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

by Jon Gertner

  IN 1956, Shannon was invited to spend a semester at MIT as a visiting professor. Almost immediately, he and Betty felt rejuvenated by the intellectual life of Cambridge—the plays, concerts, lectures, bookstores, libraries, and the like. “There is an active structure of university life that tends to overcome monotony and boredom,” Shannon explained. “The new classes, the vacations, the various academic exercises add considerable variety to the life here.”17 Years before, Betty says, she had lamented the Labs’ move to the New Jersey suburbs from Manhattan: “At West Street when we went to lunch we went to the Village or a bookstore. At Murray Hill, we would go to the cafeteria and then get right back to work.” Cambridge reminded her more of the old days.

  Not long after he arrived at MIT, the school offered Shannon a permanent job. Bell Labs made a counteroffer, and Shannon wrestled with this painful dilemma. In October, he wrote his supervisor at the Labs, Hendrik Bode, to say, “I have finally decided to have a go at academic life.” Like a mathematician balancing out a complex equation, he drew for Bode a dichotomy between life at Bell Labs and life in Cambridge. “With regard to personnel, I feel Bell Labs is at least equal in caliber to the general level in academic circles. In some of their specialties Bell Labs is certainly stronger.” But the intellectual range of the university—and the long summer vacations—appealed to him more. “It always seemed to me that the freedom I took [at the Labs] was something of a special favor,” he told Bode. At MIT, it seemed to him, freedom “in hours of work” would be less unusual.

  At around this point in his career, Shannon was beginning to publish less. Perhaps it would have been impossible to keep up the extraordinary run he’d had in the 1940s; perhaps, too, a torrent of ideas still rushed through his mind but he was less interested, as he later conceded, in writing any of them down. “We’ve got boxes full of unfinished papers,” Betty would remark to visitors.18 Many years later Shannon would leave behind these half-written papers along with scraps of ideas and mathematical scribbles that were titled “good problems”—but with no indication as to whether he had ever found it worth his time to discover good answers.19 Family life, by the time he left Bell Labs for MIT, was in any event often taking precedence over work. He and Betty had three children. After the visiting professorship at MIT, Shannon decided to take a one-year fellowship in California, at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, before returning to Massachusetts for the next phase of his career. Rather than flying, he bought a Volkswagen microbus and drove the family out west.20

  In Shannon’s old Bell Labs office, his machines and his folders of unanswered letters were packed up and sent to Massachusetts. “When all these advantages and disadvantages are added up it seems to me that Bell Labs and academic life are roughly on par,” Shannon had told Bode in his resignation letter, “but having spent fifteen years at Bell Labs I felt myself getting a little stale and unproductive.” It was unclear precisely what he was going to do at MIT. His initial project involved hosting a popular lecture series on different topics—information, communication, computers—for students and faculty. Meanwhile, he was also involved in several projects with the National Security Agency, a secret government organization within the Department of Defense that focused on cryptography and the deciphering of international communications.21 But he still intended to pursue his personal curiosities. He and Betty bought a grand house by a lake in Winchester, Massachusetts; soon after, Shannon purchased a Massachusetts Transport Authority bus so he could gut it and reconfigure the inside into a perfect camping vehicle—with a stove, bunk beds, and folding tables. In his free time—or was it all free time?—he experimented with a rocket-powered Frisbee, a gasoline-powered pogo stick, and his various unicycles. He also started to build intricate juggling machines where balls and rings weren’t actually juggled by mechanical figurines but were instead moved on hidden guidewires. All the while he began thinking about outfitting a special room in the big house with mirrors—on the floor, ceiling, walls—to create the illusion of an infinite stretch of rooms where none existed.

  “Mostly he worked at home,” Betty says. Students would come to the house to visit him, mainly to seek advice on their research but also to hear about his newest enthusiasms or experience his latest electromechanical gadget. He quit smoking and began running two or three miles in the morning. Letters kept arriving, meanwhile—letters he still rarely answered—asking him questions both trivial and profound. There were invitations to give speeches or lectures in far-flung locales, or congratulations on the bestowment of honorary degrees and awards. Sometimes letter writers asked, would Dr. Shannon consider contributing to a new book? And sometimes he would actually send back a typewritten response. “Unfortunately,” he would say, “I am currently completely snowed under with a google of other jobs.”22 When he did answer a letter it was more likely to be about juggling than mathematics.

  At first, Shannon visited Murray Hill occasionally. He would come to talk with his old colleagues like Slepian and Hagelbarger about his most recent ideas, and to hear about theirs and perhaps offer a suggestion or two. Shannon and his supervisors at Bell Labs agreed that he would stay on the Labs payroll as a part-time employee, so he still maintained an office there. But eventually the visits to Murray Hill grew less and less frequent. And then, finally, he would not come at all. Shannon’s office, its nameplate burnished and its door always closed, stood in wait. He remained in the Bell Laboratories telephone book. Those who phoned his office discovered they would instead be directed to a Bell Labs secretary, who would inform them that no, no, unfortunately, Dr. Shannon wasn’t in today.23

  Nine

  FORMULA

  In the late winter of 1950, Mervin Kelly embarked on a whirlwind trip through France, Switzerland, Sweden, Holland, Belgium, and England. Kelly had gone to Europe just a few years before—in 1948, not long after the invention of the transistor, for a monthlong excursion. At that time, he had made his way through a continent that was broken not only socially and politically, but technologically as well. Repairs to the havoc wrought by World War II were only beginning. Now, two years later, Kelly was keenly interested in seeing how much Europe’s laboratories and communications systems had rebounded.

  But he had come across the Atlantic with another purpose as well.1 Over the past year he had prepared a lengthy presentation about Bell Labs, and in Europe he intended to lecture on an organization that he now described as “an example of an institute of creative technology.” He was a missionary with a gospel to preach. On the same trip during which British engineers were urging Kelly to send Claude Shannon to Europe to talk about Shannon’s new theory of information, Kelly was meanwhile offering them a broader context into which they could place Shannon’s work, or for that matter Bill Shockley’s. Kelly wanted to explain how their efforts were enmeshed within the vast machinery of ideas at Bell Labs. Listeners who hadn’t before seen or heard Kelly reacted to his habitual manner—speedy, impatient, assertive—with surprise. “The remark was made that never before were so many words said in 1.5 hours in England,” Kelly wrote to Ralph Bown, his deputy, about one of his speeches. “So I apparently was talking at my home speed.”2

  In London, late in the afternoon on March 23, 1950, Kelly gave a polished version of the lecture about Bell Labs in front of the Royal Society, making every effort to speak more slowly. Even sixty years after the fact, it is worth pausing to consider what Kelly was trying to do in the London speech, for he not only tried to explain the empire he was building, but why he was building it. Only good manners kept him from suggesting to a packed auditorium that Bell Labs was the world’s foremost example of a place where scientists pursued creative technology. Echoing Shannon’s ideas on the subject, Kelly told his audience in London that “the telephone system of the United States could be viewed as a single, integrated, highly technical machine in which electrical currents that are very small and complex in wave form are sent from any one of more than 40 million points to any one of
all the others.”3 Bell Labs helped maintain and improve that system, he said, by creating an organization that could be divided into three groups. The first group was research, where scientists and engineers provided “the reservoir of completely new knowledge, principles, materials, methods and art.” The second group was in systems engineering, a discipline started by the Labs, where engineers kept one eye on the reservoir of new knowledge and another on the existing phone system and analyzed how to integrate the two. In other words, the systems engineers considered whether new applications were possible, plausible, necessary, and economical. That’s when the third group came in. These were the engineers who developed and designed new devices, switches, and transmissions systems. In Kelly’s sketch, ideas usually moved from (1) discovery, to (2) development, to (3) manufacture.

  To look at the process in more concrete terms, Kelly explained, one might imagine the kernel of new knowledge that arose from the Labs’ solid-state research team just two years before The transistor moved from there to development and manufacture. At the same time, the systems engineers began to consider how to insert it into the phone system. Though its impact on technology was still only speculative, the transistor validated in Kelly’s mind everything he had done in his management career, along with everything he thought America’s industries (and now Europe’s, too) should be doing in the years to come.

  In truth, the handoff between the three departments at Bell Labs was often (and intentionally) quite casual. Part of what seemed to make the Labs “a living organism,” Kelly explained, were social and professional exchanges that moved back and forth, in all directions, between the pure researchers on one side and the applied engineers on the other. These were formal talks and informal chats, and they were always encouraged, both as a matter of policy and by the inventive design of the Murray Hill building. Researchers and engineers would find themselves discussing their respective problems in the halls, over lunch, or they might be paired together on a project, either at their own request or by managers. Or a staffer with a question would casually seek out an expert, “whether he be a mathematician, a metallurgist, an organic chemist, an electromagnetic propagation physicist, or an electron device specialist.” At the Labs this was sometimes known as going to “the guy who wrote the book.” And it was often literally true. The guy who wrote the definitive book on a subject—Shockley on semiconductors, John Tukey on statistics, Claude Shannon on information, and so forth—was often just down the hall. Saddled with a difficult problem, a new hire at Bell Labs, a stuttering nobody, was regularly directed by a supervisor toward one of these men. Some young employees would quake when they were told to go ask Shannon or Shockley a question. Still, Labs policy stated that they could not be turned away.

  Physical proximity, in Kelly’s view, was everything. People had to be near one another. Phone calls alone wouldn’t do. Kelly had even gone so far as to create “branch laboratories” at Western Electric factories so that Bell Labs scientists could get more closely involved in the transition of their work from development to manufacture.

  Kelly never mentioned the word “innovation” in his speech. It would be a few more years before the executives at Bell Labs—especially Jack Morton, the head of transistor development—began using the word regularly.4 What he went on to describe in London, though, was a systematized approach to innovation, the fruit of three decades of consideration at the Labs. To Kelly, inventing the future wasn’t just a matter of inventing things for the future; it also entailed inventing ways to invent those things. In London, Kelly seemed to be saying that Bell Labs’ experience over the past few years demonstrated that the process of innovation could now be professionally fostered and managed with a large degree of success—and even, perhaps, with predictability. Industrial science was now working on a scale, and embracing a complexity, that Edison could never have imagined. Please listen, Kelly was telling the Europeans. He had a formula.

  IN TECHNOLOGY, the odds of making something truly new and popular have always tilted toward failure. That was why Kelly let many members of his research department roam free, sometimes without concrete goals, for years on end. He knew they would fail far more often than not. To gather new knowledge in real time, as Kelly had done all his life—even back to those early days in his career, when he counted oil drops in Millikan’s lab, or when he shared an office on West Street with the slow-moving and specter-thin Clinton Davisson—was to see how difficult and faltering the process was. So how was one to make something truly innovative every year? “There is a certain logic in the reasoning that methods which have produced much new knowledge are likely to be the best to produce more new knowledge,” the science historians Ernest Braun and Stuart Macdonald wrote some years after Kelly’s 1950 speech. “Though there is also something paradoxical in the thought that there should be established methods of creating the revolutionary.”5

  Here, then, was the dilemma: Just because you had made something new and wondrous didn’t mean you would make something else new and wondrous. But Bell Labs had the advantage of necessity; its new inventions, as one of Kelly’s deputies, Harald Friis, once said, “always originated because of a definite need.” In Kelly’s view, the members of the technical staff had the great advantage of working to improve a system where there were always problems, always needs.

  Sometimes innovations sprang from economic needs—making something cheaper, for instance, such as a long-distance phone call, by efficiently combining many different conversations on a single cable, interleaving them at different frequencies or at different time intervals (or both), and then pulling apart those conversations at the receiving end. Sometimes innovations sprang from operational needs—making something that worked better and faster, such as direct dialing so subscribers wouldn’t need to use an operator to complete a phone call. Sometimes, apparently, innovations sprang from cultural necessity—making something that appealed to an evolving society, such as a cross-country phone link or, by 1950, a new Bell product like the car phone. And sometimes they sprang from military necessity—an invention such as radar or automatic gun controllers, which were urgent for national defense.

  To innovate, Kelly would agree, an institute of creative technology required the best people, Shockleys and Shannons, for instance—and it needed a lot of them, so many, as the people at the Labs used to say (borrowing a catchphrase from nuclear physics), that departments could have a “critical mass” to foster explosive ideas. What’s more, the institute of creative technology should take it upon itself to further the education and abilities of its promising but less accomplished employees, not for reasons of altruism but because industrial science and engineering had become so complex that it now required men and women who were trained beyond the level that America’s graduate schools could attain. In 1948, Bell Labs began conducting a series of unaccredited but highly challenging graduate-level courses for employees known as the Communications Development Training Program, or CDT. But nobody at Bell Labs really called it CDT. The program was informally known—much to Kelly’s discomfort—as “Kelly College,” because that’s what it was.

  An institute of creative technology needed to house its critical mass close to one another so they could exchange ideas; it also needed to give them all the tools they needed. Some of these tools took the form of expensive machinery or furnaces for the laboratories. Some of them were human, however. Bell Labs employed thousands of full-time technical assistants who could put the most dedicated graduate students to shame. Such assistants sometimes had only a high school diploma but were dexterous enough, mentally and physically, that PhDs would often speak of them with the same respect they gave their most acclaimed colleagues. The TAs, as they were known, formed a large subculture—a stratum parallel to the one formed by the Labs’ esteemed scientists—where they would exchange valuable information among themselves over lunch. “They were the keepers of practical information,” John Rowell, an experimental physicist, recalls.6 “They knew secrets, tricks.
And they knew all this lore about what had been done in the early days.” The best of the assistants had the same talents that Walter Brattain and other physicists would idealize, a natural ability to take apart car engines or radios and put them back together, an ability that at Bell Labs might translate into a gift for growing crystals, preparing the surface of a metal for a contact, or constructing experiments.7

  An institute of creative technology required a stable stream of dollars. “Never underestimate the importance of money,” the physicist Phil Anderson says—and it was true.8 Thanks to the local phone companies, AT&T, and Western Electric, Bell Labs had ample and dedicated funding. Plans could thus be made for the near term as well as for the far future—five, ten, and even twenty years away.

  Perhaps most important, the institute of creative technology needed markets for its products. In the case of Bell Labs, there were markets for consumers (that is, telephone subscribers) as well as for manufacturing (with Western Electric). There was no precise explanation as to why this was such an effective goad, but even for researchers in pursuit of pure scientific understanding rather than new things, it was obvious that their work, if successful, would ultimately be used. Working in an environment of applied science, as one Bell Labs researcher noted years later, “doesn’t destroy a kernel of genius—it focuses the mind.”9

  Finally, something else seemed important. “A new device or a new invention,” Kelly once remarked, “stimulates and frequently demands other new devices and inventions for its proper use.”10 Just as the invention of the telephone had led to countless developments in switching and transmission, an invention like the transistor seemed to point to even more developments in switching, transmission, and computer systems. Or to put it another way, the solution to a technological problem invariably created other problems that needed solutions. So making something truly new seemed to ensure that you would be making something else truly new before too long. The only trouble was, this rule suggested that your competitors—that is, if you weren’t a regulated monopoly like the American Telephone and Telegraph company, and you actually had competitors—could do the same.