by Jon Gertner
Davisson decided to stay at West Street when the war ended. He was allowed to carve out a position as a scientist who rejected any kind of management role and instead worked as a lone researcher, or sometimes a researcher teamed with one or two other experimentalists, pursuing only projects that aroused his interest. He seemed to display little concern about how (or whether) such research would assist the phone company. And he planned his experiments with such rigor and unhurried meticulousness that his output was considered meager, though in truth Davisson’s work was often interrupted by his colleagues’ questions. Frank Jewett had no illusions that his Western Electric shop was in the business of increasing human knowledge; they were in the business of increasing phone company revenues. By allowing Davisson a position on staff, though, Jewett and his deputy Harold Arnold recognized that Davy had financial value. If he was helpful to the researchers working on real-world problems, he was worth keeping around.
“He was perhaps my closest friend,” Kelly later wrote. The two men ended up living a mile apart, in Short Hills, New Jersey, and whenever Davisson was ill with some unspecified malady—a common occurrence—Kelly would visit. “Invariably I would find him in dressing gown, writing pad on his knee and pencil in hand, smoking his pipe and puzzling over his problem.” Davisson used to tell people he was lazy, but Kelly believed otherwise: “He worked at a slow pace but persistently.” Years later, Kelly noted that Davy might well be called “the father of basic research” at Bell Labs. It was another way of saying that early on, long before either man had gained power or fame, Kelly recognized in Davisson not only a friend and gifted scientist but a model for what might come later.
BY THE TIME KELLY ARRIVED at AT&T, the U.S. government had begun to concur with Theodore Vail’s arguments for his company’s expansion. A group of senators issued a report noting that the phone business, because of its sensitive technological nature—those fragile voice signals needed a unified and compatible infrastructure—was a “natural monopoly.” A House of Representatives committee, clearly sympathetic to the prospect of simply dealing with a single corporate representative, complained that telephone competition was “an endless annoyance.”5 In the Willis-Graham Act of 1921, the U.S. Congress formally exempted the telephone business from federal antitrust laws.6
By then, the so-called natural monopoly had grown even larger. Indeed, the engineering department at West Street had become so big (two thousand on its technical staff, and another sixteen hundred on its support staff) that AT&T executives agreed in a December 1924 board meeting to spin it off into a semiautonomous company. They chose the name Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. Some of their reasoning remains obscure. A short notice about the new labs in the New York Times noted that “the new company was said to [mean] a greater concentration upon the experimental phases of the telephone industry.” The spin-off, in other words, was justified by the notion that scientific research at Bell Labs would play an increasingly greater role in phone company business.7 Frank Jewett’s private memos, meanwhile, suggest that the overlap between the AT&T and Western Electric engineering departments was creating needless duplications and accounting problems. By establishing one central lab to serve two masters, the phone company would simply be more efficient.8
On January 1, 1925, AT&T officially created Bell Telephone Laboratories as a stand-alone company, to be housed in its West Street offices, which would be expanded from 400,000 to 600,000 square feet. The new entity—owned half by AT&T and half by Western Electric—was somewhat perplexing, for you couldn’t buy its stock on any of the exchanges. A new corporate board, led by AT&T’s chief engineer, John J. Carty, and Bell Labs’ new president, Frank Jewett, controlled the laboratory. The Labs would research and develop new equipment for Western Electric, and would conduct switching and transmission planning and invent communications-related devices for AT&T. These organizations would fund Bell Labs’ work. At the start its budget was about $12 million, the equivalent of about $150 million today.9
As president of Bell Labs, Jewett now commanded an enormous shop. That an industrial laboratory would focus on research and development was not entirely novel; a few large German chemical and pharmaceutical companies had tried it successfully a half century before. But Bell Labs seemed to have embraced the idea on an entirely different scale. Of the two thousand technical experts, the vast majority worked in product development. About three hundred, including Clinton Davisson and Mervin Kelly, worked under Harold Arnold in basic and applied research. As Arnold explained, his department would include “the fields of physical and organic chemistry, of metallurgy, of magnetism, of electrical conduction, of radiation, of electronics, of acoustics, of phonetics, of optics, of mathematics, of mechanics, and even of physiology, of psychology, and of meteorology.”10
From the start, Jewett and Arnold seemed to agree that at West Street there could be an indistinctness about goals. Who could know in advance exactly what practical applications Arnold’s men would devise? Moreover, which of these ideas would ultimately move from the research department into the development department and then mass production at Western Electric? At the same time, they were clear about larger goals. The Bell Labs employees would be investigating anything remotely related to human communications, whether it be conducted through wires or radio or recorded sound or visual images. At the opening of the new U.S. patent office a few years after Bell Labs was set up, Frank Jewett, whose speeches were often long-winded and hyperbolic, found a way to explain the essential idea of his new organization. An industrial lab, he said, “is merely an organization of intelligent men, presumably of creative capacity, specially trained in a knowledge of the things and methods of science, and provided with the facilities and wherewithal to study and develop the particular industry with which they are associated.” In short, he added, modern industrial research was meant to apply science to the “common affairs” of everyday life. “It is an instrument capable of avoiding many of the mistakes of a blind cut-and-try experimentation. It is likewise an instrument which can bring to bear an aggregate of creative force on any particular problem which is infinitely greater than any force which can be conceived of as residing in the intellectual capacity of an individual.”
Buried within Jewett’s long speech was a clear manifesto. The industrial lab showed that the group—especially the interdisciplinary group—was better than the lone scientist or small team. Also, the industrial lab was a challenge to the common assumption that its scientists were being paid to look high and low for good ideas. Men like Kelly and Davisson would soon repeat the notion that there were plenty of good ideas out there, almost too many.
Mainly, they were looking for good problems.
KELLY HEWED to his vacuum tube work in the years after World War I. As he ascended steadily into management, his job came to include responsibility for developing the vacuum tubes built by Bell Labs for Western Electric, which was to say he saw himself as being responsible for improving the most important invention of his lifetime up to that point. Tubes could do much more than amplify a weak phone signal or radio transmission: They could change alternating current into direct current, making them a crucial component in early radios and televisions, which received AC from the power grid but whose mechanisms required DC to operate. What’s more, the tubes could function as simple and very fast switches that turned current on and off. Early in Kelly’s tenure, his tube shop made fifteen different models. There were large water-cooled tubes the size of wine bottles that were used in high-power radio broadcast stations; small tubes for public-address systems; and the famed repeater tube that had been Harold Arnold’s great contribution in bringing the transcontinental connection to bear.
Sometimes a vacuum tube was described as a cousin to the ordinary incandescent light bulb. In some respects this was true—for instance, both devices contained wires that were sealed inside a glass container. Yet the differences between them were far more pronounced. A factory could turn out tens of thousands of b
ulbs a day. But the daily output of, say, a repeater tube that allowed telephone conversations to be conveyed across the country was at best in the hundreds. What’s more, the kind of tubes made in Kelly’s shop had to be forged with a jeweler’s precision. There was no room for error. If a light bulb failed, it would be easy to replace and not necessarily urgent; if a repeater failed, many conversations would, too. Money would be lost, maybe even lives.
Early in his career, Kelly wrote a long article explaining in meticulous detail how a vacuum tube was made. It reveals something of the nature of Bell Labs’ work in general at the time, which aspired to be at the leading edge of what any company in the world could achieve, both in conceptual and manufacturing terms. The tube shop Kelly described was located in a building a dozen blocks south of the West Street labs in Manhattan, at 395 Hudson Street. There, in a gritty industrial neighborhood, his workers, men as well as women, labored behind lab benches in large rooms outfitted for assembly and production. To explain the process, Kelly used the example of the repeater tube known as the 101-D. Its production began with a glass pipe about the size of a man’s pinkie. The pipe was heated and rotated on a machine so that its bottom opening could then be flared out. A different machine would take the top opening of the pipe, insert four long wires, and then heat the glass to seal the wires so they extended through the seal. The four wires resembled plant stalks poking through a hill of snow. This assembly was called the stem press.11
Next, a worker would attach, carefully and by hand, a solid glass rod atop the stem press, just behind the four wires that were already poking up. The glass rod was positioned vertically and was in turn superheated. A hand-operated machine was then used to insert in its hot, softened glass ten more wires. Two of these stuck out vertically, the other eight horizontally.
The assembly now looked more like a broken toy than an electronic device. It was a mass of wires, fourteen in all, poking out in all directions from a central glass core. But it wasn’t done. First, the tube’s glass core had to be heated and cooled and heated and cooled again in order to harden it. Afterward, a worker had to administer several chemical washes to remove grease and oil from the surface of the glass and wires. The faintest trace of impurities raised the risk of failure. Finally it was time for a worker to arrange the functional parts of the vacuum tube—the parts that would amplify phone signals—around the glass core and wires. These parts were the cathode, grid, and anode. It had taken the Bell scientists years to figure out, in Edisonian, trial-and-error fashion, which materials worked best. The anode was a tiny flattened, hollow box of sheet nickel; the grid was a mesh fashioned from nickel wire of several different diameters; the cathode was a ribbon of metal, M-shaped, made from a platinum-alloy core coated with other trace elements. All of these parts were heated in an oven to 1,000 degrees centigrade to burn off imperfections.
Afterward, the tube shop workers welded these parts to the ragged wires sticking out from the glass core. The contraption no longer looked disheveled. It looked like a device with a purpose. Every part was now tidily connected and wrapped tight. At this point an employee would insert what they had in front of them—the assembly of welded wires and metal plates anchored to the glass rod—into a round glass bulb roughly the size and shape of a conventional light bulb. Then they would heat the bottom of the bulb to create a closed seal.
A vacuum tube couldn’t work without a vacuum inside. So the pumping began. It was a complex, four-stage process requiring several different pumps, all of the machines designed within Kelly’s tube shop itself. The goal was to eliminate the air inside—to “approximately one-millionth of an atmosphere,” as Kelly would explain—through a hole on top of the bulb. But afterward a few other steps still remained: The inside of the bulb, for instance, had to now be heated to about 800 degrees centigrade for further improvements in the vacuum. And the hole on top of the bulb had to be sealed. Finally, a worker would connect four wires dangling from the bottom of the vacuum tube to a small cylindrical base and fasten the base to the bottom of the bulb. At last, after this final step, one could admire the finished vacuum tube, the 101-D, and get the impression of looking at a large but fabulously complex light bulb with an intricate miniature architecture of metal plates, posts, and wires inside.
Kelly called the tubes “miracle devices” that would usher in a great age of electronic communications. But he knew better than anyone how difficult they were to make: labor-intensive, complex, expensive. He knew they soaked up vast amounts of electricity to operate and gave off tremendous amounts of heat. Most of all he knew they had to be perfect, and often they weren’t. “They were awfully hard to make and they broke all the time,” his wife would recall. “He was always hoping there would be something.” Something else, in other words, that could do what only tubes could do.12
IN THE LATE 1920S, work at the tube shop, as well as at Bell Labs, boomed along with the rest of the American economy. In the months after the stock market crash of 1929, when the black depths of the Great Depression weren’t yet apparent, Kelly and a few other colleagues belonged to a buoyant “three-hours-for-lunch” club, a group of Labs employees intent on trying the newest Manhattan speakeasies (Prohibition was still in force) before the police could shut them down. But the business climate grew ever more dire. The astonishing drop in manufacturing jobs and the unrelenting misery in the American farm belt drove down phone subscriptions—and with them AT&T’s revenue. In the course of three years, between 1930 and 1933, more than 2.5 million households, most of them Bell subscribers, disconnected from the phone grid. In 1932 alone, the number of telephones with Bell service dropped by 1.65 million. Western Electric laid off 80 percent of its workforce. The Labs, which had typically hired a few hundred young employees every spring, sending out a team of recruiters to speak with professors at colleges around the country in search of graduate students who might be well suited for industrial research, stopped hiring. And then, with a straitened budget, Frank Jewett, still the Labs’ president, instituted pay cuts and a four-day workweek.
And then Harold Arnold died.
Jewett’s research deputy, forty-nine years old, suffered a heart attack at 3 a.m. on a July morning at his home in Summit, New Jersey. Jewett soon appointed a successor: a tall, thoughtful, experimental physicist named Oliver Buckley who had spent much of his career at the Labs trying to address the special problems that affected “submarine” cable—that is, cable that went under water, connecting islands to the mainland, and was susceptible to a range of stresses that didn’t affect ordinary underground phone cables. Buckley’s dream was to run a transatlantic cable from North America to Great Britain, a project that the Depression and various technological challenges had placed on an indefinite hold.
Not long after Buckley moved up, Mervin Kelly did, too. Through his work in the tube shop, as both a researcher and production chief, he had extended the life of the Western Electric telephone repeater tubes from 1,000 hours to 80,000 hours, an impressive and cost-saving feat. In 1936, Kelly was appointed director of research. The Bell Labs hierarchy was now established for the next decade: Frank Jewett on top, Buckley below him, then Kelly. Though Kelly was not technically in charge, that mattered little. As events would show, he would lead regardless of his rank or station.
KELLY’S PROMOTION, in the mid-1930s, coincided with a slight easing in the Great Depression. Phone subscriptions picked up, and so did telephone company revenues. At that point, Kelly successfully argued for extra funding to hire a group of scientists for his research department. He had his pick of almost anyone. For one thing, the Labs’ reputation had been burnished over the past few years by the work of Kelly’s old office mate, Davy Davisson. He had won fame in his profession—and in 1937, the Nobel Prize—for his experiments in what was called electron diffraction. (In an experiment, Davisson had bombarded a piece of crystalline nickel with electrons, and the results demonstrated a theory first put forward by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger that electrons
moved in a wave pattern.) For Kelly’s new hires, however, a good salary likely mattered more than Davisson’s notoriety. Kelly had funding at a time when almost no one else did. The country’s universities had drastically pared their budgets and teaching positions were almost impossible to come by. And even where research or teaching positions could be found, colleges were offering only a fraction—a half or, at best, two-thirds—of the Labs’ starting salary of $3,000 a year. “I had already figured that $2,600 was practically putting me up in the state of a rajah,” said one of the recruits, Dean Woolridge, a student under Millikan (who had now moved from the University of Chicago to Caltech). “$3,000 was just fantastic.”13
It was curious, in a way, who they were, these men coming to Bell Labs in New York. Most had been trained at first-rate graduate schools like MIT and Chicago and Caltech; they had been flagged by physics or chemistry or engineering professors at these places and their names had been quietly passed along to Kelly or someone else at the Labs. But most had been raised in fly-speck towns, intersections of nowhere and nowhere, places with names like Chickasa (in Woolridge’s case) or Quaker Neck or Petoskey, towns like the one Kelly had come from, rural and premodern like Gallatin, towns where their fathers had been fruit growers or merchants or small-time lawyers. Almost all of them had found a way out—a high school teacher, oftentimes, who noticed something about them, a startling knack for mathematics, for example, or an insatiable curiosity about electricity, and had tried to nurture this talent with extra assignments or after-school tutoring, all in the hope (never explained to the young men but realized by them all, gratefully, many years later) that the students could be pushed toward a local university and away from the desolation of a life behind a plow or a cash register.