by Jon Gertner
The system’s problems and needs were so vast that it was hard to know where to begin explaining them. The system required that teams of chemists spend their entire lives trying to invent new, cheaper sheathing so that phone cables would not be permeated by rain and ice; the system required that other teams of chemists spend their lives working to improve the insulation that lay between the sheathing and the phone wires themselves. Engineers schooled in electronics, meanwhile, studied echoes, delays, distortion, feedback, and a host of other problems in the hope of inventing strategies, or new circuits, to somehow circumvent them. Measurement devices that could assess things like loudness, signal strength, and channel capacity didn’t exist, so they, too, had to be created—for it was impossible to study and improve something unless it could be measured. Likewise, the system had to keep track of the millions of daily calls within it, which in turn required a vast, novel infrastructure for billing. The system had to account for it all.
“There is always a larger volume of work that is worth doing than can be done currently,” Kelly said, which was a way of acknowledging that work on the system, by definition, could have no end. It simply kept expanding at too great a clip; its problems meanwhile kept proliferating. For one person to call another required the interrelated functioning of tens of thousands of mechanical and electronic elements, all of them designed and developed by Bell Labs, and all of them manufactured by Western Electric. What’s more, almost every part of the system was designed and built to stay in service for forty years. That entailed a litany of durability tests at the West Street plant on even the most trifling of system components. Labs engineers invented a “dropping machine” to simulate “the violence of impact” of a receiver dropped into its cradle tens of thousands of times. They fashioned a “woodpecker machine,” meant to resemble “that industrious bird in action,” to test the scratch-resistant qualities of varnishes and finishes. They fabricated what they called an “artificial mouth,” resembling a freestanding microphone, to test the aural sensitivity of handsets; they created a machine with a simulated finger to mimic the demands of button-pushing and dialing. And it wasn’t enough to merely measure the durability of a telephone dial; other teams of engineers had to calibrate and measure, to a level approaching perfection, the precise speed at which the dial rotated.
Some men at West Street specialized in experimenting on springs for switchboard keys, others in improving the metal within the springs. AT&T linemen bet with their lives on the integrity of the leather harnesses that kept them tethered at great heights—so Labs technicians established strength and standards for the two-inch leather belts (limiting “the content of Epsom salts, glucose, free acid, ash and total water-soluble materials”) and improving the metal rivets and parts. Millions of soldered joints held the system together—so Labs engineers had to spend years investigating which fluxes and compounds were best for reinforcing anything from seams on sheet metal to lead joints to copper wires to brass casings. AT&T lines carried transmissions from the Teletype, a machine that could send and translate written messages over long distances—so Labs engineers likewise found it necessary to invent a better teletypewriter oiler, a small square oil can, named the 512A tool. And the Labs engineers were not necessarily content with designing any oil can; this one had to be built with a complex inner mechanism for dispensing up to (but no more than) fifteen drops of lubricant. The 512A was an example of how, if good problems led to good inventions, then good inventions likewise would lead to other related inventions, and that nothing was too small or incidental to be excepted from improvement. Indeed, the system demanded so much improvement, so much in the way of new products, so much insurance of durability, that new methods had to be created to guarantee there was improvement and durability amid all the novelty. And to ensure that the products manufactured by Western Electric were of the proper specifications and quality, a Bell Labs mathematician named Walter Shewhart invented a statistical management technique for manufacturing that was soon known, more colloquially, as “quality control.” His insights not only guided the manufacture of items within the Bell System for the next few decades, but in time were applied to improve industrial processes and products around the world.9
The system demanded that a small branch of the Labs was established in western New Jersey, in the country village of Chester. The men there were to study the outdoors deterioration of telephone equipment. Lodgepole pine trees from five western states had been determined by Labs engineers to be the most useful for poles, and so telephone men in Chester buried the pine phone poles ten feet deep and spent decades studying their degradation. At the same time, they mixed a witches’ brew of stains and fungicides, applied them to the buried poles, and graded their effectiveness. They found it necessary, too, to investigate the behavior of gophers, squirrels, and termites, which gnawed through wood and cables and were fingered as the cause of hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses every year. (One strategy the men discovered could rebuff the pesky gopher: steel tape on cables.) The cables seemed to require a variety of other types of study, too. A Bell Labs engineer named Donald Quarles, who was in charge of the Chester plant, wrote a long treatise entitled “Motion of Telephone Wires in the Wind.” His men made rigorous, multiyear tests on the proper spans (how far should the poles be spaced apart?), proper lashing (how tight should the wires be tied together?), proper vertical spacing between horizontal strings of wires (company practice suggested twelve inches, but engineers discovered eight inches could be enough to prevent abrasion). Many of the system’s most important cables, meanwhile, were not strung through the air but ran underground. For burying wire, the men in Chester had to develop new processes involving special tractors they invented and splicing techniques. Other Labs engineers focused on undersea cables, which required not only special materials and techniques but special ships, outfitted with enormous spools of cable in their massive holds, that could lay the cable smoothly on the sea bottom.
The system demanded that the Labs men go anywhere necessary to test or acquire proper materials. A sturdy telephone cable that carried hundreds of calls at the same time would do so at different frequencies, much as daylight carries within it different colors of the spectrum. “In order to get the economies resulting from putting a bundle of dozens or hundreds of telephone conversations in one conductor,” Kelly explained, “you have got to have very intricate and complex equipment at the ends of those circuits to combine all of these different telephone conversations in the one single bundle and then at the other end to unscramble them so that each conversation shall go where you want it to go.”10 The scrambling and unscrambling was done at either end with electronic filters, which separated channels, just as a prism can divide light. The essential components of these filters were quartz plates cut from quartz crystals. The men at the Labs had discovered that the best quartz for this purpose came from Brazil—“the only place in the world that has the quality of crystals of sufficient size to do this work,” Kelly said. And so the Bell Labs managers set up an extraordinary supply chain so they could get the perfect quartz, so they could make the perfect quartz filters, so they could try to perfect the system that, by its very nature, could never be perfected.
WE USUALLY IMAGINE that invention occurs in a flash, with a eureka moment that leads a lone inventor toward a startling epiphany. In truth, large leaps forward in technology rarely have a precise point of origin. At the start, forces that precede an invention merely begin to align, often imperceptibly, as a group of people and ideas converge, until over the course of months or years (or decades) they gain clarity and momentum and the help of additional ideas and actors. Luck seems to matter, and so does timing, for it tends to be the case that the right answers, the right people, the right place—perhaps all three—require a serendipitous encounter with the right problem. And then—sometimes—a leap. Only in retrospect do such leaps look obvious. When Niels Bohr—along with Einstein, the world’s greatest physicist—heard in 1938 that split
ting a uranium atom could yield a tremendous burst of energy, he slapped his head and said, “Oh, what idiots we have all been!”11
A year earlier, Mervin Kelly assigned William Shockley to a training program for new employees that included time in the vacuum tube laboratory. One day, Kelly stopped by Shockley’s West Street office, possibly to visit with Davisson, with whom Shockley shared the office, and began to talk. Shockley later recalled:
I was given a lecture by then–research director Dr. Kelly, saying that he looked forward to the time when we would get all of the relays that make contacts in the telephone exchange out of the telephone exchange and replace them with something electronic so they’d have less trouble.12
In a system that required supreme durability and quality, there were, in other words, two crucial elements that had neither: switching relays and vacuum tubes. As we’ve seen, tubes were extremely delicate and difficult to make; they required a lot of electricity and gave off great heat. Switches—the mechanisms by which each customer’s call was passed along the system’s vast grid to the precise party he was calling—were prone to similar problems. They were delicate mechanical devices; they used relays that employed numerous metal contacts; they could easily stop working and would eventually wear out. They were also, because they clicked open and closed, far slower than an electronic switch, without moving parts, might be. Kelly had set an intriguing goal that lingered in Shockley’s mind as he finished his indoctrination program and turned back to studying the physical properties of solid materials on his own and with his study group. Kelly’s articulation of a solution—a product, in essence—was fairly straightforward, even if the methods for creating such a product remained obscure: Perhaps the Labs could fashion solid-state switches, or solid-state amplifiers, with no breakable parts that operated only by way of electric pulses, to replace the system’s proliferating relays and tubes. For the rest of his life Shockley considered Kelly’s lecture as the moment when a particular idea freed his ambition, and in many respects all modern technology, from its moorings.
. . .
WHEN HE WAS OLDER, when he had become famous for his scientific achievements and infamous for his unscientific views on race, Bill Shockley would recount his past and point to what he called “irregularities.” There were, he would concede, certain irregularities about his childhood—that he was homeschooled until he was about eight, for instance, or that his parents moved so often and so arbitrarily that it was sometimes difficult to explain why he attended a particular school or lived in a particular place. Other irregularities he didn’t readily concede. As a toddler, Shockley—“Billy” to his parents, May and William—would experience tantrums that put him beyond the reach of consolation. As his father dutifully related in his diaries, his son’s emotional outbursts were often uncontrollable. Billy would slap at his parents, throw stones at other boys, bark like a dog. “Billy always gets angry because he is thwarted or denied something,” his father noted in May 1912, when his son was just two years old, in a prescient journal entry entitled “Billy’s rages.” A week later, he observed that “when he is good, he is very good indeed; and when he is bad he is horrid.”13
Shockley was an only child, and a solitary one. When he was three years old, May and William had settled in Palo Alto, California, to begin eking out a middle-class life in the same small city where May had been raised. Shockley’s father was a mining engineer with a thoughtful demeanor and substantial assets from earlier in his career, but in Palo Alto he was often short on both employment and money. His fitful work schedule left him home often enough to tutor his son in math and encourage his early curiosity about science. But Shockley would say that his largest influence was a neighbor named Pearley Ross, a professor at Stanford who worked with X-rays and whose young daughters were Shockley’s main companions. Ross taught Shockley the fundamentals of physics.
In his teens, Shockley’s family moved from Palo Alto to Los Angeles, where he attended high school before enrolling at Caltech. Slight in frame (at five foot eight) but in taut physical condition (he was devoted to calisthenics and swimming), he cut a memorable figure as an undergraduate. His childhood rages had subsided, replaced by a geniality that hid a relentless competitive edge and an occasional and savage asperity. The science prodigy seemed to have a compulsive need to charm, to entertain, to challenge the dull conventionality of academia, often in a way that subtly merged humor and aggression. Shockley schooled himself in parlor tricks and amateur magic. Sometimes he would use it to entertain a crowd at parties; other times he would use it to interrupt a sober affair or gently humiliate a lecturer. Bouncing balls materialized from nowhere, flowerpots exploded, bouquets popped suddenly from his sleeve in place of a handshake—incidents that created a distraction from the seriousness of institutional life while turning attention back on Shockley. How did he do that? It was no wonder he loved to construct intricate practical jokes as well. In one Caltech class, Shockley, with the help of some fellow students and a few faculty members, concocted a successful scheme to enroll an entirely fictitious student named, in one Caltech student’s recollection, Helvar Skaade. The target was the class professor, Fritz Zwicky, who was known for his casual attitude on matters of class attendance. “All these tests were open book exams typically,” Dean Woolridge, one of Kelly’s young recruits who also attended Caltech, would later recall. “You could use any books that you wanted to. The procedure was for the professor to come in and write down the questions on the board, and Zwicky always had five problems, and then he would leave the room and come back at the end of the hour.” Shockley arranged for one copy of the exam to be taken out of the classroom, solved expertly by himself and a team of graduates who had already taken the class, signed by Helvar Skaade, and then returned in time to be handed in. Skaade, the mysterious young genius, answered all the questions brilliantly except for the last one, to which he responded, “Hell, I’m too damn drunk to write anymore.” Skaade got an A-minus, the highest grade in the class.14
Shockley came east with an adventurous flourish that burnished his personal mythology. In the summer of 1932, he and an acquaintance, Fred Seitz, drove from California in Shockley’s 1929 DeSoto Roadster. Shockley was on his way to MIT, where he had decided to pursue a PhD. Seitz was going to get his physics PhD at Princeton—the men agreed Shockley would drop him off there. For the trip, Shockley brought a loaded pistol that he kept in the glove compartment. They selected a southern route that took them through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Arkansas, and they barely survived the trip. They encountered nights of torrential rains that obliterated the desert highways; in Kentucky, they narrowly averted a deadly head-on collision when they encountered two trucks racing toward them around a mountain pass, taking up both lanes of a two-lane road. “By the grace of the Lord, I had just enough shoulder to squeeze by the oncoming truck with perhaps an inch to spare,” Seitz recalled. “To the best of my knowledge I have never been closer to instant death than in those few seconds.”15 A few days later, on a moonlit night, Shockley dropped his new friend off in New Jersey. Princeton’s campus struck him as extremely attractive. When he arrived at MIT the next day, a stiff wind was blowing factory fumes into his face and the campus buildings appeared more industrial than academic. He wondered if he’d made a mistake. But MIT nevertheless turned out to be a good experience for Shockley. It gave him a strong background in quantum mechanics and introduced him to two friends who would prove crucial to his later career: Jim Fisk, a classmate, and Philip Morse, a professor.
To know Shockley, even in his twenties and thirties, was to be confused by him. Was he likable? “In a way,” says one of his former colleagues, Phil Anderson. An infectious energy and a boundless enthusiasm for physics had a tendency to pull colleagues into his orbit and allow them to overlook, at least for a while, his marauding ego. He could be fantastically good company—warm, witty, entertaining. He loved sharing a drink or two and frequently invited friends for rock-climbing trips or vacations in ups
tate New York with his wife and young daughter. He had an extraordinary talent for instruction and could be surprisingly generous with his time. “I would go visit him in the evenings in his apartment in Manhattan,” Chuck Elmendorf, a Caltech graduate who joined Bell Labs in 1936, recalls. “And I would just sit there on the edge of his couch and he would just teach me physics every night. He was decent, wonderful, pleasant.” In a more formal work environment, moreover, being around Shockley meant being dazzled. “He was the quickest mind I’ve ever known,” adds Anderson, a theoretical physicist who went on to win a Nobel Prize. Even at the Labs, a place where everyone was fast on their feet, Shockley was faster. “His intellectual power was such that when Shockley said something,” recalled his colleague Addison White, “I recognized it was right.”16
There was something in particular about the way he solved difficult problems, looking them over and coming up with a method—often an irregular method, solving them backward or from the inside out or by finding a trapdoor that was hidden to everyone else—to arrive at an answer in what seemed a few heartbeats. Mervin Kelly had sensed this gift right away when he had visited MIT and met with Shockley in 1936. Shockley would later say, “I can recall talking to Kelly and being impressed that he called up, used the telephone to call all the way down to New York City, to find out if he’d be authorized to make me an offer, because I had to decide right then and there.”17