The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
Page 1
The
Idea
Factory
The
Idea
Factory
Bell Labs and the
Great Age of
American Innovation
JON GERTNER
THE PENGUIN PRESS
New York
2012
THE PENGUIN PRESS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in 2012 by The Penguin Press,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Jon Gertner, 2012
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gernter, Jon.
The idea factory : the Bell Labs and
the great age of American innovation / Jon Gernter.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-101-56108-9
1. Bell Telephone Laboratories—History—20th century.
2. Telecommunication—United States—History—20th century.
3. Technological innovations—United States—History—20th century.
4. Creative ability—United States—History—20th century. 5. Inventors—United States—History—20th century. I. Title.
TK5102.3.U6G47 2012
384—dc23
2011040207
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
DESIGNED BY AMANDA DEWEY
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
For Liz, Emmy, and Ben
CONTENTS
Introduction. WICKED PROBLEMS
PART ONE
One. OIL DROPS
Two. WEST TO EAST
Three. SYSTEM
Four. WAR
Five. SOLID STATE
Six. HOUSE OF MAGIC
Seven. THE INFORMATIONIST
Eight. MAN AND MACHINE
Nine. FORMULA
Ten. SILICON
Eleven. EMPIRE
PART TWO
Twelve. AN INSTIGATOR
Thirteen. ON CRAWFORD HILL
Fourteen. FUTURES, REAL AND IMAGINED
Fifteen. MISTAKES
Sixteen. COMPETITION
Seventeen. APART
Eighteen. AFTERLIVES
Nineteen. INHERITANCE
Twenty. ECHOES
Acknowledgments
Endnotes and Amplifications
Sources
Selected Bibliography
Index
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
—T. S. Eliot, The Rock
Introduction
WICKED PROBLEMS
This book is about the origins of modern communications as seen through the adventures of several men who spent their careers working at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Even more, though, this book is about innovation—about how it happens, why it happens, and who makes it happen. It is likewise about why innovation matters, not just to scientists, engineers, and corporate executives but to all of us. That the story is about Bell Labs, and even more specifically about life at the Labs between the late 1930s and the mid-1970s, isn’t a coincidence. In the decades before the country’s best minds began migrating west to California’s Silicon Valley, many of them came east to New Jersey, where they worked in capacious brick-and-glass buildings located on grassy campuses where deer would graze at twilight. At the peak of its reputation in the late 1960s, Bell Labs employed about fifteen thousand people, including some twelve hundred PhDs. Its ranks included the world’s most brilliant (and eccentric) men and women. In a time before Google, the Labs sufficed as the country’s intellectual utopia. It was where the future, which is what we now happen to call the present, was conceived and designed.
For a long stretch of the twentieth century, Bell Labs was the most innovative scientific organization in the world. It was arguably among the world’s most important commercial organizations as well, with countless entrepreneurs building their businesses upon the Labs’ foundational inventions, which were often shared for a modest fee. Strictly speaking, this wasn’t Bell Labs’ intended function. Rather, its role was to support the research and development efforts of the country’s then-monopolistic telephone company, American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), which was seeking to create and maintain a system—the word “network” wasn’t yet common—that could connect any person on the globe to any other at any time. AT&T’s dream of “universal” connectivity was set down in the early 1900s. Yet it took more than three-quarters of a century for this idea to mature, thanks largely to the work done at Bell Labs, into a fantastically complex skein of copper cables and microwave links and glass fibers that tied together not only all of the planet’s voices but its images and data, too. In those evolutionary years, the world’s business, as well as its technological progress, began to depend on information and the conduits through which it moved. Indeed, the phrase used to describe the era that the Bell scientists helped create, the age of information, suggested we had left the material world behind. A new commodity—weightless, invisible, fleet as light itself—defined the times.
A new age makes large demands. At Bell Labs, it required the efforts of tens of thousands of scientists and engineers over many decades—millions of “man-hours,” in the parlance of AT&T, which made a habit of calculating its employees’ toil to a degree that made its workers proud while also keeping the U.S. government (which closely monitored the company’s business practices and long-distance phone monopoly) at bay. For reasons that are conceptual as well as practical, this book does not focus on those tens of thousands of Bell Laboratories workers. Instead, it looks primarily at the lives of a select and representative few: Mervin Kelly, Jim Fisk, William Shockley, Claude Shannon, John Pierce, and William Baker. Some of these names are notorious—Shockley, for instance, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 and in his later years steadfastly pursued a scientific link between race and intelligence. Others, such as Shannon, are familiar to those within a certain area of interest (in Shannon’s case, mathema
tics and artificial intelligence) while remaining largely unknown to the general public. Pierce, a nearly forgotten figure, was the father of satellite communications and an instigator of more ideas than can be properly accounted for here. Kelly, Fisk, and Baker were presidents of the Labs, and served as stewards during the institution’s golden age. All these men knew one another, and some were extremely close. With the exception of Mervin Kelly, the eldest of the group, they were sometimes considered members of a band of Bell Labs revolutionaries known as the Young Turks. What bound them was a shared belief in the nearly sacred mission of Bell Laboratories and the importance of technological innovation.
The men preferred to think they worked not in a laboratory but in what Kelly once called “an institute of creative technology.” This description aimed to inform the world that the line between the art and science of what Bell scientists did wasn’t always distinct. Moreover, while many of Kelly’s colleagues might have been eccentrics, few were dreamers in the less flattering sense of the word. They were paid for their imaginative abilities. But they were also paid for working within a culture, and within an institution, where the very point of new ideas was to make them into new things.
SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT how new ideas begin? Practically speaking, if our cell phones ring and our computer networks function we don’t need to recall how two men sat together in a suburban New Jersey laboratory during the autumn of 1947 and invented the transistor, which is the essential building block of all digital products and contemporary life. Nor should we need to know that in 1971 a team of engineers drove around Philadelphia night after night in a trailer home stocked with sensitive radio equipment, trying to set up the first working cell phone system. In other words, we don’t have to understand the details of the twentieth century in order to live in the twenty-first. And there’s a good reason we don’t have to. The history of technology tends to remain stuffed in attic trunks and the minds of aging scientists. Those breakthrough products of past decades—the earliest silicon solar cells, for example, which were invented at Bell Labs in the 1950s and now reside in a filing cabinet in a forlorn warehouse in central New Jersey—seem barely functional by today’s standards. So rapid is the evolutionary development of technological ideas that the journey from state-of-the-art to artifact can occur in a mere few years.
Still, good arguments urge us to contemplate scientific history. Bill Gates once said of the invention of the transistor, “My first stop on any time-travel expedition would be Bell Labs in December 1947.”1 It’s a perceptive wish, I think. Bell Labs was admittedly imperfect. Like any elite organization, it suffered at times from personality clashes, institutional arrogance, and—especially in its later years—strategic missteps. Yet understanding the circumstances that led up to that unusual winter of 1947 at Bell Labs, and what happened there in the years afterward, promises a number of insights into how societies progress. With this in mind, one might think of a host of reasons to look back at these old inventions, these forgotten engineers, these lost worlds.
While our engineering prowess has advanced a great deal over the past sixty years, the principles of innovation largely have not. Indeed, the techniques forged at Bell Labs—that knack for apprehending a vexing problem, gathering ideas that might lead to a solution, and then pushing toward the development of a product that could be deployed on a massive scale—are still worth considering today, where we confront a host of challenges (information overloads, infectious disease, and climate change, among others) that seem very nearly intractable. Some observers have taken to calling them “wicked problems.” As it happens, the past offers the example of one seemingly wicked problem that was overcome by an innovative effort that rivals the Apollo program and Manhattan Project in size, scope, expense, and duration. That was to connect all of us, and all of our new machines, together.
“At first sight,” the writer Arthur C. Clarke noted in the late 1950s, “when one comes upon it in its surprisingly rural setting, the Bell Telephone Laboratories’ main New Jersey site looks like a large and up-to-date factory, which in a sense it is. But it is a factory for ideas, and so its production lines are invisible.”2 Some contemporary thinkers would lead us to believe that twenty-first-century innovation can only be accomplished by small groups of nimble, profit-seeking entrepreneurs working amid the frenzy of market competition. Those idea factories of the past—and perhaps their most gifted employees—have no lessons for those of us enmeshed in today’s complex world. This is too simplistic. To consider what occurred at Bell Labs, to glimpse the inner workings of its invisible and now vanished “production lines,” is to consider the possibilities of what large human organizations might accomplish.
Part 1
One
OIL DROPS
The first thing they tended to notice about Mervin Kelly was his restlessness. Anyone in the town of Gallatin, Missouri, could see it. The boy was antsy, impatient—barely able to contain himself in anticipation of some future event that could not possibly arrive quickly enough. You might think he’d been born with electricity running through his veins. He was serious about his schoolwork, but his excess of energy led him to a multitude of other jobs, too. At a very young age, he made extra money assisting in his father’s store and leading cows to pasture for local farmers. At ten he began building a paper route business, and soon became an employer of other boys who did the work, rather than the one who made the deliveries. By his teenage years he was also helping his father keep the books at the shop downtown. His high school class was small—just eighteen students—but he was a striver, becoming both class president and valedictorian. His classmates called him “our Irish king.” People in Gallatin noticed that, too. The young man was intent on being in charge. And in a place where people neither walked fast nor talked fast, young Mervin Kelly did both.
His father—kindly and bookish, and not nearly the go-getter his son was turning out to be—was named Joseph Fennimore Kelly. As a young man, Joe Kelly had taught high school history and English, but by 1900, when the Kelly family was counted for the first time in the Gallatin census, he was managing a hardware store on the east side of the town square. Despite being seventy-five miles from Kansas City, far enough away to be considered a backwater, Gallatin’s downtown bustled. The clear reason was its location at the intersection of two train lines, the Rock Island and the Wabash, both of which stopped in town to take in and disgorge passengers. As a result, Gallatin, with a population of just 1,700, boasted three hotels and several restaurants. The town had two newspapers, two banks, five dentists, four druggists, two jewelers, and nine physicians. There were two cigar factories, four blacksmiths, and several saloons. In Gallatin, the Kelly family had settled in a prosperous place that was perched on the cusp of modernity.
All around was the simplicity of small-town life. The days were mostly free of noisy machinery or any kind of electric distractions. You butchered your own hogs and collected eggs from your own hens. Farmers and merchants alike visited with acquaintances around the crowded town square on Saturday nights. The Old West—the Wild West—had not quite receded, and so you listened quite regularly to reminiscences about the trial of Frank James, Jesse’s outlaw brother, which Gallatin had hosted a few decades before. On hot days in the summer you walked or rode a horse a half mile from town to the banks of the Grand River, where you would go for a swim; and on some summer evenings, if you were a teenager (and if you were lucky), you danced with a girl at an ice cream social. There were no radio stations yet—the device was mostly a new toy for hobbyists—so instead there might be a primitive Edison phonograph or a string band at the party, some friends who could play fiddle and mandolin.
In the meantime, there was little doubt that Gallatin was moving ahead with the rest of the world. And the disruptions of technology, at least to a young man, must have seemed thrilling. It wasn’t only the railroads. As Mervin Kelly attended high school, automobiles began arriving in Gallatin. Thanks to a diesel generator, the town now enj
oyed a few hours of electricity each evening. A local telephone exchange—a small switchboard connecting the hundred or so phone subscribers in Gallatin—opened its office near the town square, in the same brick building as the Kelly hardware store. To see the switchboard in action, Kelly would only have had to step outside his father’s store, turn right, and walk around the side of the building to the front door of the exchange. In a sense, his future was right around the corner.
At sixteen, he was awarded a scholarship to the Missouri School of Mines, located in the town of Rolla, 250 miles away. To someone from Gallatin, such a distance was almost unimaginably far, yet Kelly seemed to have no reservations about leaving. “I was really pretty lucky,” he later said. Few people in his town made it through high school; fewer still made it to college. When he departed, the young man thought he might ultimately work as a geologist or mining engineer. That way, he would travel to the far reaches of the earth. He seemed well aware that the course of his life might be determined by his energetic impulses. “My zeal,” Kelly noted in the Gallatin High School yearbook, “has condemned me.”
IN 1910, when Kelly set off for mining school, few Americans recognized the differences between a scientist, an engineer, and an inventor. The public was far more impressed by new technology than the knowledge that created the technology. Thus it was almost certainly the case that the inventor of machinery seemed more vital to the modern age than someone—a trained physicist, for example—who might explain how and why the machine worked.
There seemed no better example of this than Thomas Edison. By the time Kelly was born, in 1894, Edison was a national hero, a beau ideal of American ingenuity and entrepreneurship. Uniquely intuitive, Edison had isolated himself with a group of dedicated and equally obsessive men at a small industrial laboratory in New Jersey. Edison usually worked eighteen hours a day or longer, pushing for weeks on end, ignoring family obligations, taking meals at his desk, refusing to pause for sleep or showers. He disliked bathing and usually smelled powerfully of sweat and chemical solvents.1 When fatigue overcame him he would crawl under his table for a catnap or stretch out on any available space (though eventually his wife placed a bed in the library of his West Orange, New Jersey, laboratory). For his inventing, Edison used a dogged and systematic exploratory process. He tried to isolate useful materials—his stockroom was replete with everything from copper wire to horses’ hoofs and rams’ horns—until he happened upon a patentable, and marketable, combination.2