distance, as there is in all analog systems.”