by Jon Gertner
“Ernie, I didn’t travel first class on the train,” Elmendorf admitted.
Waters looked up at Elmendorf. “If we thought you’d have gone first class,” he replied, “then we wouldn’t have hired you.”
Waters suggested to Elmendorf that he go to the YMCA on 34th Street, where rooms cost fifty cents a night, and Elmendorf immediately took his advice. A few weeks later he moved up to a different YMCA, “a nicer one,” as he recalls, that was located around 56th Street. One day in August at his new digs, he bumped into John Pierce, who had also been hired in the Labs’ research department. The two men hadn’t seen each other in several months. After finishing his PhD at Caltech, Pierce had taken some time before his arrival in New York to travel alone, on a trip financed by his parents, through Europe. Mostly he had bicycled around England, but he had also taken a quick tour of the Continent. “I went to Paris, and to the north of Italy, to Viareggio,” he later recalled. “I went to Munich and went to the opera.” It was three years after Hitler’s ascension to power, but Pierce tended to be oblivious to things that didn’t hold his interest. He conceded later he was almost completely unaware of Europe’s political crosscurrents, save for the fact that in one open-air café, after some Italians drank a toast to Roosevelt in honor of the American visitor, he returned the favor by toasting Mussolini. “That was the right answer, apparently,” he said later.13 Often when Pierce didn’t know what to do, he made a good choice anyway.
Pierce and Elmendorf decided to move out of the Y and find a place together. As Elmendorf recalls, they rented a one-room apartment on the first floor of the London Terrace apartment complex at 23rd Street and 9th Avenue. The apartment had one Murphy bed. “As a PhD John was getting $33 a week,” Elmendorf recalls. “As a master’s they were paying me $29 a week. So he got the bed.” At the apartment, Elmendorf did the cooking and Pierce did the washing up. The two men were within walking distance of work—fifteen minutes south, at a brisk pace, was all it took.
At Bell Labs, the two men were not on an equal footing. Elmendorf was placed in what he calls “the salt mines,” a lowly department where he was tasked with designing equipment for the phone system, a terrible letdown for an engineer who aspired to research complex circuits. Years later, after a career in which he had worked his way up to a high executive position with AT&T, Elmendorf discovered that his first job was due partly to his friend Pierce, who when asked about his colleague from Caltech had informed the Bell Labs management—not with malice but in keeping with his habit of saying whatever might be on his mind—that Elmendorf “wasn’t that smart.”14 In relation to Pierce, of course, few people were. Pierce himself was assigned to work in the research department on vacuum tubes, where he was given free rein to pursue any ideas he might have. He considered the experience equivalent to being cast adrift without a compass. “Too much freedom is horrible,” he would say in describing his first few months at the Labs. Indeed, he eventually came to believe that freedom in research was similar to food; it was necessary, but moderation was usually preferable to excess. It was almost certainly true, however, that Pierce’s freedom was a reflection of his supervisors’ belief in the recruit.
Soon after his arrival at the Labs, Pierce met Bill Shockley—“a new employee who was making the rounds of various parts of the research department,” he recalled.15 Shockley patiently explained the physics of vacuum tubes to Pierce, and the men quickly became friends. And soon afterward, Pierce began to find his way. He and Shockley worked together researching various devices and writing several papers during the late 1930s. But Pierce began to show a knack for inventing things on his own, too, putting together a variety of new types of highly complex and specialized vacuum devices—electron multipliers, they were called, and later reflex klystrons, which were useful for radar—that the Labs quickly patented.
Pierce always gravitated toward the smartest people in the building, just as he had gravitated toward his mother rather than his father. It was also true that the smartest people gravitated toward him. Surprisingly, he wasn’t especially intimidated by the likes of Shockley. And Pierce’s awkward manner and social peculiarities did not seem to preclude him from fitting in; on the contrary, he developed a wide circle of devoted admirers, charmed by his wit and his lively mind. Not long after he’d started at West Street, the young engineer was stopped in the hallway at Bell Labs by an unfamiliar manager—a man who seemed every bit as brusque as Pierce.
“What are you doing here?” the man asked him.
Pierce looked at him with suspicion. “Who are you?” he demanded in response.
“I’m Mervin Kelly,” the man said.
It was one of Pierce’s favorite stories, one that demonstrated both his obliviousness and his audacity. In time, Pierce would consider Mervin Kelly his great hero—one of two he had at Bell Labs. A close colleague of both men would later marvel that Kelly and Pierce didn’t obliterate each other with their matching energies and enthusiasms.16 But in many ways their mutual admiration made sense. Those who worked for Pierce, just as those who worked for Kelly, were often frightened of him—frightened of the way he raked through their ideas, ruthlessly and without regard to their feelings, in an attempt to separate the good from the bad. “You took your life in your hands every time you went into his office,” recalls one of his former employees. Pierce, like Kelly, was a man of action, a man of strong opinions, and above all things a pragmatist in regard to science and innovation. Pierce, like Kelly, ran up and down staircases. He needed to get where he was going as fast as possible.
Pierce’s other hero at Bell Labs was none of those things. He was a dreamer as well as an unrepentant futurist; and he was someone with no aspirations whatsoever to manage people or wield power. That would be Pierce’s good friend in the mathematics department, Claude Shannon.
AN INSTIGATOR is different from a genius, but just as uncommon. An instigator is different, too, from the most skillful manager, someone able to wrest excellence out of people who might otherwise fall short. Somewhere between Shannon (the genius) and Kelly (the manager), Pierce steered a course for himself at Bell Labs as an instigator.
“I tried to get other people to do things, I’m lazy,” Pierce once told an interviewer.
“Do you think this has helped your career?” the interviewer asked.
“Well, it was my career,” Pierce replied.17
It was probably more accurate to say that Pierce had too many ideas to actually pursue on his own, and too many interests—airplanes, electronics, acoustics, telephony, psychology, philosophy, computers, music, language, writing, art—to focus on any single pursuit. Also, as he readily admitted, organization was not his strong suit. “John is not the typical inventor,” Pierce’s good friend Harald Friis, the director of the Labs’ microwave research lab in Holmdel, New Jersey, told the New Yorker writer Calvin Tomkins. “His mind goes off at too many different angles and sees too many different possibilities in everything. He is like a child in that, but a very mature child.”18 Pierce’s real talent, according to Friis and Pierce himself, was in getting people interested in something that hadn’t really occurred to them before.
“You should do something on that,” Pierce would suggest to Shannon about some idea or another. “Should? What does should mean?” Shannon would reply. Then both men would laugh. It was Shannon’s way of saying he was never going to follow Pierce’s suggestion, just as he never followed anyone’s.19
But when most people heard Pierce float an idea, they didn’t laugh. According to Pierce, he had made certain suggestions that led to Jack Morton’s early work on something that came to be known as the Morton triode—a powerful vacuum device that would be essential for the vast national system of microwave relay towers. A few years later, Pierce had been the third collaborator, with Shannon and another member of the technical staff, Barney Oliver, who was destined to run Hewlett-Packard’s research laboratories, in the first definitive paper on pulse code modulation, or PCM, the new method f
or sending communications that would rely on pulses representing digital information rather than on electrical waves.
Around that same time, Walter Brattain had bumped into Pierce in the hallway at Murray Hill and invited him into his office. Brattain was looking for a name for the new device he and John Bardeen had built, and Pierce had a reputation around the Labs as a wordsmith. As usual, Pierce didn’t hesitate before tossing out a suggestion: How about calling it a transistor?20 That his suggestion was eventually adopted after a vote was, Pierce would say, “my one claim to eternal fame.”21
He seemed to have a knack for involving himself—or being right nearby—in situations that made historical ripples. Pierce was apparently the last person at Bell Labs that Bill Shockley spoke with—as recorded in a cryptic entry in Shockley’s diary, for noon on December 31, 1947—before he began working around the clock on his idea for the junction transistor.22 Pierce had suggested that his friend Arthur C. Clarke compose a history of overseas communication,23 and he demonstrated for Clarke, during a visit to Murray Hill, a computer rendition, created by a group of scientists working in acoustics at Bell Labs, of “A Bicycle Built for Two.” This rendition eventually found its way into the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.24 Pierce had also been the supervisor who came by when the mathematicians were playing their guessing game on the blackboard, “Convergence in Webster,” and scratched out the infamous sentence, You Are All Fired.25
Essentially, Pierce’s job was coming up with ideas for the next generation of communications technology. He was vain about his intelligence, but not so vain as to consider his own ideas automatically superior to those of his colleagues. In looking for what was interesting and doable, he could be an able scavenger. One day in 1943, while Pierce was working on vacuum devices for the military—like everyone else at the Labs, he had been engaged in engineering work for World War II—he read a British report on new developments in the field. Something caught his eye. A man working at Oxford, an Austrian immigrant named Rudi Kompfner, had created a new vacuum tube that seemed decidedly different from anything Pierce had seen before. It was called the traveling wave tube, and was sometimes abbreviated as TWT. Although Pierce later liked to say that the device was simple, the mechanism within was quite complex: The tube was pencil-thin and around a foot long, with an interior consisting of a long wire wound in a helix pattern that resembled a stretched screen-door spring.26 A communications signal—a traveling wave—was sent along the curling spring of wire; meanwhile a focused beam of electrons was sent through the center of the spring. The two interacted, and the result was a considerable transfer of energy from the beam of electrons to the spiraling signal wave. In plain terms, the merits of the device were twofold: (1) a spectacular amplification of the signal; and (2) a remarkable capacity, or bandwidth, meaning it could amplify a vast number of signals at one time. Sitting in his Bell Labs office in the West Village—the office with a five-drawer file cabinet that he had labeled “bottom drawer,” “next-to bottom drawer,” “middle drawer,” “next-to top drawer,” and “top drawer”27—Pierce saw in the report something potentially invaluable to the phone system. “It was interesting because it seemed to have great prospects, but it had all sorts of problems,” he remarked. Such problems were at once theoretical—how did the traveling wave tube work?—and developmental—could Bell Labs make the device reliable enough for the system?
In November 1944 Pierce traveled to England, on a trip sponsored jointly by Bell Labs and the U.S. Navy. Over the course of an exhausting four-week stretch he visited twenty different British industrial labs and government research installations. Mostly he was trying to assess for the United States the state of the art of tube development in England.28 In the midst of the trip he sought out Kompfner. He was searching out new technologies, not new friendships, but here he encountered a man who was perhaps closer to himself in sensibility, quickness, and intelligence than anyone else he would ever meet. Kompfner made an indelible impression on everyone. He had begun his career as a trained architect and had drifted toward physics and inventing only because he found it interesting. He was less eccentric than Pierce, and more worldly. Buffed with a European polish, Kompfner was blessed with an uncommon wit and elegance. He was a world-class storyteller and a superb skier. But like Pierce, he could be blunt and dismissive of ideas or people he considered ignorant. He always spoke his mind to Pierce, who would in time seek Kompfner’s advice on almost all of his ideas.
Pierce later liked to say that “Rudi invented the traveling wave tube and I discovered it”—a quip Kompfner enjoyed and never disputed. Pierce brought Kompfner’s design back to Bell Labs and started working on a prototype. At the unveiling of the device to the press in 1946, the traveling wave tube was hailed as an invention that could make possible a coast-to-coast network “over which 10,000 telephone conversations may go simultaneously, or all the television programs needed for all the video stations likely to be operating in this country in years to come.” The New York Times report quoted an unattributed source at Bell Labs, quite possibly Pierce, noting that perhaps for the first time, “radio men will have created a device that eventually may provide the means of setting up more channels for long-distance communications than they will know what to do with.”29
In fact, the new tube wasn’t quite ready for that. And as it turned out, Pierce—along with a team of engineers and scientists that included Kompfner, who joined Bell Labs in 1951—spent the next thirteen years investigating, testing, and perfecting various kinds of traveling wave tubes. Pierce had been correct in some respects about the traveling wave tube’s potential. But as he came to understand, inventions don’t necessarily evolve into the innovations one might at first foresee. Humans all suffered from a terrible habit of shoving new ideas into old paradigms. “Everyone faces the future with their eyes firmly on the past,” Pierce said, “and they don’t see what’s going to happen next.”30
WE KNOW SO MUCH about John Pierce’s opinions on Bell Labs and innovation because his career as a technologist was complemented, almost from the start, by his career as a writer. He had made great strides after the publication of his 1929 book on gliders. By the late 1940s, as he was becoming immersed in his work on traveling wave tubes, he was turning out essays, science fiction stories, lectures, and books. This work was in addition to his lengthy technical memoranda (distributed internally at Bell Labs) and his papers (published in various engineering journals) describing his vacuum tube research. Some of Pierce’s writing was published under his own name; some of it, however, was done under the pseudonyms John Roberts and j.j. coupling, the latter of which he borrowed on a whim from the physics literature (a j-j coupling described the spin and orbital functions of electrons), so that he would not have to seek clearance from the Bell Labs publications department, a sometimes formidable obstacle, each time he wanted to disseminate one of his new ideas.31 Pierce would later describe himself as a “writerholic,” and indeed his literary output was prodigious. It was also done in haste. “I am rather alarmed at your habit of sending finished articles before we have had a chance to discuss them,” an editor at Scientific American told him in 1949.32 Manuscripts were frequently rejected by publishers and, in the case of Pierce’s nonfiction work, riddled with minor errors.33
The rejections of his stories must have stung him terribly. A publicly unsentimental man, Pierce nevertheless kept in his files until his death what appeared to be every rejection letter he’d ever received. There were hundreds. His factual mistakes, however, were not something he worried much about. In 1950 he wrote a book on traveling wave tubes, pouring “everything I knew about the subject” into the text. He made many small errors, he later conceded, but had gotten the gist of things right. And that was what he thought most important. With what seemed like amusement, he noted that the corrections amounted to a stack of papers a quarter of an inch thick. “There was,” he acknowledged, “about one correction for every page of the book.”34
Pierce’s clos
est friends recognized that his wry, skeptical, and crusty exterior concealed the warm inner core of a romantic. Sometimes a person visiting Pierce in his office would find him reading poetry; sometimes they would find him reading poetry in another language. A devotee of verse—in college he had organized a group of students and then convinced a professor to read all of Paradise Lost to them aloud—he often tried to write poems, usually with stilted and unsuccessful results. His science fiction, meanwhile, was imaginative and promising, and something he worked on far more diligently. He and Shannon often discussed their favorite stories and traded books. Pierce often admitted that he perceived in writing and publishing—and in writers themselves—a kind of glamour. In fact, while he was in England in 1944 visiting Rudi Kompfner, he decided in London to look up one of his literary idols, the author H. G. Wells. Pierce didn’t know Wells, or anybody who knew him. But he explained in a note to the author that he and his traveling companion, an accomplished Bell Labs engineer named Homer Hagstrum, were important American scientists visiting London—at the time an exaggeration—and would like to meet. Wells invited the two for tea in his house, and Pierce and Hagstrum complied.
It was a dreary November afternoon, thick with London fog. “He sort of appeared at the door, in a huge dressing gown, with the collar turned up around the neck,” Pierce wrote in notes he jotted down just after the meeting. Wells was sick, with a bad cough, but he was hospitable. The men sat down in the dining room, at a large table laid with doilies, and a tea service arrived by dumbwaiter. Pierce jumped up to pour the tea, only to realize that “I didn’t know how to go about it.” Did one put the milk in first, or the tea? Wells gave him instructions, and the men settled down to eat toast and cakes and cucumber sandwiches. Pierce let Wells know that one of his science fiction concepts—an atomic bomb—was coming true: America was building one. He had deduced this from the way most of the country’s good physicists were disappearing and being directed to secret laboratories around the country. Pierce told Wells that he and his fellow engineers joked that promising scientists had been “body snatched.” But Wells was largely uninterested in what Pierce was saying. He wanted to talk about politics—among other things, Churchill, Roosevelt, and race in America.35 Pierce was happy to talk about whatever Wells preferred. Afterward, when Pierce and Hagstrum left the house and headed home in the fog, he concluded that he was “feeling rather bad about the whole imposition.” Wells had struck him as being both old and tired.36