by Jon Gertner
By the summer of 1951, Jack Morton’s team had thus readied Bardeen and Brattain’s point-contact transistor for large-scale production. The manufacture of the device roughly coincided with Shockley’s demonstration of the first junction transistors at a public unveiling at the West Street auditorium. The newest invention, hailed as clearly superior to the point-contact transistor in terms of its efficiency and performance (it used only one-millionth of the power of a typical vacuum tube), was “a radically new type of transistor which has astonishing properties never before achieved in any amplifying device.”
Shockley, much to his delight, was now the public face of Bell Laboratories’ research as well as the personification of the three-year-old transistor age. His fabled research group that had given rise to the device—one of the greatest research teams ever pulled together on a problem, as Brattain had put it—had largely collapsed, however. John Bardeen, frustrated by Shockley’s muscular efforts to monopolize the Labs’ semiconductor research, had decided to leave for a professorship at the University of Illinois at Urbana. Walter Brattain, too, had made his displeasure with Shockley known.
One afternoon, Mervin Kelly invited Brattain over to his home in Short Hills to discuss the matter. They likely met in Kelly’s study, where he saw all his visitors—a large and stately room, clad in dark wood paneling, with a large fireplace and big windows that looked out over Kelly’s backyard tulip gardens.36 A servant could be summoned through the push of a button on the floor. Brattain listed his frustrations with the Labs and with Shockley, whom Kelly depended on as a conduit for information. Some of Brattain’s complaints came as a surprise to Kelly, yet the boss swung back anyway with a powerful backhand. “He’s a tough customer,” Brattain would later recall with some respect. “I stated my case, and [he] pretty thoroughly knocked me down on every question I raised.” But when Brattain mentioned to Kelly that he knew precisely when Shockley invented the junction transistor, the tone changed. In veiled terms Brattain was suggesting to Kelly that he and Bardeen could somehow complicate the transistor patents based on the fact that their invention came well before Shockley’s, and “if we ever went on the stand in a patent fight” they could not lie about what they knew.37
Thereafter, Kelly made sure that Brattain was blessed with a nearly unfettered freedom at Bell Labs. Brattain was no longer involved in the transistor work, but he no longer had to report to Shockley, whom he now considered intolerable as a manager. Apparently, there was an S.O.B. in the solid-state group after all.
NOT LONG AFTER the transistor’s unveiling at the West Street auditorium, the Labs began to spread its new invention around. In later years, corporations would give calculated thought and effort to this process, which would become known as the diffusion of new technology. The executives at Bell Labs, however, were making things up as they went along. The top managers had already agreed that they were compelled to share and license the transistor device. The political logic—the appeasement of government regulators—was overwhelming. And an open-door policy had other advantages, too. Bell Labs’ breakthrough burnished its reputation as a national resource. For those doubting that the monopoly granted to AT&T, its parent company, would result in any large-scale scientific and public benefits, here was contravening proof.38
In the late 1940s, the Labs executives were simply content to pass out samples of the new device without explaining how they were made. Indeed, as Kelly traipsed through northern Europe in the summer of 1948—the trip he took after telling Jack Morton he wanted to hear a production plan when he got back—he handed out transistors like a beneficent grandfather passing out gifts of hard candy.39 By September of that year, Oliver Buckley, the Labs’ president, was writing to Kelly, then staying at the Savoy Hotel in London, to say that the Labs would soon send out samples to academic and industrial scientists. “The plan,” Buckley wrote to his deputy, “is to make a gift of two Transistors put up in a nice little box marked as a gift from the Laboratories.”40 The invention hadn’t made a whit of difference yet in the machinery of the world, of course. From a public relations perspective, though, the little transistor was a godsend.
By the time Jack Morton had ironed out some of the production problems with the point-contact transistor in the early 1950s, the Labs was ready to move ahead in licensing the technology. Shockley, seemingly immune to normal human fatigue and now without question the most eminent solid-state physicist in the world, had already written and published a five-hundred-page book—Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors—that would serve for decades as a definitive guide to scientists and engineers working with the new materials. And in 1951 and 1952, the Labs began sponsoring multiday conventions at Murray Hill, attended by hundreds of scientists and engineers from around the world, who were interested in licensing transistor rights. At the conventions, Jack Morton gave the guests a brief overview of the transistor and Gerald Pearson followed with a brief tutorial on transistor theory. The next two days were given to in-depth presentations on different types of transistors and their applications. The cost for licensing the transistor technology was $25,000. A free exception was made for companies that wanted to use the devices for hearing aids. This was in deference to AT&T founder Alexander Graham Bell, who had spent much of his career working with the deaf.
“IT IS THE BEGINNING of a new era in telecommunications and no one can have quite the vision to see how big it is,” Mervin Kelly told an audience of telephone company executives in 1951. Speaking of the transistor, he added that “no one can predict the rate of its impact.” Kelly admitted that he wouldn’t see its full effect before he retired from the Labs, but that “in the time I may live, certainly in 20 years,” it would transform the electronics industry and everyday life in a manner much more dramatic than the vacuum tube. The telecommunications systems of the future would be “more like the biological systems of man’s brain and nervous system.” The tiny transistor had reduced dimensions and power consumption “so far that we are going to get into a new economic area, particularly in switching and local transmission, and other places that we can’t even envision now.”41 It seemed to be some kind of extended human network he had in mind, hazy and fantastical and technologically sophisticated, one where communications whipped about the globe effortlessly and where everyone was potentially in contact with everyone else.
There had been whispers in the electronics industry about whether Bell Labs’ enthusiasm over the transistor was overblown; the reported difficulty in manufacturing the devices only added to the skepticism. Whether it was a shortcoming or an advantage, Kelly’s confidence was almost certainly rooted in his early experiences. He remembered the endless days and nights constructing vacuum tubes in lower Manhattan, the countless problems in the beginning and then the stream of incremental developments that improved the tubes’ performance and durability to once-unimaginable levels. He could remember, too, that as the tubes became increasingly common—in the phone system, radios, televisions, automobiles, and the like—they had come down to price levels that once seemed impossible. He had long understood that innovation was a matter of economic imperatives. As Jack Morton had said, if you hadn’t sold anything you hadn’t innovated, and without an affordable price you could never sell anything. So Kelly looked at the transistor and saw the past, and the past was tubes. He thereby intuited the future.
At the same time, there was one cautionary point he wanted to relate to fellow phone company executives. The transistor and other research projects at the Labs were hard work. Goals were set carefully, and then achieved by the process of experiment and calculation. “Bell Labs is no ‘house of magic,’” Kelly warned, echoing the headline of a recent magazine story about the Labs that he had found repellent.42 “There is nothing magical about science. Our research people are following a straight plan as a part of a system and there is no magic about it.” People rarely disagreed with Kelly to his face. But to visitors, and sometimes to scientists, too, Bell Labs nevertheless was taking on a s
lightly magical air. And it was hard to deny that wholly unscientific factors—serendipity and chance, for example—played a part in the Labs’ innovations. Hadn’t Bardeen been out of luck in finding an office, for instance, and then just happened to camp out in Brattain’s laboratory? Another example: Around the time Kelly was giving his speech to the phone company executives, a metallurgist named Bill Pfann was mulling over how to raise the purity of germanium to improve it further for transistor production. Pfann had returned to his office after lunch—“I put my feet on my desk and tilted my chair back to the window sill for a short nap, a habit then well established,” he recalled. He had scarcely dozed off when he suddenly awoke with a solution. “I brought the chair down with a clack I still remember,” he said.43 Pfann envisioned passing a molten zone—a coil of metal, in effect, creating a superheated ring—along the length of a rod of germanium; as the ring moved, it would strafe the impurities out of the germanium.
Kelly would eventually tell people that Pfann’s idea—it was called “zone refining,” and was an ingenious adaptation of a technique metallurgists had used on other materials—ranked as one of the most important inventions of the past twenty-five years. Kelly didn’t tell people it resulted from a man sleeping on the job. The process allowed the Labs’ metallurgists to fabricate the purest materials in the history of the world—germanium that had perhaps one atom of impurity among 100 million atoms.44 If that was too hard to envision, the Labs executives had a handy analogy to make it even more clear. The purity of the materials produced at Bell Labs, beginning in the early 1950s, was akin to a pinch of salt sprinkled amid a thirty-eight-car freight train carrying in its boxcars nothing else but sugar.
Seven
THE INFORMATIONIST
It might have been said in 1948 that you either grasped the immense importance of the transistor or you did not. Usually an understanding of the device took time, since there were no tangible products—no proof—to demonstrate how it might someday alter technology or culture. But a few people could see it right away. The tiny device, its three wires peeking out, was sitting on the desk of Bill Shockley one day when a guest stopped in the midst of their conversation and asked what it was. “It’s a solid-state amplifier,” Shockley told his visitor. It worked like a vacuum tube, he added.1 The visitor, a rail-thin mathematician in his early thirties who was known at Bell Labs as something of a loner, listened closely. He had a gaunt face and clear gray eyes; often he gave others the impression, always unspoken, that he was amused by whatever was being said. Very few things impressed him. But he would later explain that he immediately saw the import of what Shockley was saying. It mattered little that he was looking at the transistor in its earliest incarnation, before it was manufactured, before it even had a name.
At that point in time, employees at Bell Labs were informed of the secret device on a need-to-know basis. They were taken aside and briefed on the matter only if they were working with the metallurgical team on the purification of germanium, for instance, or if they had been drafted to work on the transistor’s development and mass production with Jack Morton. But Shockley, who was notorious for the speed with which he judged colleagues as his intellectual inferiors, believed that his guest that day, Claude Elwood Shannon, was exceptional, a scientist vital to the Labs’ reputation as an intellectual vanguard. Shannon deserved to know what the solid-state team had done. Almost anyone who spent time with the quiet, courteous Shannon, going back at least a decade, seemed to walk away with a similar impression. He was known to be retiring and eccentric. But above all, he was known to be special. “A decidedly unconventional type of youngster,” Shannon’s advisor at MIT, the engineering dean Vannevar Bush, described his young student a decade earlier.2 “He is shy, personally likable, and a man who should be handled with great care.”3 Bush’s assessment might have raised some questions—namely, why handle Shannon with great care? His thinness (five foot ten and 135 pounds) notwithstanding, it wasn’t a question of physical fragility: Shannon was athletic and energetic, never more so than when he was setting up machinery or ripping apart old electronic equipment to salvage parts for some kind of contraption he was building. Rather, it seemed to Bush and a handful of mathematicians who encountered Shannon in the late 1930s that he mightn’t be just another exceedingly bright graduate student. He was something else entirely. One professor at MIT, informed in the late 1930s that young Shannon was taking piloting lessons, considered intervening so the scientific community wouldn’t risk losing him prematurely in an air crash.4 There was, in other words, a quiet accord among the professors at MIT: People like Shannon come along so rarely that they must be protected.
At the University of Michigan and at MIT he had studied both mathematics and electrical engineering, and it wasn’t easy to say precisely where his genius resided. Some things about him actually suggested little in the way of conventional brilliance. When confronted with ordinary number problems—18 × 27, for instance—Shannon would work them out not in his head but on a blackboard.5 He wasn’t much for details; sometimes he would solve problems in a way that showed surprising intuition but a mathematical approach that some colleagues found unsatisfactory or lacking in rigor. Above all, he almost seemed more interested in doing work with his hands than with his mind. He’d originally come east from his home state of Michigan because he had found a job listing by chance at the University of Michigan, where he was finishing his undergraduate degree. “There was this little postcard on the wall,” Shannon later recalled, “saying that M.I.T. was looking for somebody to run the differential analyzer, a machine which Vannevar Bush had built to solve differential equations.”6 He applied for the job and got it.
The analyzer was an early “analog” computer that took up an entire room and required a crew of several operators. Yet it was a great leap ahead of any previous calculating machine; it could solve complex mathematical problems with revolutionary speed. The machine had a circuit of electronic switches that controlled sets of rods, pulleys, gears, and spinning disks, which assistants like Shannon had to constantly fiddle with. In a sense Shannon was a computer programmer: He would adjust the machine’s rods and gears to correspond with the values in a numerical problem. The analyzer, set in motion, would then spit out the answer to equations not through a screen or a printout but with a mechanical pen on a sheet of graph paper.
At MIT, Shannon fell in love with his machine. And as he began working with the analyzer, he became especially intrigued by the electromechanical relays in its control circuit. These were magnetic switches that clicked open or closed when a current was applied or cut off. The open or closed position of the relays could stand in for a yes or no answer to a question. Or a string of relays could branch out in one logical direction or another, whereby the positions (open or closed) each stood for “AND” or “OR.” One could thereby answer a complicated problem or execute a complicated set of commands. Shannon began to perceive a new way to think about the design and function of such circuits. He saw that one could make sense of them through an obscure branch of mathematics based on 0s and 1s—what was known as Boolean algebra.
In the summer of 1937, Shannon left Cambridge for a few months to work at the Bell Labs office on West Street, where he continued to think about how relays, switching, and circuits fit into this notion. His choice of summer jobs was fortuitous: At the time, there was no place in the world better suited for studying electrical relays, which formed the switching backbone of the entire Bell System. With Vannevar Bush’s endorsement, Shannon wrote up his insights upon his return to MIT. “I believed it was a classic, a comment which I very seldom make,” Bush said of Shannon’s thesis. But such praise, while unusual for Bush, soon seemed modest in comparison to the wider reception of Shannon’s work. His paper demonstrated that designing logic circuits for a computer could be an efficient mathematical endeavor rather than a painstaking art. In 1939, the work won him a distinguished prize from an engineering society. “I was so surprised and pleased to
receive the letter announcing the award,” he wrote to Bush, “that I nearly fainted!”7
Like so many of his future colleagues at Bell Labs, Shannon had grown up in the Midwest—in tiny Gaylord, Michigan, population 3,000, in the state’s northern tip, where by Shannon’s own account it was “small enough that if you walked a couple of blocks, you’d be in the countryside.”8 Some of the buildings in Gaylord’s modest downtown were built and owned by Shannon’s father, a businessman and probate court judge; his mother was a principal of the town’s high school. Gaylord’s closest big cities, Grand Rapids and Detroit, were more than 150 miles to the south. Shannon’s small-town innocence—I nearly fainted!—was unquestionably authentic. But so, too, was his lack of professional direction. As word spread, Shannon’s slender and highly mathematical paper, about twenty-five pages in all, would ultimately become known as the most influential master’s thesis in history.9 In time, it would influence the design of computers that were just coming into existence as well as those that wouldn’t be built for at least another generation. But this was off in a far distant future. Still only twenty-three years old, and not at all certain what to do with himself, the young man wrote to Vannevar Bush to ask what he should work on next.
. . .
VANNEVAR BUSH WAS just then moving from Cambridge to Washington to assume the presidency of the Carnegie Institution—at the time the premier private endowment in the United States for funding scientific research. Soon Bush would also begin lobbying President Franklin D. Roosevelt, successfully, to take charge of the United States’ immense research and development efforts for World War II, effectively making him the most powerful scientist in the country. His stature happened to match his own healthy self-regard. Bush delighted in connecting students and friends to one another within his large social and professional web. What’s more, inquiries such as Shannon’s were useful in satisfying Bush’s broad scientific curiosity. If Bush was interested in genetics, for instance, as he told Shannon he was, then Shannon could be a proxy: The young man might consider delving into the subject of human genes, and find a way to apply his mathematical skills to an analysis. There happened to be a laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, New York—an affiliate of the Carnegie Institution, no less—where Bush suggested Shannon might work on his PhD research. Shannon agreed. “I had a very enjoyable summer working on my genetic algebra under Dr. Burks at Cold Spring Harbor and want to thank you for making it possible,” he wrote to Bush a few months after. “The work came along very well and has been accepted here at Tech as a Ph.D. Thesis.”10