by Jon Gertner
Ring and Young hadn’t used the word “cellular” in their presentation. Nevertheless what they outlined—in the honeycomb of hexagons and repeating frequencies—was exactly that. Those hexagons were cells. After Ring’s memo was forwarded to the FCC it was filed away in New Jersey with the thousands of other technical memos that were churned out every year by Bell Labs scientists. It was not published in the prestigious Bell System Technical Journal. It was not published anywhere, in fact. And there is nothing to suggest it was considered a landmark of engineering. More likely it was thought to be merely helpful in the Bell System’s lobbying efforts for more radio spectrum. In June 1950, Oliver Buckley, the president of Bell Labs, testified before the FCC and alluded to the 1947 plan. “We are ready to proceed with the development as soon as we have assurance of frequency space,” Buckley told the commission. “I am convinced that the benefits to the public at large of having such an integrated mobile telephone system will be very great indeed.”27
The FCC had other ideas. In the late 1950s, the commissioners awarded a large block of radio frequencies to television broadcasters. The broadcasters were to create eighty new channels in the UHF range.28 Had it been given to cellular service instead, which requires less bandwidth than TV, the same block of spectrum could have created as many as eight hundred or a thousand new phone channels. (Each channel, in turn, could serve many mobile phone users.) It was a decision that maddened John Pierce, who was a fierce advocate for mobile radio and believed that wireless phones would someday be small and portable, like a transistor radio. Pierce’s notion seemed utopian to many radio engineers at Bell Labs. Most considered mobile phones as necessarily bulky and limited to cars, due to the power required to transmit signals from the phone to a nearby antenna. Pierce, in any event, wryly observed that “the FCC has decided pretty clearly that what the American people want is mass communication rather than individual communication.” In choosing television over telephony, Pierce thought the FCC had picked a communications technology that suppresses individual expression rather than encouraging it.29
He resolved to keep trying. For the next few decades Pierce and a variety of other Bell executives lobbied to change the FCC’s decision. And in 1964 and 1965, several AT&T executives began meeting in New York to discuss reviving the company’s petition for mobile radio spectrum.30 “The consensus of the group,” an AT&T memo from that era explained, “was that a substantial market does exist.”31 Those business planners brought in several engineers from Bell Labs to consider how a national “high capacity” mobile system might be installed. The Bell Labs engineers imagined such a system might take ten years to plan, develop, and deploy.
Soon after, AT&T was quietly informed that the FCC might be willing to reconsider the mobile radio proposals. Apparently the commission was disappointed with the lackluster content and low popularity of UHF television. And so the mobile radio initiative fell, quietly and momentarily, into the lap of Chuck Elmendorf, John Pierce’s old Caltech friend and New York City roommate. Elmendorf was now an assistant vice president at AT&T, working out of a big office in the gilded headquarters at 195 Broadway. In March 1967 he composed a letter to a director at the Bell Labs office in Holmdel: At the FCC, Elmendorf wrote, “it appears that some conditions may have changed.” The commission was now “giving serious consideration” to mobile radio, which in turn meant that “the Bell System should be prepared with some concrete proposals.”32 The suggestion wasn’t subtle. The FCC was about to make a move, and Bell Labs should get ready.
Seventeen
APART
A few years before the phone company executives began to try building a national mobile telephone system, a mechanical engineer named Dick Frenkiel set out for his first day of work in Holmdel, New Jersey. It was July 1963. The isolated Holmdel radio labs that had stood on the site for decades—the vast green fields where children would throw boomerangs on weekends, the gracious woodframe building around which engineers would test radio transmissions—were gone. Those labs had been razed. In their stead, on the center of 460 acres of former farmland, Bell Labs had commissioned an enormous modern building to accommodate its growing ranks. The employees at Bell Labs now numbered around thirteen thousand. The new Holmdel lab housed about twenty-six hundred people, but it was eventually intended to hold about five thousand, which would make it even larger than Murray Hill. For obvious reasons, the building was soon nicknamed the Black Box. It was a steel-and-glass six-story structure, serious and austere, designed by the Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen.1 It was also a monument to architectural presumption. Saarinen, who died before his design was actually built, saw his creation as having the same kind of flexibility as Murray Hill—offices could easily be moved and partitioned, for instance—but with a crucial difference. He placed the building’s long connecting hallways on its glassy perimeter, with the windowless offices and labs in the interior. “Gone completely are the old claustrophobic, dreary, prison-like corridors,” Saarinen remarked with pride. Thanks to the floor-to-ceiling windows, the members of the technical staff would be liberated by unobstructed views of the countryside rather than chance encounters in the hallways.2
On his first day, Dick Frenkiel turned into the long driveway and drove toward the new building, now barely a year old. “A wide, dark rectangle centered on flat, empty grassland,” he later wrote of his impressions. “It was still a half-mile distant as one entered the property and started down the long esplanade road. Size and space conspired to create a strange optical illusion, in which the road turned out to be much longer, and the building much larger, than one at first perceived.”3 The fields, he noticed, were brown that summer from a drought.
Frenkiel accepted a dollar bill on his first day in exchange for his future patent rights. It was the same ritual that new Bell Labs employees had enacted for decades. But by Frenkiel’s own account, he soon came to realize that he had joined an organization that differed from its myth. The Black Box represented one aspect of this evolution. More to the point, the thrust of the work at Bell Labs seemed to have shifted decisively to big projects involving hundreds of people. Frenkiel’s Bell Labs didn’t seem to have anything to do with heroic research on a new amplifier, done by a few men in a hushed lab. It was about large teams attacking knotty problems for years on end. Jim Fisk’s 1947 dinner party—the Bell Labs of Kelly and Pierce and Shockley, “an ancient place of grainy and fading photographs,” as Frenkiel later viewed it, “where giants of science produced their individual monuments and left behind their personal legends”—was a ghost story. Frenkiel heard about but never bumped into any of those legends. They seemed to have vanished along with Holmdel’s woodframe laboratory building.
In his first few years at Holmdel, Frenkiel floundered about. He was assigned to work on heavy-duty machines that produced prerecorded phone messages, such as ones that give callers the exact date and time. In January 1966, however, his boss came to him with a different project. Apparently the rumors about mobile radio were getting around. As Frenkiel recalls, “He was saying that someone told Bell Labs that the FCC was willing to consider mobile again, because UHF television was a disappointment. It was not in the news, but he said, ‘Somebody whispered in our ear that we should start thinking about a proposal again.’ ”4 Among other things, Frenkiel was handed Doug Ring and Rae Young’s old 1947 memo.5 He was also teamed up with an engineer named Phil Porter and asked to write a report laying out some ideas for a mobile phone system. On January 17, 1966, Frenkiel and Porter met to talk about their ideas for the first time. Frenkiel scribbled some notes that day on a sheet of looseleaf paper. “A system could be developed to locate mobile at all times,” he noted. Also, there should be “hexagonal cellular array of areas.” Neither Frenkiel nor Porter knew precisely how this would be achieved. “It was just two of us,” Frenkiel says. “Nothing important.”
They spent most of 1966 working on the problem—or rather, the problems. The two men covered the walls of their office
s with maps and climbed on ladders in various parts of the country to count hills. There were thousands of questions they would need to answer eventually. Many of these were extremely technical, regarding reception and transmission. They talked about signal strength and interference and channel width. They knew every cell would need to be served by what they called “base station” antennas. These antennas would (1) transmit and receive the signals from the mobile phones and (2) feed those signals, by cable, into a switching center that was connected to the nationwide Bell System. Still, several big conceptual problems stood out.
The first was, How large should a hexagonal cell be? Base station antennas would be expensive. How few could they install and still have a high-functioning system?
The second was, How could you “split” a cell? The system would almost certainly start with just a few users—meaning big cells. But as the number of users grew, those cells would subdivide to accommodate the traffic. And more, smaller cells would require more base stations. What was the best and cheapest way?
The third was, How would you “hand off” a call from one cell to another? It had never been done. But it would be the system’s essential characteristic. As a mobile telephone user moved around, how could you switch the call from one antenna to another—from cell to cell, in other words—without causing great distraction to the caller?
Frenkiel and Porter began working out some approximate answers to cell size and cell splitting and handoffs. “Those kinds of things were in our memo,” he recalls. “But the FCC hadn’t done anything by the end of that year so we went on to other work.” Their plan sat on the shelf, and they were drawn into a different Bell Labs project, paid for by the U.S. Department of Transportation, that involved putting pay phones on the Metroliner, a new express train that would run between Union Station in Washington, D.C., and Penn Station in New York City. Frenkiel and Porter’s presence made sense: This was a simplified application of the cellular idea. The Metroliner route was divided into cells of different frequencies. Markers were put on the tracks—coils, actually—that could be tripped by the train as it passed; these signaled that a call had to be handed off from one cell, and one frequency, to another. “It was not great technology,” Frenkiel recalls, “but it was the first cellular system.”
AROUND THAT TIME, Frenkiel and Porter met a systems engineer named Joel Engel, who had just joined the Holmdel office. Engel—bright, opinionated, and energetic—soon noticed that even though Frenkiel and Porter were working on the Metroliner system, they were fixated on the questions from the previous year, when they had put forward the basic ideas for a larger mobile phone service. It was Engel’s understanding that to get ahead at Bell Labs, “you were supposed to work on more than you were asked to work on.”6 It was necessary, in other words, not only to do your assigned work but to devote 20 or 30 percent of your time to another project. At the time Engel was assigned to work on Bell Labs’ paging systems; AT&T was now selling a bulky, bricklike box, known as “Bell Boy,” that doctors or other busy professional people could use to alert them with a buzz that someone had called them. That buzzing urged a Bell Boy user to get to a pay phone and call their office in case there was an emergency. To a systems engineer, the Bell Boy was not terribly interesting. Engel, as a result, was soon drawn into Frenkiel and Porter’s spare-time obsession. “We would meet,” he recalls, “the three of us, and we would grab a conference room and stand around a blackboard and draw hexagons.”
The three men standing by the blackboard in Holmdel, New Jersey, in early 1968 did not have grandiose plans. “We were not visionaries,” Engel says of the early cellular meetings. “We were techies. If there was a vision it was primarily as a business service. Real estate agents. Doctors who made house calls.” The men believed that if they could get the system to work, the economics of cellular service could be compelling: A trucking service, for instance, could boost its efficiency with a fleet of phones in its vehicles. Increased productivity would justify the cost of the phones. The men around the blackboard were thinking car phones. Perhaps small handheld phones would emerge at some point, but not for decades yet.
In the summer of 1968, the FCC officially informed the Bell System that it might be interested in hearing what it might do if some of the channels being used by UHF television were reapportioned. Though Bell Labs engineers had already been warned by Chuck Elmendorf at AT&T, in Engel’s recollection the reaction to the FCC’s invitation was tinged with panic. Some of the old-timers at Bell Labs doubted, from looking at the early plans of Frenkiel, Porter, and Engel, that such a cellular system would work. “Microwaves don’t travel in hexagons,” Engel recalls hearing. There was further concern that the system wouldn’t be able to “find” a mobile phone subscriber and connect a call to them. Nevertheless, the FCC’s invitation represented an extraordinary opportunity for AT&T. The company had waited twenty years for this. Porter, Frenkiel, and Engel estimated that it would take about three years to deliver a cellular plan, which turned out to be correct.
“We got a lot less attention than you would think,” Frenkiel recalls of the efforts to create the cellular system. “We were really just another project.” Indeed, to stroll around inside the Black Box at that time, one would not have imagined that a mobile telephone system was an on-ramp to the future. The thing about Bell Labs, Frenkiel remarks, was that it could spend millions of dollars—or even $100 million, which was what AT&T would spend on cellular before it went to market7—on a technology that offered little guarantee it would succeed technologically or economically. Indeed, a marketing study commissioned by AT&T in the fall of 1971 informed its team that “there was no market for mobile phones at any price.” Neither man agreed with that assessment. Though Engel didn’t perceive it at the time, he later came to believe that marketing studies could only tell you something about the demand for products that actually exist. Cellular phones were a product that people had to imagine might exist.
“You have to understand,” Joel Engel says of the entire effort, “we were all very young, we were unscarred by failure. So we always knew it was going to work.” Not all of the AT&T executives were as optimistic. But anyone worrying that the cellular project might face the same disastrous fate as the Picturephone might see that it had one advantage. A Picturephone was only valuable if everyone else had a Picturephone. But cellular users didn’t only talk to other cellular users. They could talk to anyone in the national or global network. The only difference was that they could move.
ENGEL WAS PUT IN CHARGE of the group planning the cellular system design. He would later look back and see the early 1970s as a perfect example of what engineers sometimes call “steam engine time.” This term refers to the Scottish engineer James Watt, the inventor of the first commercially popular steam engine, whose name is also memorialized in the term we use to measure power. In the late 1700s, Watt made startling improvements upon more basic ideas of how to use compressed steam to run heavy machinery. The knowledge needed to make such an engine had by then coalesced to the point that his innovation was, arguably, inevitable. By the 1970s, the mobile business was ready to happen, Engel was sure, even if the marketers had their doubts. The technology was there. It was now just a matter of who was going to do it, and how fast they could make it work. “It was,” he says, “steam engine time for cellular.”
The FCC’s decision to consider proposals for mobile radio had been the spark. But a number of other technologies made it steam engine time, too. To Engel’s colleague Dick Frenkiel, it seems unlikely that the early cellular pioneers at Bell Labs could have actually implemented their designs in the 1950s. “Cellular is a computer technology,” Frenkiel points out. “It’s not a radio technology.” In other words, engineering the transmission and reception from a mobile handset to the local antennas, while challenging, wasn’t what made the idea innovative. It was the system’s logic—locating a user moving through the cellular honeycomb, monitoring the signal strength of that call, and handing off a ca
ll to a new channel, and a new antenna tower, as a caller moves along. One necessary piece of hardware for this logic was integrated circuits, those silicon chips on which a tiny circuit and thousands of transistors could be etched. They had only been developed a few years before Frenkiel’s mobile work at the Labs. And then, as the cellular team at Bell Labs began working on its FCC proposal, a Santa Clara, California, semiconductor company named Intel—formed by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, both refugees from Bill Shockley’s first semiconductor company—began producing a revolutionary integrated circuit called the 4004 microprocessor. Measuring only one-eighth by one-sixteenth of an inch, and containing 2,300 transistors, the 4004 was essentially a tiny, powerful computer. It was the first generation of devices that, when inserted into a mobile phone unit, could do a host of essential and highly complex calculations.