The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (66 page)

THE TECHNOLOGY OF ENVY:
T
OP
: An early junction transistor, a breakthrough device based on a 1948 theory by Bill Shockley that was built in 1951. Bell Labs’ publicity department was fond of comparing the technology to a pea or a kernel of corn. Shockley began formulating the idea as he dealt with the blow of not being one of the transistor’s original inventors. “I did not want to be left behind on this one,” he said. B
OTTOM
: Gerald Pearson, Daryl Chapin, and Cal Fuller, the creators of the first silicon solar cell. The circumstances of the innovation were serendipitous; all the men worked in different buildings.

Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center

BEHOLD, THESEUS:
T
OP RIGHT
: Claude Shannon, with the mouse-machine that could find its way through a maze and learn from its mistakes. The mouse’s logic circuits were beneath the floor of the maze. Bell Labs’ patent department was unimpressed with Theseus; Shannon’s colleagues, on the other hand, thought it brilliant. L
EFT
: One of 107 microwave towers that served as links in a long-distance coast-to-coast network that opened in 1951.
RIGHT
: John Pierce and Rudi Kompfner, circa 1951, standing before an array of traveling wave tubes.

READY FOR LAUNCH:
T
OP
: The Echo satellite balloon was made from a thin film of Mylar and stood about ten stories high. B
OTTOM
: Telstar was the first active communications satellite; in addition to sending and receiving phone and television signals, it collected a trove of data about radiation in space. The black plates on the satellite face are solar cells.
Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center

A LOST WORLD:
The small corps of scientists and engineers at the Holmdel lab, in southern New Jersey, circa 1933. The men spent their days researching antenna technology in the “turkey shed” building. Just as often, they worked outdoors, amid hundreds of acres of mown lawns. “Lord, it was just beautiful,” one visitor recalled.
Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center

THE BLACK BOX:
An austere new laboratory, viewed from outside and from within its atrium, that was designed by the architect Eero Saarinen. The building, opened in 1961, replaced the old lab in Holmdel, New Jersey, and served as a dramatic contrast to the Murray Hill buildings, thirty miles to the north. “Gone completely are the old claustrophobic, dreary, prison-like corridors,” Saarinen remarked with pride.
Ezra Stoller©Esto

AN INSTIGATOR:
John Pierce in 1961, around the time of the Echo launch. “You took your life in your hands every time you went into his office,” a colleague recalls. But Pierce’s close friends realized that his tough and skeptical exterior hid the warm inner core of a romantic.
Yale Joel/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images