by Jon Gertner
At the fair, a visitor who wanted to try a Picturephone would enter one of seven booths and sit before what was called a “picture unit.” The device was a long oval tube, measuring about one foot wide and seven inches high and about a foot in depth. Set within the oval face was a small camera and a rectangular video screen, measuring four and three-eighths inches by five and three-quarter inches. The picture unit was cabled to a touch-tone telephone handset with a line of buttons to control the screen. If you wanted to make a Picturephone call at the fair—or more precisely, if you wanted to talk with the Picturephone users at other booths—you simply pressed a button marked “V” for video; after that you could either talk through the handset or through a speakerphone on the picture unit.
Without question, the Picturephones were diverting. In several obvious respects, the device was less a radical innovation than an elegant melding of the established technologies of television and telephone. But it wasn’t entirely clear whether the Picturephone actually solved a problem. Some Bell Labs engineers worried about this. As far back as the mid-1950s, John Pierce was exchanging memos with colleagues wondering about the utility of the new device: “The need for acceptability of such a service,” Pierce wrote of the Picturephone, “has not been adequately evaluated, and the [phones] themselves were not at the point at which they could be put into commercial use.”3
To be sure, the Picturephone technology had come a long way since then. By 1964, the video image was crisper than what Pierce had critiqued in the late 1950s; also, the entire device—which was to say millions of the devices—now seemed to have the potential to be integrated over the next few decades into the evolving telephone switching and transmission network. There were some concerns as to whether the phone network could handle the additional traffic. There were also concerns as to whether the nation was ready. But the response of visitors to the New York fair—usually a line of people were waiting to try the Picturephones—suggested a substantial degree of public curiosity, and perhaps even enthusiasm.
AT&T executives had in fact decided to use the fair as an opportunity to quietly commission a market research study. That the fairgoers who visited the Bell System pavilion might not represent a cross section of society was recognized as a shortcoming of the survey results. Nevertheless, researchers asked seven hundred users of the Picturephone for their reaction to its design and technology; they also asked whether they might want to use the Picturephone in the future. The overall reaction, summarized in a confidential report, was termed “generally favorable.” Users complained about the buttons and the size of the picture unit; a few found it difficult to stay on camera. But a majority said they perceived a need for Picturephones in their business, and a near majority said they perceived a need for Picturephones in their home.
Would they pay for it? Here, the results were less clear. For a price of between $40 and $60 a month, for instance, only 12 percent of the couples interviewed said they would want a Picturephone in their homes. Business customers, however, seemed more amenable. Even if the cost were substantially higher—$60 to $80 a month—29 percent said they would be interested in having the device at their place of business.
When the AT&T market researchers asked Picturephone users whether it was important to see the person they were speaking to during a conversation, a vast majority said it was either “very important” or “important.” To phone company executives, this must have been deeply encouraging. Apparently the market researchers never asked users their opinion about whether it was important, or even pleasurable, that the person they were speaking with could see them, too.4
BY 1964, there were about 75 million telephones in the United States, meaning that Bell Labs had now created the means for about 2,500,000,000,000,000 possible interconnections between subscribers.5 In light of this, the Labs’ primary innovation of 1964, for all the attention the Picturephone received, was actually something nobody who used a telephone would see or even understand. It was known as ESS No. 1, a new electronic switching station, opened in a small modern building in the village of Succasunna, New Jersey.6 The design for the switching station had taken two thousand “man-years” of work to create and used tens of thousands of transistors. Its complexity dwarfed that of other previous Bell Labs undertakings such as the transatlantic undersea cable. ESS, as Fred Kappel, the chairman of AT&T, pointed out at its opening in Succasunna, “was the largest single research and development project in Bell System history.”7 The costs were acknowledged by AT&T to be “more than” $100 million, which likely suggested they were much more. Still, its expense was projected to drop dramatically as the ESS technology was deployed all over the country. By the year 2000, Bell executives maintained, all communications switching would be done through electronic means like that in Succasunna, and it would be “better and cheaper”—that golden combination—than the current system.
Why move in this direction? What kind of future did the men envision? One of the more intriguing attributes of the Bell System was that an apparent simplicity—just pick up the phone and dial—hid its increasingly fiendish interior complexity. What also seemed true, and even then looked to be a governing principle of the new information age, was that the more complex the system became in terms of capabilities, speed, and versatility, the simpler and sleeker it appeared. ESS was a case in point. Switching had always been immensely complex, both as a concept and an actual technology. Making untold connections between millions of subscribers, automatically routing a call from one central switching office to another, finding alternate routes (or alternate routes to the alternate routes) if the most direct path for a call was too busy—this was why those who understood the vast interlocking parts of the Bell System called it, as Pierce and Shannon often did, the largest and most complex machine ever built. A visit to a switching office in any city verified this observation. There, one could see the vast banks of crossbar switches—metal matrices, taller than a man, where calls came in and were routed out. To stand before the rectangular crossbars was to hear their constant clicking; to look behind them was to see the ropes of copper wiring, the logic of a programmed machine that encompassed bundles of thousands upon thousands of color-coded copper wires that snaked through and around the machinery so as to connect all to all. The “switching art,” as it was known at Bell Labs, was suitably captured by a specialized technical jargon describing relays, registers, translators, markers, and so forth and a bevy of convoluted, mind-twisting flow charts. Those who had mastered the switching art were members of a technological priesthood.
ESS, which was meant to replace crossbars, looked simple on the outside—panels of glowing lights and data banks smaller than the crossbar matrices—but it was in fact far more sophisticated. In the moment during which a phone subscriber picked up the receiver and began dialing a friend—the moment during which the caller would receive a dial tone and begin pressing digits—the ESS followed thousands of separate, sequential instructions, a nearly instantaneous interplay of the system’s logic and memory circuits, all carried out in microseconds. Bell engineers were asked by Bell management—ever wary of the federal government’s order to stay out of the computer business—to describe the ESS only as “computer-like.” (The internal memo warned, “Do not call ESS a computer,” instead suggesting that ESS be described as “a large digital information processor.”)8 Of course, the great advance of ESS was that it was a computer, a highly sophisticated and programmable machine (unlike the crossbar) that could figure out phone connections in a few millionths of a second and could handle more traffic than any previous switching system. It could provide services that hadn’t previously been available. And it could help integrate the Picturephone into the existing system.
Like the microwave towers that had recently been introduced to the long-distance transmission system—the ones that were a cheaper alternative to cables between cities—electronic switching was, from a user’s point of view, an incremental improvement. If you weren’t a phone engine
er, it was hard to understand the excitement. After all, everyone could already talk with everyone else. Thus the phone company pushed various selling points. “A housewife will be able to turn on her oven while away from home by using her telephone … an office worker’s call to a line that is busy will be completed automatically when the line is free,” a New York Times article noted in a story about touch-tone phones and the new electronic switches.9 And the ESS enabled other options, such as call waiting or conference calling, that seemed promising, too. The New York Times noted that ESS allowed for the possibility that “a couple out for an evening of bridge will be able to have their calls switched automatically to their host’s home.”
In other words, telephone customers could now move around—they could be mobile—and the system could still find them. Eventually, this would prove to be immensely valuable. Bell Labs’ engineers had been encouraged by the public relations department to remark to journalists that ESS had the capacity “to provide services we haven’t even thought of yet.” It was a vague throwaway line that turned out to be exactly right.
THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY is never particularly easy to discern. That was why John Pierce never ceased to point out that anyone in the business of making predictions was destined to make a humiliating false step. And yet if you worked at Bell Laboratories, and were therefore entrusted by the United States government with the future of telecommunications, you still had to have a plan. So how much should Pierce and his colleagues wager on one idea for the future or another? And how fast could—how fast should—the future happen?
Jim Fisk, the president of Bell Labs, presided over the ESS ribbon-cutting in Succasunna. Fisk was the physicist whom Mervin Kelly had hired right out of MIT and who had made his name designing magnetrons for radar sets during the war. As an executive, he had the same unflappable posture he’d had as a young researcher—an easygoing temperament, coupled with a strong scientific mind, that had prompted his friend Bill Shockley to remark to a colleague, as Fisk was visiting the Labs in the late 1930s, “If that man gets hired, we’ll all be working for him in ten years.” Now several decades had passed. To Fisk, looking out from the early 1960s toward the future, at least three things were apparent. The first was that the system would need to get faster—an imperative that would be solved in part through electronic switching systems and touch-tone phones. Second, the system would need to send more information digitally. Soon, Bell Labs engineers would put into place a system known as T-1 that used the pulse code modulation technique that Shannon and Pierce had long ago seen as the future. Instead of waves, transmission would consist of modulating voice signals transformed into on/off pulses that were effectively the same as the strings of 1s and 0s that guided the functions of computers. “The speech in each telephone channel,” Fisk said of PCM, “is sampled at a rate of 8,000 times per second and coded signals describing each sample are transmitted to the receiving terminal where the original speech is reconstructed.” It was in some ways the telecommunications equivalent of finely shredding a newspaper in one city, instantly sending those scraps of paper to another city, and then putting the sheets back together in such a way that no one could ever discern that the paper had once been sliced apart.
The third truth about the future was that the system would become more congested. Traffic— comprising voices, as phone subscriptions and calls continued to increase; data, as computers began conversing with one another over the phone wires; and video, as television and Picturephone devices became increasingly popular—would lead to overwhelming floods of information. How to accommodate it all? ESS would help. But ESS could only switch information and suggest a path, like a highly skilled traffic cop; you still needed to build pathways that were broad enough to transmit everything. A half-century-old trend suggested where those pathways might be found. “Historically,” Fisk remarked, “the progress of radio and wire communications has required the use of ever higher and higher frequencies.”10
To the engineers at Bell Labs, the implications of this statement were fairly clear. All forms of electronic communication use electromagnetic waves. And all electromagnetic waves have a place, classified by their length, on the electromagnetic spectrum. On one end are long waves—signals like the ones broadcast from huge antennas that project songs onto AM and FM radio stations. These undulating waves might measure several meters, or even hundreds of meters. Next come shorter waves whose lengths might only be measured in centimeters or millimeters. These wavelengths are commonly used for TV signals and radar. Generally speaking, the shorter the wavelength, the higher its frequency, and the more information it can carry.
By the early 1960s, Bell Labs executives had concluded that millimeter waves would serve as the communications medium of the future. The idea at Bell Labs was to send information through such waves not by wires or broadcast towers but by means of the circular waveguide, which had been developed down in Holmdel. “A specially designed hollow pipe,” as Fisk defined it, the waveguide was just a few inches in diameter, and lined inside with a special material that would allow it to carry very high-frequency millimeter radio wave signals. The waveguide pipe would in effect do the same thing as an intercity phone cable—known as a trunk line—but with far more capacity. Indeed, each pipe would likely carry hundreds of thousands of calls at a time.
Labs engineers had looked beyond the current waveguide and the millimeter waves it carried to even shorter infrared and visible light waves. These waves are so tiny that they must be measured in arcane units known as angstroms. In a single millimeter, there are 10,000,000 angstroms. By 1960, the Bell engineers believed that within a few decades it might be possible to send data over such wavelengths—in other words, to send data through light itself. If they could figure out how to do that, the system would be able to transmit an unimaginably huge amount of information.
DIRECTLY OVERSEEING BELL LABS’ vast plans for the future were two of Jim Fisk’s deputies, Julius Molnar and William Baker. Molnar, the Picturephone’s primary champion, believed that by the year 2000, “Picturephone will be the primary mode by which people will be communicating with one another.”11 Molnar oversaw the numerous development projects at the Labs—the digital transmission lines, for instance, as well as the new electronic switching centers—while serving as Fisk’s executive vice president. He was “running the show,” as one colleague puts it, much in the way Mervin Kelly did during Oliver Buckley’s presidential tenure. A tall man with a friendly face, sparse hair, and pronounced bushy eyebrows, Molnar had been trained as a physicist at MIT before moving up through the Bell Labs ranks. He was legendary for the precision of his thinking, but also for his confidence. “He was a powerhouse,” recalls Chuck Elmendorf, John Pierce’s old Caltech friend, who was a friend of Molnar’s as well. “Julius was extremely bright, extremely competent. But the thing about him was that he exuded power.”
Indeed, those who knew Molnar believed that he knew more about the phone network and systems engineering than any person alive. “I can say, in front of any Bell Labs executive, without hurting anyone’s feelings, that Julius was the greatest executive at Bell Labs,” recalls Bill Fleckenstein, who worked under Molnar and eventually became the head of the Labs’ switching development division. “He knew more about what was going on at the Labs than any of several people put together. I liked Fisk very much. But the combination of Fisk, who didn’t know a lot about what was going on in the bowels of the place, and Julius, who knew everything about what was going on in the bowels of the place, was a good combination.”12
It was hard to say whether Bill Baker, the head of Bell Labs’ research division, knew what was going on in the bowels of the place. He did not, as a matter of course, tell people what he knew. He had nevertheless gathered a vast storehouse of information about Bell Labs’ operations. Every day at lunch he would sit down with the first person he spotted in the cafeteria, whether he was a glassblower from the vacuum tube shop or a metallurgist from the semiconductor lab—“Is it o
kay if I join you?” he would ask politely, never to be refused—and would gently interview the employee about his work and personal life and ideas. “At the end of any conversation,” Baker’s friend and colleague Mike Noll recalls, “you would then realize that he would know everything about you but you would know absolutely nothing about him.” His memory was as remarkable as his opacity. When several oral historians sat down with Baker in the mid-1980s, they asked him about his graduate school work of nearly five decades before; he spent perhaps close to an hour recalling in great detail his teachers, textbooks, and lectures. Then he recalled how each of his classmates from the late 1930s had spent their careers, and whom they had spent them with. Then he recalled the ideas and research they had produced, and why some of it mattered and some did not. Colleagues often stood amazed that Baker could recall by name someone he had met only once, twenty or thirty years before. His mind wasn’t merely photographic, though; it worked in some ways like a switching apparatus: He tied everyone he ever met, and every conversation he ever had, into a complex and interrelated narrative of science and technology and society that he constantly updated, with apparent ease.