How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

by Steven Johnson

  Understandably, the recording was not of the highest quality, even played at the right speed. For most of the clip, the random noise of the recording apparatus overwhelms Scott’s voice. But even this apparent failing underscores the historic importance of the recording. The strange hisses and decay of degraded audio signals would become commonplace to the twentieth-century ear. But these are not sounds that occur in nature. Sound waves dampen and echo and compress in natural environments. But they don’t break up into the chaos of mechanical noise. The sound of static is a modern sound. Scott captured it first, even if it took a century and a half to hear it.

  But Scott’s blind spot would not prove to be a complete dead end. Fifteen years after his patent, another inventor was experimenting with the phonautograph, modifying Scott’s original design to include an actual ear from a cadaver in order to understand the acoustics better. Through his tinkering, he hit upon a method for both capturing and transmitting sound. His name was Alexander Graham Bell.

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  FOR SOME REASON, sound technology seems to induce a strange sort of deafness among its most advanced pioneers. Some new tool comes along to share or transmit sound in a new way, and again and again its inventor has a hard time imagining how the tool will eventually be used. When Thomas Edison completed Scott’s original project and invented the phonograph in 1877, he imagined it would regularly be used as a means of sending audio letters through the postal system. Individuals would record their missives on the phonograph’s wax scrolls, and then pop them into the mail, to be played back days later. Bell, in inventing the telephone, made what was effectively a mirror-image miscalculation: He envisioned one of the primary uses for the telephone to be as a medium for sharing live music. An orchestra or singer would sit on one end of the line, and listeners would sit back and enjoy the sound through the telephone speaker on the other. So, the two legendary inventors had it exactly reversed: people ended up using the phonograph to listen to music and using the telephone to communicate with friends.

  As a form of media, the telephone most resembled the one-to-one networks of the postal service. In the age of mass media that would follow, new communications platforms would be inevitably drawn toward the model of big-media creators and a passive audience of consumers. The telephone system would be the one model for more intimate—one-to-one, not one-to-many—communications until e-mail arrived a hundred years later. The telephone’s consequences were immense and multifarious. International calls brought the world closer together, though the threads connecting us were thin until recently. The first transatlantic line that enabled ordinary citizens to call between North America and Europe was laid only in 1956. In the first configuration, the system allowed twenty-four simultaneous calls. That was the total bandwidth for a voice conversation between the two continents just fifty years ago: out of several hundred million voices, only two dozen conversations at a time. Interestingly, the most famous phone in the world—the “red phone” that provided a hotline between the White House and the Kremlin—was not a phone at all in its original incarnation. Created after the communications fiasco that almost brought us to nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the hotline was actually a Teletype that enabled quick, secure messages to be sent between the powers. Voice calls were considered to be too risky, given the difficulties of real-time translation.

  Inventor Alexander Graham Bell’s laboratory in which he experimented with the transmission of sound by electricity, 1886.

  The telephone enabled less obvious transformations as well. It popularized the modern meaning of the word “hello”—as a greeting that starts a conversation—transforming it into one of the most recognized words anywhere on earth. Telephone switchboards became one of the first inroads for women into the “professional” classes. (AT&T alone employed 250,000 women by the mid-forties.) An AT&T executive named John J. Carty argued in 1908 that the telephone had had as big of an impact on the building of skyscrapers as the elevator:

  It may sound ridiculous to say that Bell and his successors were the fathers of modern commercial architecture—of the skyscraper. But wait a minute. Take the Singer Building, the Flatiron Building, the Broad Exchange, the Trinity, or any of the giant office buildings. How many messages do you suppose go in and out of those buildings every day? Suppose there was no telephone and every message had to be carried by a personal messenger? How much room do you think the necessary elevators would leave for offices? Such structures would be an economic impossibility.

  But perhaps the most significant legacy of the telephone lay in a strange and marvelous organization that grew out of it: Bell Labs, an organization that would play a critical role in creating almost every major technology of the twentieth century. Radios, vacuum tubes, transistors, televisions, solar cells, coaxial cables, laser beams, microprocessors, computers, cell phones, fiber optics—all these essential tools of modern life descend from ideas originally generated at Bell Labs. Not for nothing was it known as “the idea factory.” The interesting question about Bell Labs is not what it invented. (The answer to that is simple: just about everything.) The real question is why Bell Labs was able to create so much of the twentieth century. The definitive history of Bell Labs, Jon Gertner’s The Idea Factory, reveals the secret to the labs’ unrivaled success. It was not just the diversity of talent, and the tolerance of failure, and the willingness to make big bets—all of which were traits that Bell Labs shared with Edison’s famous lab at Menlo Park as well as other research labs around the world. What made Bell Labs fundamentally different had as much to do with antitrust law as the geniuses it attracted.

  Employees install the “red phone,” the legendary hotline that connected the White House to the Kremlin during the Cold War, in the White House, August 30, 1963, Washington, D.C.

  From as early as 1913, AT&T had been battling the U.S. government over its monopoly control of the nation’s phone service. That it was, in fact, a monopoly was undeniable. If you were making a phone call in the United States at any point between 1930 and 1984, you were almost without exception using AT&T’s network. That monopoly power made the company immensely profitable, since it faced no significant competition. But for seventy years, AT&T managed to keep the regulators at bay by convincing them that the phone network was a “natural monopoly” and a necessary one. Analog phone circuits were simply too complicated to be run by a hodgepodge of competing firms; if Americans wanted to have a reliable phone network, it needed to be run by a single company. Eventually, the antitrust lawyers in the Justice Department worked out an intriguing compromise, settled officially in 1956. AT&T would be allowed to maintain its monopoly over phone service, but any patented invention that had originated in Bell Labs would have to be freely licensed to any American company that found it useful, and all new patents would have to be licensed for a modest fee. Effectively, the government said to AT&T that it could keep its profits, but it would have to give away its ideas in return.

  It was a unique arrangement, one we are not likely to see again. The monopoly power gave the company a trust fund for research that was practically infinite, but every interesting idea that came out of that research could be immediately adopted by other firms. So much of the American success in postwar electronics—from transistors to computers to cell phones—ultimately dates back to that 1956 agreement. Thanks to the antitrust resolution, Bell Labs became one of the strangest hybrids in the history of capitalism: a vast profit machine generating new ideas that were, for all practical purposes, socialized. Americans had to pay a tithe to AT&T for their phone service, but the new innovations AT&T generated belonged to everyone.

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  ONE OF THE MOST TRANSFORMATIVE breakthroughs in the history of Bell Labs emerged in the years leading up to the 1956 agreement. For understandable reasons, it received almost no attention at the time; the revolution it would ultimately enable was almost half a century in the future, and its very existence was a state secret, almost as closely guarded as the Manhattan Proj
ect. But it was a milestone nonetheless, and once again, it began with the sound of the human voice.

  The innovation that had created Bell Labs in the first place—Bell’s telephone—had ushered us across a crucial threshold in the history of technology: for the first time, some component of the physical world had been represented in electrical energy in a direct way. (The telegraph had converted man-made symbols into electricity, but sound belonged to nature as well as culture.) Someone spoke into a receiver, generating sound waves that became pulses of electricity that became sound waves again on the other end. Sound, in a way, was the first of our senses to be electrified. (Electricity helped us see the world more clearly thanks to the lightbulb during the same period, but it wouldn’t record or transmit what we saw for decades.) And once those sound waves became electric, they could travel vast distances at astonishing speeds.

  But as magical as those electrical signals were, they were not infallible. Traveling from city to city over copper wires, they were vulnerable to decay, signal loss, noise. Amplifiers, as we will see, helped combat the problem, boosting signals as they traveled down the line. But the ultimate goal was a pure signal, some kind of perfect representation of the voice that wouldn’t degrade as it wound its way through the telephone network. Interestingly, the path that ultimately led to that goal began with a different objective: not keeping our voices pure, but keeping them secret.

  During World War II, the legendary mathematician Alan Turing and Bell Labs’ A. B. Clark collaborated on a secure communications line, code-named SIGSALY, that converted the sound waves of human speech into mathematical expressions. SIGSALY recorded the sound wave twenty thousand times a second, capturing the amplitude and frequency of the wave at that moment. But that recording was not done by converting the wave into an electrical signal or a groove in a wax cylinder. Instead, it turned the information into numbers, encoded it in the binary language of zeroes and ones. “Recording,” in fact, was the wrong word for it. Using a term that would become common parlance among hip-hop and electronic musicians fifty years later, they called this process “sampling.” Effectively, they were taking snapshots of the sound wave twenty thousand times a second, only those snapshots were written out in zeroes and ones: digital, not analog.

  Working with digital samples made it much easier to transmit them securely: anyone looking for a traditional analog signal would just hear a blast of digital noise. (SIGSALY was code-named “Green Hornet” because the raw information sounded like a buzzing insect.) Digital signals could also be mathematically encrypted much more effectively than analog signals. While the Germans intercepted and recorded many hours of SIGSALY transmissions, they were never able to interpret them.

  Developed by a special division of the Army Signal Corps, and overseen by Bell Labs researchers, SIGSALY went into operation on July 15, 1943, with a historic transatlantic phone call between the Pentagon and London. At the outset of the call, before the conversation turned to the more pressing issues of military strategy, the president of Bell Labs, Dr. O. E. Buckley, offered some introductory remarks on the technological breakthrough that SIGSALY represented:

  We are assembled today in Washington and London to open a new service, secret telephony. It is an event of importance in the conduct of the war that others here can appraise better than I. As a technical achievement, I should like to point out that it must be counted among the major advances in the art of telephony. Not only does it represent the achievement of a goal long sought—complete secrecy in radiotelephone transmission—but it represents the first practical application of new methods of telephone transmission that promise to have far-reaching effects.

  If anything, Buckley underestimated the significance of those “new methods.” SIGSALY was not just a milestone in telephony. It was a watershed moment in the history of media and communications more generally: for the first time, our experiences were being digitized. The technology behind SIGSALY would continue to be useful in supplying secure lines of communication. But the truly disruptive force that it unleashed would come from another strange and wonderful property it possessed: digital copies could be perfect copies. With the right equipment, digital samples of sound could be transmitted and copied with perfect fidelity. So much of the turbulence of the modern media landscape—the reinvention of the music business that began with file-sharing services such as Napster, the rise of streaming media, and the breakdown of traditional television networks—dates back to the digital buzz of the Green Hornet. If the robot historians of the future had to mark one moment where the “digital age” began—the computational equivalent of the Fourth of July or Bastille Day—that transatlantic phone call in July 1943 would certainly rank high on the list. Once again, our drive to reproduce the sound of the human voice had expanded the adjacent possible. For the first time, our experience of the world was becoming digital.

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  THE DIGITAL SAMPLES OF SIGSALY traveled across the Atlantic courtesy of another communications breakthrough that Bell Labs helped create: radio. Interestingly, while radio would eventually become a medium saturated with the sound of people talking or singing, it did not begin that way. The first functioning radio transmissions—created by Guglielmo Marconi and a number of other more-or-less simultaneous inventors in the last decades of the nineteenth century—were almost exclusively devoted to sending Morse code. (Marconi called his invention “wireless telegraphy.”) But once information began flowing through the airwaves, it was not long before the tinkerers and research labs began thinking of how to make spoken word and song part of the mix.

  One of those tinkerers was Lee De Forest, one of the most brilliant and erratic inventors of the twentieth century. Working out of his home lab in Chicago, De Forest dreamed of combining Marconi’s wireless telegraph with Bell’s telephone. He began a series of experiments with a spark-gap transmitter, a device that created a bright, monotone pulse of electromagnetic energy that can be detected by antennae miles away, perfect for sending Morse code. One night, while De Forest was triggering a series of pulses, he noticed something strange happening across the room: every time he created a spark, the flame in his gas lamp turned white and increased in size. Somehow, De Forest thought, the electromagnetic pulse was intensifying the flame. That flickering gaslight planted a seed in De Forest’s head: somehow a gas could be used to amplify weak radio reception, perhaps making it strong enough to carry the more information-rich signal of spoken words and not just the staccato pulses of Morse code. He would later write, with typical grandiosity: “I discovered an Invisible Empire of the Air, intangible, yet solid as granite.”

  After a few years of trial and error, De Forest settled on a gas-filled bulb containing three precisely configured electrodes designed to amplify incoming wireless signals. He called it the Audion. As a transmission device for the spoken word, the Audion was just powerful enough to transmit intelligible signals. In 1910, De Forest used an Audion-equipped radio device to make the first ever ship-to-shore broadcast of the human voice. But De Forest had much more ambitious plans for his device. He had imagined a world in which his wireless technology was used not just for military and business communications but also for mass enjoyment—and in particular, to make his great passion, opera, available to everyone. “I look forward to the day when opera may be brought into every home,” he told the New York Times, adding, somewhat less romantically, “Someday even advertising will be sent out over the wireless.”

  On January 13, 1910, during a performance of Tosca by New York’s Metropolitan Opera, De Forest hooked up a telephone microphone in the hall to a transmitter on the roof to create the first live public radio broadcast. Arguably the most poetic of modern inventors, De Forest would later describe his vision for the broadcast: “The ether wave passing over the tallest towers and those who stand between are unaware of the silent voices which pass them on either side… . And when it speaks to him, the strains of some well-loved earthly melody, his wonder grows.”

  Alas, t
his first broadcast did not trigger quite as much wonder as it did derision. De Forest invited hordes of reporters and VIPs to listen to the broadcast on his radio receivers dotted around the city. The signal strength was terrible, and listeners heard something closer to the Green Hornet’s unintelligible buzz than the strains of a well-loved earthly melody. The Times declared the whole adventure “a disaster.” De Forest was even sued by the U.S. attorney for fraud, accused of overselling the value of the Audion in wireless technology, and briefly incarcerated. Needing cash to pay his legal bills, De Forest sold the Audion patent at a bargain price to AT&T.

  When the researchers at Bell Labs began investigating the Audion, they discovered something extraordinary: from the very beginning Lee De Forest had been flat-out wrong about most of what he was inventing. The increase in the gas flame had nothing to do with electromagnetic radiation. It was caused by sound waves from the loud noise of the spark. Gas didn’t detect and amplify a radio signal at all; in fact, it made the device less effective.

  But somehow, lurking behind all of De Forest’s accumulation of errors, a beautiful idea was waiting to emerge. Over the next decade, engineers at Bell Labs and elsewhere modified his basic three-electrode design, removing the gas from the bulb so that it sealed a perfect vacuum, transforming it into both a transmitter and a receiver. The result was the vacuum tube, the first great breakthrough of the electronics revolution, a device that would boost the electrical signal of just about any technology that needed it. Television, radar, sound recording, guitar amplifiers, X-rays, microwave ovens, the “secret telephony” of SIGSALY, the first digital computers—all would rely on vacuum tubes. But the first mainstream technology to bring the vacuum tube into the home was radio. In a way, it was the realization of De Forest’s dream: an empire of air transmitting well-loved melodies into living rooms everywhere. And yet, once again, De Forest’s vision would be frustrated by actual events. The melodies that started playing through those magical devices were well-loved by just about everyone except De Forest himself.