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

by Jon Gertner

  Within Bell Labs, the engineers began debating various possibilities. One basic question was how high the orbit of an active satellite, or a group of active satellites, should be. Among the companies vying to control space communications, one possibility was to launch several satellites that circled the earth at about 22,300 miles, which was the height at which their orbits would keep pace with the earth’s rotation. Such “geostationary” satellites would stay fixed in the sky above a particular point on earth, and could theoretically be available for transmission at any time. The disadvantage here was twofold, however. Rocket technology had advanced tremendously since Pierce first laid out a rough plan for communications satellites in 1954. But NASA still couldn’t put a relay so high up in space. The second problem, as Bell Labs researchers soon found out, was that a satellite at such heights would necessitate such a long path for a phone call—at least 44,600 miles—that a delay of about six-tenths of a second would result. This was tolerable for a television signal, yet it posed challenges for a two-way conversation. Indeed, in psychological experiments at Murray Hill, test subjects reacted to the long conversational delay (and to a related problem of echo) with annoyance and frustration. And so, for the moment at least, the Bell engineers decided that an active satellite orbiting at no more than 3,000 miles high was the better option.

  Telstar moved fast. “We were all working on an impossible schedule and nobody was going to speak up and say, ‘I can’t do that,’” says Ian Ross, who worked on the transistor and tube elements of the satellite. “There was pell-mell competition to see who would get done first,” Eugene O’Neill, Telstar’s project engineer, would recall, noting that the tight deadlines and financial pressures were a departure for Bell engineers accustomed to working on a more orderly schedule and with a focus on quality and durability rather than speed.34 Telstar, if it worked, could show the world that AT&T and Bell Labs could do it all. During the course of the work, John Pierce offered O’Neill suggestions, but mostly he was relegated to the status of a wise and distant uncle. It didn’t rankle Pierce. The point of a successful research project like Echo, after all, was to hand it off to the Labs’ development group. And the contrasts between the research and development approaches were substantial. Echo was done on a shoestring, at a cost of less than $2 million, with a staff of about three dozen men. Telstar—the rocket launch alone, billed by NASA to AT&T, cost $3 million—was a development project that required the work of more than five hundred Bell Labs scientists and engineers. Echo was a big shiny balloon with a small radio beacon; Telstar had fifteen thousand parts.

  The engineers’ objective was not to build a satellite for customer phone calls and generating revenue. It was still too early for that. More precisely, Telstar was meant to demonstrate that Bell engineers could design, develop, and deploy an active satellite, and that in doing so they could flag potential problems, especially those of reliability, that might befall AT&T’s plans for a large-scale relay business. The complexity of the project was easily on par with the undersea cable, but the time frame for development was much faster, making the task even more difficult. Nothing in the satellite could be allowed to fail, moreover, for as hard as it was to repair an undersea cable, it would be impossible, in a world that had yet to send a man into space, to fix a satellite.

  O’Neill, the project manager, recalled that every one of Telstar’s fifteen thousand parts was tested exhaustively: “We shook them and racked them in every way imaginable and stressed them electrically and physically until hell wouldn’t have it to satisfy ourselves that it was going to be rugged enough to withstand the vibration of a rocket launch and survive in outer space.”35 The engineers also attempted to work into Telstar a number of specialized parts—special semiconductor diodes, for instance—that were intended not for communication tests but to make scientific measurements on temperature and radiation in space. The information would be transmitted to Bell scientists on the ground. Space was as yet an utter mystery that the satellite could help unravel by showing how the intense radiation of the Van Allen Belt surrounding the earth, or an atmospheric vacuum, or the extraordinary temperature changes—hundreds of degrees in a single orbit—might affect a working spaceship.

  Telstar was slightly bigger than a beach ball—about three feet in diameter—and as heavy as a man—170 pounds. After it was assembled in a laboratory in Hillside, New Jersey, then tested at Murray Hill and Bell Labs’ Whippany, New Jersey, facility, it was transported to Cape Canaveral, Florida, for a Delta-Thor rocket launch scheduled for the second week of July 1962. Though it was spherical in shape, Telstar’s surface had seventy-two flat facets, giving it the appearance of a large, bizarrely decorated gemstone. In the end, though, it served as an almost perfect example of Pierce’s contention that innovations tend to happen when the time is right. Indeed, Telstar was not one invention but rather a synchronous use of sixteen inventions patented at the Labs over the course of twenty-five years. “None of the inventions was made specifically for space purposes,” the New York Times pointed out. On the other hand, only all of them together allowed for the deployment of an active space satellite.

  Some of the ideas used for Telstar had to do with transmission—the maser to amplify faint signals, for instance, and a noise-reducing circuit (a “frequency-modulation feedback receiver”) that had been patented by a Labs engineer named Joe Chaffee in 1937 and was considered largely useless at the time but had been dusted off with spectacular success for Echo and would be used again for Telstar. Other inventions, meanwhile, had to do with semiconductors. On the surface of Telstar were thirty-six hundred solar cells to provide the power that allowed the satellite to function; there were also thousands of transistors and diodes, many of them used to make radiation measurements. The essential amplifying component of the satellite, finally, was a pencil-thin, footlong traveling wave tube—a modification of the design that Pierce had salvaged from Rudi Kompfner during the war nearly twenty years before. This particular tube had been patented by Pierce and Kompfner and Jack Morton, the development chief who had helped move the transistor into mass production.

  On the night of Telstar’s launch, Pierce had dinner at a restaurant with a friend. Then he went up to Crawford Hill to relax with Rudi Kompfner and see whether the active satellite would succeed. Pierce was confident—one of his hallmark traits. He found it continually astonishing that a complex apparatus such as the phone system even worked, but on individual projects he rarely doubted the capability of his fellow Bell engineers.36 As it happened, the crowd he joined at Crawford Hill was using their horn antenna only as voyeurs. Officially, Telstar was being tracked and guided at a new installation, built on a thousand acres purchased by AT&T in a remote area of Maine. Dubbed “Space Hill,” the Maine installation was located in a bowl of mountains that minimized radio interference. The centerpiece of the site was a mammoth horn antenna, 177 feet long, far larger than the one at Crawford Hill, that sat atop a rotating base. To make sure that the Maine weather would not get in the way, the horn had been placed inside an inflatable dome—the largest inflatable structure ever built at the time—made of Dacron and synthetic rubber.

  At 4:35 on the afternoon of June 10, 1962, the rocket carrying Telstar lifted off. By 7:30 p.m. the satellite had been released into orbit and was making its sixth pass around the earth. It was then that Fred Kappel, the AT&T chief, placed a call via Telstar to Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. The two chatted briefly without any hitches. Within the hour, a French ground station that had also been involved in the Telstar project began receiving a live, clear television signal: It was the image of an American flag waving in the breeze at the receiving station in Andover, Maine. The following morning a British ground station broadcast a live show to American audiences. To millions—by one measure, a full 82 percent of British residents knew Telstar by name—the technology seemed positively startling. “It pleased us that the satellite did no more nor less than just exactly what it was designed to do, but we expected t
hat,” Pierce later remarked. What did surprise him, however, was Telstar’s “human impact.” On the day after the launch, the New York Times called it a communications feat “regarded as rivaling in significance the first telegraphed transmission by Samuel F. B. Morse more than a century ago.”37 Soon after, a British band called the Tornados released an instrumental homage to the satellite, aptly named “Telstar,” that became a number one hit in both the United States and England. Pierce was especially charmed that six months after its launch, on Christmas Day 1962, Queen Elizabeth of England referred to Telstar as “the invisible focus of a million eyes.”

  By that point, though, the euphoria for satellites at Bell Labs had largely disappeared. Congress and the Kennedy administration, concerned about ceding the control of space communications entirely to the private sector and worried, too, about AT&T’s immense size and aggressiveness, had already pushed all private companies out of the international satellite business. Pierce, in turn, had fallen into something resembling a tailspin.

  JOHN PIERCE DIDN’T HAVE pronounced political leanings; in fact, he never even registered to vote.38 But the Communications Satellite Act of 1962, which created a new government-authorized communications corporation called COMSAT and effectively barred AT&T from the international satellite communications business, radicalized him in a way. “I took that hard, you know,” he remarked to an interviewer some years later. “I’d just got into communications satellites and covered my name with glory—deserved or not deserved. I felt thrust out into the cold.”39 Pierce had long been frustrated by Washington’s bureaucracy. (NASA officials, in turn, had also been frustrated by AT&T, which they believed had unfairly monopolized credit for Echo and Telstar.)40 But for all the accusations that the Bell System could be slow to implement its newest technologies, Pierce held an unshakable belief that his organization was the world’s supreme example of technical competence. He doubted satellite engineering could advance at the same rate without Bell Labs or private competition.41 And he was even more astonished that the enormous engineering successes of Echo and Telstar had led to a decisive business failure. Perhaps, Pierce later mused, Mervin Kelly had been right to insist that the Bell System should stay out of the space race entirely.

  Pierce occasionally entertained offers to leave Bell Laboratories. Despite his quirks, or perhaps because of them, he had a devoted circle of friends and admirers in academia, government, and industry. His acquaintances included many of the world’s most influential scientists. William Shockley, for instance, when setting up his semiconductor company in California, had sounded out his old friend about a move to the West Coast. “He says he’s happy at BTL,” Shockley noted about Pierce in a personal journal in the mid-1950s.42 Pierce had also remained close with Shannon, who often invited him to visit at his house in Massachusetts.43 Even the collapse of the Bell System satellite business didn’t change Pierce’s views on his employer, however. As he later reflected, “I liked Bell Laboratories better than I liked satellites.”44 For a while, at least, he was staying.

  He still had plenty to do. All during his work on satellites, for instance, Pierce had become more and more involved with electronic and computer-generated music. Along with his colleague Max Mathews, Pierce and some Labs researchers had compiled an album of computer-programmed music, released by Decca Records, that they’d created on a primitive IBM 7090 computer. The music was intriguing and nearly unlistenable—beeps and blips, mainly, interspersed with shards of classical melodies and eccentric diversions. The Labs scientists called it Music from Mathematics. Pierce sent unsolicited copies of the record, along with an enthusiastic cover letter, to the composers Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland.45

  Not all his work was so tangential to his company’s business. Pierce was still thinking about the state of the phone system, too, and especially what might lie beyond. In speeches and television appearances during the years defined mostly by Echo and Telstar, he sometimes impressed people as a kind of philosopher of communications. In his view, it wasn’t so much that technologies were changing society; rather, a new web of instantaneous information exchanges, made possible largely by the technologies of Bell Labs, was changing society. Pierce was also coming to the realization that other advances—data transmission, home computers, electronic mail, lightwave communications—might soon define the culture far more radically than the Bell System already had. “It is clear that more and more the Bell System will be concerned with sending digital signals, both to enable machines to talk to one another and to enable people to hear distant sounds or to see distant scenes,” he remarked in 1956. By the late 1960s, when he sat down to talk about the future with the CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, he made the point, just as his friend Claude Shannon had done in a less accessible manner, that all electronic exchanges—letters, calls, data, television—were likely to merge.

  Cronkite: You’re talking now of some sort of a central communications panel in the home, a single switchboard from which all of this can be done?

  Pierce: I think that it’s very important to realize that communication is a general function. The wires that will carry telephony will also carry teletypewriter, and a circuit that’s capable of handling television will handle high-speed data and many other things as well. So that once you have the transmission facilities available, they can be used for everything interchangeably.46

  Among other things, he had long been pushing at Bell Labs for more research into mobile phones. If the Federal Communications Commission would grant Bell Labs and AT&T permission to operate such phones in a large frequency range, Pierce believed the business would explode in popularity. (Without a broad range of frequencies, however, there wasn’t much logic in moving forward with new technologies, since a mobile system’s capacity, and thus its potential pool of customers, would be small.) Was there any way of “prying mobile allocations out of the FCC?” he wrote in a 1957 memo. At the time, Pierce was actually thinking ahead by a decade or two, and wondering where Bell Labs should be with mobile phone research by that point.47 He perceived that the transistor might create entirely new possibilities for mobile communications.

  As it happened, it took almost a decade until the Labs could move forward with mobile technology. Project Echo, the huge balloon that defined Pierce’s career, stayed aloft for nearly eight years, disappearing somewhere off the western coast of South America on the evening of May 23, 1968.48 At that point Bill Jakes, Echo’s project engineer, was still working at Holmdel under Pierce. One day, around the time of Echo’s demise, Jakes looked up to see his boss come into his office. “Jakes, why don’t you do something about mobile communications?”49 Pierce asked. And then, before waiting for an answer, Pierce walked out.

  Fourteen

  FUTURES, REAL AND IMAGINED

  A year after John Pierce celebrated the success of his Echo satellite balloon, and just around the time that work on Telstar was going full bore, Pierce and a Bell Labs colleague named Edward David sat down to compose a memo. It was the summer of 1961, and the two men were making an effort to compile a list of ideas for a Bell System exhibit at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. AT&T executives had already established a planning group and were soliciting advice from some of the company’s farthest-thinking scientists. They hoped that the planning team could instill upon the fair’s visitors a sense of the phone system’s complexity along with a glimpse of how communications might evolve in the coming years. That was precisely where Pierce came in.

  For corporations, world’s fairs are public relations opportunities. But the fair was not an exercise in cynicism. It was a legitimate chance to display some of the ideas in the company’s technological pipeline, a pipeline usually clogged with more inventions and ideas than the business side of the phone company could ever hope to implement.1 Pierce was thinking about the New York fair around the same time that a modest display of Bell Labs innovations was being demonstrated at Seattle’s Century 21 Exposition, which was being marked by the construction of
a huge “space needle” on the city’s fairgrounds. At the Seattle fair visitors could ride a monorail to a Bell exhibit intimating a future of startling convenience: phones with speedy touch-tone buttons (which would soon replace dials), direct long-distance calling (which would soon replace operators), and rapid electronic switching (which would soon be powered by transistors). A visitor could also try something called a portable “pager,” a big, blocky device that could alert doctors and other busy professionals when they received urgent calls.2

  New York’s fair would dwarf Seattle’s. The crowds were expected to be immense—probably somewhere around 50 or 60 million people in total. Pierce and David’s 1961 memo recommended a number of exhibits: “personal hand-carried telephones,” “business letters in machine-readable form, transmitted by wire,” “information retrieval from a distant computer-automated library,” and “satellite and space communications.” By the time the fair opened in April 1964, though, the Bell System exhibits, housed in a huge white cantilevered building nicknamed the “floating wing,” described a more conservative future than the one Pierce and David had envisioned. The exhibit was primarily explanatory. Visitors could get a sense of how quality control worked at Western Electric factories, or how researchers at Bell Labs grew pure crystals necessary for transistors. They could experience push-button “dialing,” or they could consider how Telstar and satellite communications functioned. Perhaps the only surprise was an open demonstration—available to anyone who visited the floating wing—of what Pierce and David had in their memo termed “visiphone.” By 1964, these devices, created by the engineers at Bell Labs over the course of a decade, had a trademarked name. They were known as Picturephones, and they seemed the very essence of the future.