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

by Jon Gertner

  The young Bell Labs recruits had other things in common. Almost all had grown up with a peculiar desire to know more about the stars or the telephone lines or (most often) the radio, and especially their makeshift home wireless sets. Almost all of them had put one together themselves, and in turn had discovered how sound could be pulled from the air.

  Kelly had personally hired two young PhDs from MIT, William Shockley and Jim Fisk, both of whom would have vast impacts on the Labs’ future. Others came from Caltech, such as Woolridge and an engineer named John Pierce. A chemist named William Baker was hired from Princeton. Pierce and Baker would also have tremendous influence over Bell Labs’ destiny. Another Caltech graduate was a physicist named Charles Townes, who’d been raised on a farm near Greenville, South Carolina. To grow up that way, he would later explain, made you “pay attention to the natural world, to work with machinery, and to know how to solve practical problems and fix things innovatively, with what is on hand.” In Townes’s view, those “farms and small towns are good training grounds for experimental physics.”14

  This was not necessarily an isolated opinion; a young experimental physicist who had come to the Labs a few years before Townes felt the same way. Walter Brattain grew up in rural Washington State, in Walla Walla. He had spent an entire year before college herding cattle in the mountains near his home, sleeping alone for months on end in a tent with a rifle. (When he left Washington for graduate school in Minnesota, he hopped a freight train to get there.)15 In regard to his skills as a physicist, Brattain would later say it was important “that my maternal grandfather was [a] flour miller by trade, that my paternal great grandfather, Andrew McCalley, was also a flour miller by trade, and [that] I spent a considerable [part] of my youth—a lot of years of high school and while I was at college—in a flour mill run by my father.” Brattain could take apart a car engine easily and put it back together with equal ease.16

  A certain fearlessness about life characterized the recruits. Charles Townes had been given $100 by Bell Labs to make the trip from California by rail, a sum he figured could go much further if he improvised. He took a Greyhound bus from Los Angeles to Tucson, and once there he bought a ticket for a cheap train to Mexico City. Before leaving on his trip he’d bought an accordion from a German student, “a rather ardent Nazi follower who spent a fair amount of time telling us all what a vital job Hitler was doing.” And so Townes sat on the Mexico City train in third class in the summer of 1939, “on slatted wood benches that were none too comfortable, and played a Nazi’s accordion and sang songs with Mexican fruit pickers on their way home from the fields in the United States.” He felt nervous about eating the local food at the stops—mostly he was afraid of dysentery—and for two days he lived on bottled beer. From Mexico City he traveled to the Guatemala border, but could go no farther when he discovered a bridge was closed. So instead he went up to Acapulco, not yet a tourist destination, and rented a hut on the beach for fifty cents a night, where he spent the days swimming in the warm tropical waters. Then another cheap train to Texas. Then a bus to see his family in South Carolina. And then finally another bus to get to New York City. “The $100 from Bell Labs,” he recalled, “just about exactly covered the trip’s total cost.”17

  During their first few days in New York, the new “members of the technical staff”—MTSs, as they were called—learned their way around West Street. They were summoned to listen to speeches by Labs vice president Buckley, delivered from detailed note cards, and research chief Kelly, delivered from memory with his eyes closed, as was his habit, welcoming them to Bell Labs. But mostly they met with their supervisors—in Townes’s case, Harvey Fletcher; in Bill Shockley’s case, Clinton Davisson—to try and hash out what kind of work they would be doing. At one point during the first few days the freshmen were asked to sell the rights to their future patents, whatever these might be; their research, wherever it took them, was to benefit Bell Labs and phone subscribers. None of the young men refused. And in exchange for their signatures, each was given a crisp one-dollar bill.

  Three

  SYSTEM

  The physicists that Kelly hired toward the end of the Great Depression—Shockley, Fisk, Woolridge, Townes, and all the rest—already knew how easily ideas could move from one side of the earth to the other. Usually the ideas came inside an envelope, printed in a formidable journal—Annalen der Physik from Germany, for instance, or Physical Review from New York—transported by the mail trains to New England, the Midwest, or the West Coast, where the package would be eagerly received by young physicists at places like Harvard, Chicago, or Caltech. The ideas also came to willing readers, in clear and eloquent English, via a publication named the Bell System Technical Journal, where a physicist named Karl Darrow, another former student of Millikan’s, had a gift for summarizing what he called “contemporary advances” in science, such as the newest model of the structure of the atom. Darrow had trembling hands. This left him unsuited to experimentation. Before Harold Arnold died, however, he had recognized in Darrow a useful skill for disseminating information. “I was thinking that I ought to look for a place in the academic world,” Darrow recalled, when Arnold “told me I might remain and do what I pleased.”1 The catch was that Darrow shouldn’t expect his Bell Labs salary to rise as high as that of the engineers working more directly on phone company business—a fair enough trade-off to Darrow. From then on his job involved traveling to Europe in the summers and effectively serving as an intermediary between scientific ideas there and in the United States. More often than not, his writings addressed the behavior of matter and energy at the tiny, molecular—that is, quantum—level. Quantum mechanics, as it was beginning to be called, was a science of deep surprises, where theory had largely outpaced the proof of experimentation. Some years later the physicist Richard Feynman would elegantly explain that “it was discovered that things on a small scale behave nothing like things on a large scale.” In the quantum world, for instance, you could no longer say that a particle has a certain location or speed. Nor was it possible, Feynman would point out, “to predict exactly what will happen in any circumstance.” To describe the actions of electrons or nuclei at the center of atoms, in other words, was not only exceedingly difficult. One also had to forsake the sturdy and established laws of Newtonian physics for an airy realm of imagination.2

  Increasingly, during the late 1920s and early 1930s, ideas arrived in the flesh, too. Some years Karl Darrow would visit California to lecture; some years students in various locations would learn from a physics professor named John Van Vleck, who was permitted to ride the nation’s passenger trains free of charge because he had helped work out the national rail schedules with exacting precision. It also was the case that a scholar from abroad (a 1931 world tour by the German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, for instance) would bring the new ideas to the students at Caltech or the University of Michigan. Indeed, the Bell Labs experimentalist Walter Brattain, the physicist son of a flour miller, was taking a summer course at Michigan when he heard Sommerfeld talk about atomic structure. Brattain dutifully took notes and brought the ideas back to New York. At West Street, he gave an informal lecture series to his Bell Labs colleagues.

  Every month, as it happened, seemed to bring a new study on physics, chemistry, or metallurgy that was worth spreading around—on the atomic structure of crystals, on ultra-high-frequency radio waves, on films that cover the surface of metals, and so forth. One place to learn about these ideas was the upper floor of the Bell Labs West Street offices, where a large auditorium served as a place for Bell Labs functions and a forum for new ideas. In the 1920s, a one-hour colloquium was set up at 5 p.m. on Mondays so that outside scholars like Robert Millikan and Enrico Fermi or inside scholars like Davisson, Darrow, and Shockley—though only twenty-seven years old at the time—could lecture members of the Bell Labs technical staff on recent scientific developments. (Albert Einstein came to West Street in 1935, but was evidently more interested in touring the microphone
shop with Harvey Fletcher than giving a talk.)3 Another place to learn about the new ideas was the local universities. The Great Depression, as it happened, was a boon for scientific knowledge. Bell Labs had been forced to reduce its employees’ hours, but some of the young staffers, now with extra time on their hands, had signed up for academic courses at Columbia University in uptown Manhattan. Usually the recruits enrolled in a class taught on the Columbia campus by a professor named Isidor Isaac (I. I.) Rabi, who was destined for a Nobel Prize.

  And there was, finally, another place on West Street where new ideas could now spread. Attendance was allowed by invitation only. Some of the Labs’ newest arrivals after the Depression had decided to further educate themselves through study groups where they would make their way through scientific textbooks, one chapter a week, and take turns lecturing one another on the newest advances in theoretical and experimental physics. One study group in particular, informally led by William Shockley at the West Street labs, and often joined by Brattain, Fisk, Townes, and Woolridge, among others, met on Thursday afternoons. The men were interested in a particular branch of physics that would later take on the name “solid-state physics.” It explored the properties of solids (their magnetism and conductivity, for instance) in terms of what happens on their surfaces as well as deep in their atomic structure. And the men were especially interested in the motions of electrons as they travel through the crystalline lattice of metals. “What had happened, I think, is that these young Ph.D.’s were introducing what is essentially an academic concept into this industrial laboratory,” one member of the group, Addison White, would tell the physics historian Lillian Hoddeson some years later. “The seminar, for example, was privileged in that we started at let’s say a quarter of five, when quitting time was five.” The men had tea and cookies served to them from the cafeteria—“all part of the university tradition,” White remarked, “but unconventional in the industrial laboratory of that day.” The material was a challenge for everyone in the group except Shockley, who could have done the work in his sleep, Woolridge would recall. Out of habit, the men addressed one another by their last names. According to Brattain, it was always Shockley and Woolridge—never Bill and Dean, and never Dr. Shockley and Dr. Woolridge.

  As the study group wound down for the evening, the men would often make their way over to Brattain’s Greenwich Village apartment for a drink. By then it was 8 or 9 p.m.—time for dinner at a restaurant in the Village and then bed. Shockley lived nearby in an apartment on West 17th Street. “I don’t think we had the idea then that some of the sort of things that later have become so central in the technology—that they were around the corner,” he would recall. “There’s no telling how far off they were.”4 By outward appearances, the study group was merely comprised of telephone men who were intent on learning new ideas. They weren’t yet famous enough to set their own hours. They were expected to be back at West Street the next morning at 8:45 sharp, each wearing a crisp white shirt, jacket, and tie.

  IN LATER YEARS it would sometimes be construed, thanks in part to AT&T’s vast publicity apparatus, that scientists came to the Labs in the 1930s and 1940s for the good of science. But that was an incidental dividend of their work. Mervin Kelly hired the best researchers he could find for the good of the system. The new recruits were no longer asked to climb telephone poles and operate switchboards. But all were given long seminars in their first few weeks on how the Bell System worked. Oliver Buckley, the Labs vice president, told his new employees, “Our job, essentially, is to devise and develop facilities which will enable two human beings anywhere in the world to talk to each other as clearly as if they were face to face and to do this economically as well as efficiently.”5 It was reminiscent of Theodore Vail’s dictum of “one policy, one system, universal service.” But it likewise suggested that the task at hand was immense. Already in the Bell System there were about 73 million phone calls made each day—and the numbers kept climbing.6 In the earliest days of AT&T, company engineers realized the daunting implications of such growth: The larger the system became, the larger the challenges would be in managing its complexity and structural integrity. It was also likely that the larger the system became, the higher the cost might be to individual subscribers unless technologies became more efficient. To scientists like Jewett, Buckley, and Kelly, that the growth of the system produced an unceasing stream of operational problems meant it had an unceasing need for inventive solutions. But the engineers weren’t merely trying to improve the system functionally; their agreements with state and federal governments obliged them to improve it economically, too. Every employee on West Street was therefore encouraged to take a similar perspective on the future: Phone service not only had to get better and bigger. It had to get cheaper.

  Not everyone took Ma Bell’s corporate adages at face value. By the late 1930s, in fact, AT&T was in the midst of a federal investigation that focused closely on whether it was overpaying for phone equipment from Western Electric, and thus overcharging phone users as a result. Some of the findings that came out of the multiyear inquiry—summarized in a scathing portrait of the company, written by a federal lawyer named N. R. Danielian, entitled A.T.&T.: The Story of Industrial Conquest—portrayed the Bell System as a monstrous entity focused less on public service than on maintaining its stock price and rate of expansion. Danielian painted an ugly picture of how Ma Bell executives had used propaganda—books, periodicals, short films—to enhance their corporate image during the 1920s. In his view, moreover, AT&T’s size and dominating nature raised the question of whether it was actually an “industrial dictatorship” obscured by a scrim of civic-mindedness. “The [Bell] System,” Danielian pointed out, “constitutes the largest aggregation of capital that has ever been controlled by a single private company at any time in the history of business. It is larger than the Pennsylvania Railroad Company and United States Steel Corporation put together. Its gross revenues of more than one billion dollars a year are surpassed by the incomes of few governments of the world. The System comprises over 200 vassal corporations. Through some 140 companies it controls between 80 and 90 percent of local telephone service and 98 percent of the long-distance telephone wires of the United States.” The Bell System owned the wires involved in certain aspects of radio transmission, Danielian added, and had become involved in a host of other pursuits, such as equipment for motion pictures. Its needs for raw materials added up to “hundreds of millions of dollars” annually; its deposits in banks involved “almost a third of the active banks in the United States”; its investors numbered nearly a million. It was also, not incidentally, the largest employer in the United States.7

  Kelly would maintain—sometimes under oath, in front of a state or federal utility commission—that Bell Labs’ purpose was to give AT&T and its regional operating companies “the best and most complete telephone service at the lowest possible cost.” He could talk for long stretches—easily for thirty minutes at a time, and with deep conviction—about the virtues of the Bell System and the scientific research it paid for at his laboratory. The difficulty was to reconcile his views with Danielian’s. Perhaps the only way to do so was to accept that there was no reconciliation. The truths about the Bell System, and in turn Bell Labs, were not so much mutually exclusive as simultaneous. The overseers of the phone company, those top-hatted executives at AT&T, were mercenary and aggressive and as arrogant as any captains of industry. But the phone service offered to subscribers was reliable and of high quality and not terribly expensive. That was a point even Danielian conceded. AT&T’s aggressive strategy to patent its inventions, meanwhile, made it difficult for individuals and smaller companies to compete; it was also a tool for generating profits. But Danielian likewise acknowledged that the discoveries at Bell Labs had been essential to the progress of society at large. “They have not only made things better, but have created new services and industries,” he wrote of the scientists and engineers. “They have also made significant contributions to
pure science. For these, no one would wish to deny just praise.”

  The larger point in all of this was that Bell Labs, for all its romantic forays into the mysteries of science, remained an integral part of the phone business. The Labs management made an effort to isolate its scientists from the gritty day-to-day political concerns of the business. But the managers themselves had to keep track of how the technology and politics and finances of their endeavor meshed together. Indeed, they could never forget it. As long as the business remained robust—and it was the primary job of people like Mervin Kelly to keep the business robust—so did the Labs.

  IN THE FIRST DECADE of the twentieth century, the transcontinental phone line had been one example of how the challenges of expanding the phone system led to inventions like the repeater tube. But it was only one example. Following the rapid development of the telephone business in the early twentieth century, everything that eventually came to be associated with telephone use had been assembled from scratch. The scientists and engineers at Bell Labs inhabited what one researcher there would aptly describe, much later, as “a problem-rich environment.”8 There were no telephone ringers at the very start; callers would get the attention of those they were calling by yelling loudly (often, “ahoy!”) into the receiver until someone on the other end noticed. There were no hang-up hooks, no pay phones, no phone booths, no operator headsets. The batteries that powered the phones worked poorly. Proper cables didn’t exist, and neither did switchboards, dials, or buttons. Dial tones and busy signals had to be invented. Lines strung between poles often didn’t work, or worked poorly; lines that were put underground, a necessity in urban centers, had even more perplexing transmission problems. Once telephone engineers realized they could also broadcast messages via radio waves, they encountered a host of other problems (such as atmospheric interference) they had never before contemplated. But slowly they solved these problems, and the result was something that soon came to be known, simply and plainly, as the system.