The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (62 page)

Also, a word about the oral histories listed in the following pages, which I’ve quoted from with the permission of the American Institute of Physics, AT&T, the California Institute of Technology, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and Harriet Zuckerman of the Columbia University Oral History Project. I am grateful to all of these institutions and historians for giving me access to this work. But one oral historian in particular—Lillian Hoddeson—deserves special recognition. Her dogged efforts in the 1970s to track down the origins of solid-state physics, and her insightful interviews of Shockley, Fisk, Bardeen, Pearson, Ohl, and a number of other Bell Labs researchers, have been a resource for a generation of writers. These interviews now reside with the American Institute of Physics. I’m particularly lucky to have been directed to her interview of Katherine Kelly, Mervin Kelly’s widow, in the AIP archives, which helped add flavor to the life of a man who left few clues, and several mysteries, behind.

I
N THIS BOOK
I’ve tried to describe a group of Bell Labs researchers whose lives have never been the subject of an ensemble narrative; I’ve also made it my priority to contextualize their achievements within the social, scientific, and commercial world of Bell Labs. What I have not done, however, is go as deep into the details of various innovations as some other historians. Fortunately, for readers more interested in, say, communications sciences or solid-state physics, a number of authors have done so. Their books have enriched my own reporting and are worth searching
out in their own right. All of these texts are included in the bibliography on the pages that follow. A few are worth an additional plug here.

The definitive scientific and technological history of the Bell System is a seven-volume set, published by AT&T between 1975 and 1982, that comprises about forty-eight hundred pages. Though the writing is technical and uneven (and in places far too favorably disposed to its parent company), the set is illuminating and indispensable. Four of the volumes in particular—on the Bell System’s early years; on transmission technology; on switching history; and on wartime service—were especially useful to me. A companion, eighth volume in the series entitled
Engineering and Operations in the Bell System
also proved helpful, especially in its methodical unraveling of the phone system’s technical and organizational complexity.

These books should not be thought of as the final word, however. In the science literature about Bell Labs and its era, more accessible—and more independent-minded—histories abound. Daniel Kevles’s
The Physicists
is a valuable book that explains the rise and influence of physics in America; Leonard Reich’s
The Making of American Industrial Research
is an expert summation of the early rise of scientific research at GE and Bell Labs. Robert Buderi’s
The Invention That Changed the World
is essential reading for anyone interested in the development of wartime radar systems. For those interested in a deeper history of the transistor and semiconductor electronics, meanwhile, two books in particular are worth seeking out.
Revolution in Miniature
, by Ernest Braun and Stuart Macdonald, is a thoughtful exploration of the invention and its implications.
Crystal Fire
, by Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson, is an authoritative account of the transistor’s birth and development. Two other excellent books—
The Chip
, by T. R. Reid, which focuses mostly on Jack Kilby; and
The Man Behind the Microchip
, by Leslie Berlin, which explores the life of Robert Noyce—explain how the transistor gave way to an even more powerful invention, the integrated circuit.

Claude Shannon is not yet the subject of a full biography. Yet his encyclopedia-sized
Collected Papers
, edited by Neil Sloane and Aaron Wyner, includes all of Shannon’s seminal (and well-written) papers on
Boolean algebra, cryptography, information, chess, and juggling. It also contains a wide-ranging and valuable interview of Shannon, done originally for
Omni
magazine, by Anthony Liversidge. (Another valuable interview of Shannon, which I relied upon but is unfortunately not included in the book, was conducted by Robert Price for the IEEE.) For a better understanding of how Shannon’s work fits into the science of cryptography, there is David Kahn’s monumental book
The Codebreakers.
For a better sense of how Shannon’s work formed the basis of communications engineering, there is Bob Lucky’s
Silicon Dreams
and Robert Gallager’s
Principles of Digital Communication
. James Gleick’s
The Information
, which was published as this book was in the final stages of editing, struck me as essential reading for anyone interested in how Shannon’s work fits into the evolution of our information-based society. And for those wishing to get more of a flavor for Shannon’s life and thought process, I suggest watching the engaging thirty-minute documentary “Claude Shannon: Father of the Information Age,” which is available for viewing on YouTube. I likewise suggest Googling “The Essential Message,” an unpublished MIT thesis on Shannon by Erico Marui Guizzo, which is an insightful look into how he created information theory. Finally, no list of books on Shannon would be complete without
Fortune’s Formula
, William Poundstone’s entertaining narrative of how in the 1960s Shannon and his friend Ed Thorp tried to beat the Las Vegas casinos and Wall Street.

John Pierce wrote many technical books that are still available through used booksellers; with Mike Noll, he also wrote
Signals
, a useful and accessible introduction to the science of communications. Alas, one of Pierce’s most captivating pieces of writing was
My Career as an Engineer
, an autobiography (unpublished in the United States) that he wrote—very quickly, I’m sure—for a small Japanese publisher upon receiving the Japan Prize in 1985. It is not available to a general readership, but I had the good fortune to get my hands on a copy thanks to Mike Noll. Another book useful for understanding Pierce and the developments that led to the early communications satellites is Arthur C. Clarke’s
Voice Across the Sea
. Also, to get a better understanding of the laser and fiber optics work
that went on under Pierce’s deputy Rudi Kompfner, I recommend
The Laser in America
, Joan Lisa Bromberg’s history of the device, as well as Jeff Hecht’s exhaustive examination of the invention and development of fiber optics,
City of Light
.

Finally, there are a multitude of books on telephone history and AT&T that informed my conclusions. Among the best are Claude Fischer’s
America Calling
, which documents the telephone’s early social history, and John Brooks’s
Telephone
, which deftly explains the business decisions that shaped AT&T’s first hundred years. Two books on AT&T’s breakup, meanwhile, though differing in their perspective, are especially well-written and compelling:
The Fall of the Bell System
, by Peter Temin, and
The Deal of the Century
, by Steve Coll. And two other books on the Bell System are worth noting as well. Sonny Kleinfield’s
The Biggest Company on Earth
presents a vivid snapshot of AT&T just before the breakup, and Jeremy Bernstein’s
Three Degrees Above Zero
captures life at Bell Laboratories in the midst of the empire’s early-1980s transition.

Other books, along with many magazine and journal articles that proved useful, are listed in the selected bibliography below.

—J.G.

• Rod Alferness
  

• Phil Anderson
  

• Joe Baker
  

• Norma Barzman
  

• Walter Brown
  

• Alan Chynoweth
  

• Steven Chu
  

• Edward E. David
  

• Gerry DiPiazza
  

• Phil DiPiazza
  

• Irwin Dorros
  

• Robert Dynes
  

• George Eberhardt
  

• Chuck Elmendorf
  

• Joel Engel
  

• Alan English
  

• Gary Feldman
  

• Bill Fleckenstein
  

• Dick Frenkiel
  

• Robert Gallager
  

• Ted Geballe
  

• Randy Giles
  

• Eugene Gordon
  

• Robert Gunther-Mohr
  

• David Hagelbarger
  

• Ira Jacobs
  

• Bill Jakes
  

• Mary Jakes
  

• William Keefauver
  

• Jeong Kim
  

• Leonard Kleinrock
  

• Herwig Kogelnik
  

• Henry Landau
  

• Arthur Lewbel
  

• Tingye Li
  

• Sandy Liebsman
  

• Bob Lucky
  

• John MacChesney
  

• Max Mathews
  

• John Mayo
  

• Brock McMillan
  

• Debasis Mitra
  

• Cherry Murray
  

• Michael Noll
  

• Doug Osheroff
  

• Joe Parisi
  

• Arno Penzias
  

• Henry Pollak
  

• Ian Ross
  

• John Rowell
  

• Mannfred Schroeder
  

• Betty Shannon
  

• David Slepian
  

• Neil Sloane
  

• Dave Stark
  

• Morris Tanenbaum
  

• Robert Von Mehren
  

• William O. Baker (Chemical Heritage)
  

• William O. Baker (National Reconnaissance Office [NRO])
  

• John Bardeen (American Institute of Physics [AIP])
  

• John Bardeen (Harriet Zuckerman/Columbia University)
  

• Nicolaas Bloembergen (AIP)
  

• Walter Brattain (Alan Holden and W. J. King/AIP)
  

• Walter Brattain (Charles Weiner/AIP)
  

• Walter Brattain (Harriet Zuckerman)
  

• C. Chapin Cutler (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers [IEEE])
  

• Karl Darrow (AIP)
  

• James Fisk (AIP)
  

• Thornton Fry (AT&T)
  

• Cal Fuller (Chemical Heritage)
  

• William Golden
  

• Eugene Gordon (IEEE)
  

• Richard Hamming (AT&T)
  

• Conyers Herring (AIP)
  

• Alan Holden (AIP)
  

• Charles Kao (AIP)
  

• Katherine Kelly (AIP)
  

• Jack Kilby (Charles Babbage Institute)
  

• Robert Lucky (IEEE)
  

• John Mayo (IEEE)
  

• Stanley Morgan (AIP)
  

• Foster Nix (AIP)
  

• Russell Ohl (AIP)
  

• Barney Oliver (Hewlett-Packard)
  

• Eugene O’Neill (IEEE)
  

• Gerald Pearson (AIP)
  

• John Pierce (Caltech)
  

• John Pierce (AT&T)
  

• John Pierce (IEEE)
  

• Ian Ross (IEEE)
  

• Arthur Schawlow (Stanford University)
  

• Claude Shannon (IEEE)
  

• William Shockley (AIP)
  

• William Shockley (Harriet Zuckerman)
  

• Gordon Teal (AIP)
  

• Charles Townes (AIP)
  

• Addison White (AIP)
  

• Dean Woolridge (AIP)
  

Adams, Stephen, and Orville Bustler.
Manufacturing the Future: A History of Western Electric
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Anderson, John B.
Digital Transmission Engineering.
2nd ed. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press/John Wiley & Sons, 2005.

Baldwin, Neil.
Edison: Inventing the Century.
New York: Hyperion, 1995.

Bardeen, John. “Semiconductor Research Leading to the Point Contact Transistor.” Nobel Prize Lecture, December 11, 1956;
http://130.242.18.21/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1956/bardeen-lecture.html
.

Barzman, Norma.
The Red and the Blacklist: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate.
New York: Nation Books, 2004.

Bell Laboratories Record
, 1925–1986, vols. 1–64. Published by Bell Telephone Laboratories. Warren, NJ: AT&T Archives.

Bello, Francis. “The World’s Greatest Industrial Laboratory.”
Fortune
, November 1958.

Berlin, Leslie.
The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley
. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Bernstein, Jeremy
. Three Degrees Above Zero
. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1984.

Block, Fred, and Matthew Keller. “Where Do Innovations Come From: Transformations in the U.S. National Innovation System, 1970–2006” (July 2008). Information Technology & Innovation Foundation;
www.itif.org
.

Bown, Ralph. “The Transistor as an Industrial Research Episode.”
Scientific Monthly
80, no. 1 (January 1955).

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

Brinkman, William, et al. “A History of the Invention of the Transistor and Where It Will Lead Us.”
IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits
32, no. 12 (December 1997).

Bromberg, Joan Lisa.
The Laser in America, 1950–1970.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.

Brooks, John.
Telephone: The First Hundred Years; The Wondrous Invention That Changed a World and Spawned a Corporate Giant.
New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

Buckley, Oliver E. “Bell Laboratories in the War.”
Bell Telephone Magazine
, Winter 1944.

Buderi, Robert.
The Invention That Changed the World: How a Small Group of Radar Pioneers Won the Second World War and Launched a Technological Revolution
. New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Christensen, Clayton.
The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business
. New York: HarperBusiness, 2003.