The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

by Jon Gertner

  Though Edison became rich and famous for his phonograph and his filament for the electric light bulb, some of his less heralded inventions were arguably as influential on the course of modern life. One of those was a new use for a compressed carbon “button,” which he discovered in 1877 could be placed inside the mouthpiece of a telephone to dramatically improve the quality and power of voice transmission. (He had first tried lead, copper, manganese, graphite, osmium, ruthenium, silicon, boron, iridium, platinum, and a wide variety of other liquids and fibers.) A decade later Edison improved upon the carbon button by proposing instead the use of tiny roasted carbon granules, derived from coal, in the vocal transmitter.3 These discoveries made the telephone a truly marketable invention.

  Edison’s genius lay in making new inventions work, or in making existing inventions work better than anyone had thought possible. But how they worked was to Edison less important. It was not true, as his onetime protégé Nikola Tesla insisted, that Edison disdained literature or ideas. He read compulsively, for instance—classics as well as newspapers. Edison often said that an early encounter with the writings of Thomas Paine had set his course in life. He maintained a vast library in his laboratory and pored over chemistry texts as he pursued his inventions. At the same time, however, he scorned talk about scientific theory, and even admitted that he knew little about electricity. He boasted that he had never made it past algebra in school. When necessary, Edison relied on assistants trained in math and science to investigate the principles of his inventions, since theoretical underpinnings were often beyond his interest. “I can always hire mathematicians,” he once said at the height of his fame, “but they can’t hire me.”4

  And it was true. In the boom times of the Industrial Revolution, in the words of one science historian, inventing products such as the sewing machine or barbed wire “required mainly mechanical skill and ingenuity, not scientific knowledge and training.” Engineers in the fields of mining, rubber, and energy on occasion consulted with academic geologists, chemists, and physicists. “But on the whole, the industrial machine throbbed ahead without scientists and research laboratories, without even many college-trained engineers. The advance of technology relied on the cut-and-try methods of ingenious tinkerers, unschooled save possibly for courses at mechanics institutes.”5 Indeed, by the time Mervin Kelly began his studies at the Missouri School of Mines around 1910, any sensible American boy with an eye on the future might be thinking of engineering; the new industrial age mostly needed men who could make bigger and better machines.

  And yet the notion that scientists trained in subjects like physics could do intriguing and important work was gaining legitimacy. Americans still knew almost nothing about the sciences, but they were beginning to hear about a stream of revelations, all European in origin, regarding the hidden but fundamental structure of the visible world. Words like “radioactivity,” “X-rays,” and, especially, “quanta”—a new term for what transpired within the tiny world of molecules—started filtering into American universities and newspapers. These ideas almost certainly made their way to Missouri, where Kelly was paying his rent in Rolla—a room on the third floor of the metallurgical building—by working with the State Geological Survey for $18 a week numbering mineral specimens. During one of his summer breaks he took a job at a copper mine in Utah, an experience that repelled him permanently from a career as a mining engineer and pushed him closer to pure science. After graduating he took a one-year job teaching physics to undergraduates at the University of Kentucky. The school also gave him a master’s degree in that subject. After that, he headed north to Chicago.

  . . .

  FOR DECADES, any serious American science student had to complete his education in Europe, most often at schools in Berlin and Gottingen, Germany, where he could sit at the feet of the masters as they lectured or carried on laboratory research. (The language of science was German, too.) But early in the twentieth century a handful of American schools, notably Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and the University of Chicago, began turning out accomplished graduates in physics and chemistry. In 1916, Robert Millikan at the University of Chicago was establishing himself as a leading physicist and teacher of the subject. Then in his forties, he would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1923, and grace the cover of Time magazine in 1927. Ultimately, he would build the California Institute of Technology into one of the country’s great scientific institutions, and throughout his career he would guide many of his brightest students to jobs with AT&T. To a student like Kelly, Millikan would have seemed heroic. His textbooks on physics were becoming the standard for college instruction, and his work on measuring the exact charge of an electron, an experiment that was continuing when Kelly arrived in Chicago to study with him, had made him famous in the small community of academic physicists.

  Rather like Kelly himself, there was something authentically, irresistibly American about Millikan. Though he’d received a year’s worth of instruction in Paris, Berlin, and Gottingen, he was nevertheless the son of an Iowa preacher, cheerful, earnest, conservative, boyishly handsome, and almost always neatly dressed in a collared shirt and bow tie. Also like Kelly, Millikan was a man of action. He worked himself not quite to Edison’s extreme, but close, which suggested the bootstrap ethic could apply to physicists as well as inventors. As a younger man, the professor had almost missed his own wedding because he was so busy reviewing a scientific manuscript in his office.

  By the early twentieth century, physicists were already dividing into camps: those who theorized and those who experimented. Millikan was an experimentalist. He shrewdly devised laboratory tests that validated theoretical work but also built upon the work of other experimentalists, “discovering the weak points that could be improved upon,” as his student Paul Epstein described it. Millikan’s first great claim to fame was something known as the oil-drop experiment, which was representative of those early-twentieth-century forays into laboratory physics. The experiment was both creative and demanding—creative in how it attempted to reveal the elements of the cosmos by way of a small device constructed from everyday materials, and demanding in how it required years of follow-up work (even after the results were first shared in 1910) before it could be deemed precise. It was also, not incidentally, Mervin Kelly’s first real encounter with deep, fundamental research.6

  The oil-drop experiment would, in Millikan’s own words, serve as “the most direct and unambiguous proof of the existence of the electron.” More precisely, it would attempt to put an exact value on e, which is the charge of the electron, and which in turn would make a range of precise calculations about subatomic physics possible. Other researchers had already tried to measure e by observing the behavior of a fine mist of water that had been subjected to an electric charge. The experimenter would spray a mist between two horizontal metal plates spaced less than an inch apart. One plate carried a negative charge and the other a positive charge. The electric field between the two plates would slow the fall of some droplets. The idea, or rather the hope, was to suspend a droplet of water between the plates; then, by measuring the speed of the falling droplet and the intensity of the electric field required to slow the droplet, you could calculate its electric charge. There was a problem, however: The water in the droplet evaporated so fast that it would only remain visible for a couple of seconds. It was proving difficult to get anything beyond a rough estimate of the charge. The experiment was going nowhere.

  One of Millikan’s great ideas—he would claim it came to him on a train traveling through the plains of Manitoba—was to change the measured substance from water to oil, because oil wouldn’t evaporate, and measurements would thus improve. (It was more likely that a graduate student of Millikan’s named Harvey Fletcher actually suggested the switch from water to oil and helped him create the testing apparatus.)7 In time, the experiment came to work something like this: A researcher would stand in front of a boxlike chamber and spray a fine mist of oil from a tool called an atomizer;
he would look through a close-range telescope at the droplets, which were illuminated by a beam of light; he would then turn on the electric plates and measure (stopwatch in hand) how the oil drops behaved—how long it took for them to move down or up in their suspended state—and write down the observations.

  When Millikan’s student Harvey Fletcher first tried the experiment—when he looked through the telescope at the tiny oil drops suspended in air that sparkled like “stars in constant agitation”—he felt the urge to scream with excitement. To do the experiment for hour after hour, day after day, counting how long it took for a certain-sized drop to rise or fall a certain distance when a certain amount of current was applied, was a painstaking process. Fletcher was well matched for such work. But for someone in a hurry, for someone whose very constitution was unsuited to the practice of quiet and diligent observation, the time spent in the Millikan lab must have seemed like a kind of torture. Eventually, Fletcher’s role in the lab was taken over by a younger graduate student—Mervin Kelly. On some evenings, Kelly asked his new wife, Katherine, a pretty girl from Rolla whom he had met as an undergraduate and had married after a brief courtship, to come to the lab with him. On Chicago’s south side, late into the night, she would help him measure the drops.

  LONG BEFORE Mervin Kelly came to Millikan’s lab in 1915, a chain reaction began that would ultimately shape his own career and Bell Labs’ singular trajectory. To understand how that chain of events started, it’s helpful to pause for a moment on the image of the young physicist in the lab, counting oil drops late into the night, and go back in time a few years, to 1902. That year, Robert Millikan was married. What was significant about Millikan’s wedding was not the ceremony itself. Rather, it was his best man: a slight, balding, cigar-smoking physicist named Frank Baldwin Jewett.

  At Chicago, Jewett was pursuing a PhD when he met Millikan, a new faculty member who was nine years older. The two men lived in the same boardinghouse. Unlike Millikan, Jewett had grown up in the lap of privilege. He was the son of a railroad and electric utility executive, and his family had originally owned large tracts of land that became part of Pasadena and Greater Los Angeles. And yet Jewett wasn’t exactly a snob; he was agile-minded and glib; he could talk with and befriend almost anyone. He was especially adept at earning the trust of older men. When he graduated from Chicago, Jewett considered returning west to join the ranks of California industrialists, like his father. But first he decided to teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology instead. Midway through his year as a physics instructor, he had a chance meeting with one of the engineers at American Telephone & Telegraph, who was quickly charmed and impressed by him. When Jewett was offered a job with the company in 1904, he accepted. His pay was $1,600 a year, or about $38,000 in today’s dollars.

  Contrary to its gentle image of later years, created largely through one of the great public relations machines in corporate history, Ma Bell in its first few decades was close to a public menace—a ruthless, rapacious, grasping “Bell Octopus,” as its enemies would describe it to the press. “The Bell Company has had a monopoly more profitable and more controlling—and more generally hated—than any ever given by any patent,” one phone company lawyer admitted.8 Jewett came into the business nearly thirty years after Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone; by that point approximately two million subscribers around the country, mostly in the Northeast, were using AT&T’s phones and services. And yet the company was struggling. Bell’s patents on the telephone had expired in the 1890s, and in the years after the expiration a host of independent phone companies had entered the business and begun signing up subscribers in numbers rivaling AT&T. By then the company’s competitive practices—its unrelenting aggression, its flagrant disregard for ethical boundaries—had already won it a host of enemies. Almost from the day the Bell System was created, when Alexander Graham Bell became engaged in a multiyear litigation with an inventor named Elisha Gray over who actually deserved the patent to the telephone, the Bell company was known to be ferociously litigious.9 In its later battles with independent phone companies, however, it would often move beyond battles in the courtroom and resort to sabotaging competitors’ phone lines and stealthily taking over their equipment suppliers.

  All the while, the company maintained a policy of “noncompliance” with other service providers. This meant that AT&T often refused to carry phone calls from the competition over its intercity long-distance lines. In some metro areas, the practice led to absurd redundancies: Residents or businesses sometimes needed two or even three telephones so they could speak with acquaintances who used different service providers.10 In the meantime, AT&T did little to inspire loyalty in its customers. Their phone service was riddled with interruptions, poor sound quality, unreliable connections, and the frequent distractions of “crosstalk,” the term engineers used to describe the intrusion of one signal (or one conversation) into another. In rural areas, phone subscribers had to make do with “party lines” that connected a dozen, or several dozen, households to the local operator but could only allow one conversation at a time. Subscribers were not supposed to listen in on their neighbors’ conversations. Often they did anyway.

  AT&T’s savior was Theodore Vail, who became its president in 1907, just a few years after Millikan’s friend Frank Jewett joined the company.11 In appearance, Vail seemed almost a caricature of a Gilded Age executive: Rotund and jowly, with a white walrus mustache, round spectacles, and a sweep of silver hair, he carried forth a magisterial confidence. But he had in fact begun his career as a lowly telegraph operator. Thoughtfulness was his primary asset; he could see almost any side of an argument. Also, he could both disarm and outfox his detractors. As Vail began overseeing Bell operations, he saw that the costs of competition were making the phone business far less profitable than it had been—so much so, in fact, that Vail issued a frank corporate report in his first year admitting that the company had amassed an “abnormal indebtedness.” If AT&T were to survive, it had to come up with a more effective strategy against its competition while bolstering its public image. One of Vail’s first moves was to temper its aggression in the courts and reconsider its strategy in the field. He fired twelve thousand employees and consolidated the engineering departments (spread out in Chicago and Boston) in the New York office where Frank Jewett then worked.12 Meanwhile, Vail saw the value of working with smaller phone companies rather than trying to crush them. He decided it was in the long-term interests of AT&T to buy independent phone companies whenever possible. And when it seemed likely a few years later that the government was concerned about this strategy, Vail agreed to stop buying up companies without government permission. He likewise agreed that AT&T would simply charge independent phone companies a fee for carrying long-distance calls.

  Vail didn’t do any of this out of altruism. He saw that a possible route to monopoly—or at least a near monopoly, which was what AT&T had always been striving for—could be achieved not through a show of muscle but through an acquiescence to political supervision. Yet his primary argument was an idea. He argued that telephone service had become “necessary to existence.”13 Moreover, he insisted that the public would be best served by a technologically unified and compatible system—and that it made sense for a single company to be in charge of it. Vail understood that government, or at least many politicians, would argue that phone subscribers must have protections against a monopoly; his company’s expenditures, prices, and profits would thus have to be set by federal and local authorities.14 As a former political official who years before had modernized the U.S. Post Office to great acclaim, Vail was not hostile toward government. Still, he believed that in return for regulation Ma Bell deserved to find the path cleared for reasonable profits and industry dominance.

  In Vail’s view, another key to AT&T’s revival was defining it as a technological leader with legions of engineers working unceasingly to improve the system. As the business historian Louis Galambos would later point out, as Va
il’s strategy evolved, the company’s executives began to imagine how their company might adapt its technology not only for the near term but for a future far, far away: “Eventually it came to be assumed within the Bell System that there would never be a time when technological innovation would no longer be needed.” The Vail strategy, in short, would measure the company’s progress “in decades instead of years.”15 Vail also saw it as necessary to merge the idea of technological leadership with a broad civic vision. His publicity department had come up with a slogan that was meant to rally its public image, but Vail himself soon adopted it as the company’s core philosophical principle as well.16 It was simple enough: “One policy, one system, universal service.” That this was a kind of wishful thinking seemed not to matter. For one thing, there were many systems: The regional phone companies, especially in rural areas, provided service for millions of Americans. For another, the closest a customer could get to telephoning long distance was a call between New York and Chicago. AT&T did not have a universal reach. It didn’t even have a national reach.