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

by Jon Gertner

  Bardeen himself died a few years later, in 1991. He had worked at the University of Illinois–Urbana from the time he left Bell Labs, in 1951, until then. A good deal of his subsequent research at Illinois had focused on the phenomenon of superconductivity. In other words, he and several colleagues explained the reasons why some substances, at very cold temperatures, can conduct electricity without any resistance. Their ideas took shape in a formidable tract that merged theoretical physics with complex mathematics. In 1972, Bardeen was awarded a second Nobel Prize in Physics for the work. He is the world’s only physicist to have such a distinction.

  AFTER MOVING FROM BELL LABS to MIT in the late 1950s, Claude Shannon continued to publish important papers on communications. But his most productive years as a mathematician were behind him. Like Shockley, he had left the Bell cocoon; the difference, perhaps, was that Shannon understood the implications. “I believe that scientists get their best work done before they are fifty, or even earlier than that,” he told an interviewer late in life. “I did most of my best work while I was young.”22 Indeed, a decade after arriving at MIT, his work on information began to trail off. “He was concerned that he had nothing left to say,” Len Kleinrock, who was a PhD student under Shannon at MIT in the early 1960s, recalls. This may have been another instance of Shannon’s typical modesty. Still, says Kleinrock, “He had his doubts about keeping up with his own field.”

  Shannon nonetheless remained interested in the implications of his work. His speeches from that era suggest a man quietly convinced that information—how it moved, how it was stored, how it was processed—would soon define global societies and economies. A few years after he entered academia, in 1959, he lectured to an audience of students and faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. “I think that this present century in a sense will see a great upsurge and development of this whole information business,” Shannon remarked. The future, he predicted, would depend on “the business of collecting information and the business of transmitting it from one point to another, and perhaps most important of all, the business of processing it—using it to replace man at semi-rote operation[s] at a factory … even the replacement of man in the things that we almost think of as creative, things like doing mathematics or translating languages.”

  When he started at MIT, Shannon gave regular lectures on topics that held his interest. He also invited speakers to campus. In 1961, for instance, he arranged for John Pierce to visit and give a talk entitled “What Computers Can Do Better—and How.” Pierce, though enthusiastic about the potential of computers, seemed slightly less optimistic than Shannon (who introduced his old friend with a brief speech of his own). By the late 1960s, though, Shannon’s talks at MIT were becoming rare occurrences. What’s more, his visits to the MIT campus were beginning to grow infrequent. Mostly he stayed home to tinker with his gadgets. Visitors to his large, elegant house in the Boston suburbs would get a tour of his juggling machines, his unicycles, his collection of pianos and musical instruments, and all his hand-built gadgets and automata. One week, he liked to show off a robotic lawn mower he’d constructed; another week, it was a flame-throwing trumpet. Much of it was deposited in what he called his “toy room.” When he visited Shannon, John Pierce seemed less interested in the gadgets than some others; he sometimes told people Shannon built his automata to “show off.” Mostly, Pierce wanted to chat with his friend about ideas and the future. When Pierce was at the Shannon house, Betty Shannon recalls, he and Claude would take a boat out on the lake that adjoined the property and paddle around, talking for hours.

  At almost every other opportunity, Shannon seemed eager to project an air of frivolity. “I think he just loosened up,” his wife recalls.23 To some fellow academics, his lighthearted obsessions remained puzzling: Wasn’t he wasting his time? But it was worth considering whether his interests were largely consistent with his habits, decades earlier, at Bell Labs. With information theory, Shannon had never had any intention of changing the world—it had just worked out that way. He had pursued the work not because he perceived it would be useful in squeezing more information into undersea ocean cables or deep space communications. He had pursued it because it intrigued him. In fact, Shannon had never been especially interested in the everyday value of his work. He once told an interviewer, “I think you impute a little more practical purpose to my thinking than actually exists. My mind wanders around, and I conceive of different things day and night. Like a science-fiction writer, I’m thinking, ‘What if it were like this?’ or, ‘Is there an interesting problem of this type?’ … It’s usually just that I like to solve a problem, and I work on these all the time.”24

  The stock market was an interesting problem. In the late 1960s and early 1970s it became something of an obsession. Shannon did not invest because he needed money. He had his MIT salary and pension; he also earned a comfortable sum consulting at Bell Labs. (Though Shannon had long ceased being involved at Murray Hill, Bill Baker, the president of the Labs, kept him on the payroll anyway. Baker insisted it was an honorable thing to do “should the man who came up with information theory” suffer any kind of financial hardship.)25 Shannon had become wealthy, too, through friends in the technology industry. He owned significant shares in Hewlett-Packard, where his friend Barney Oliver ran the research labs, and was deeply invested in Teledyne, a conglomerate started by another friend, Henry Singleton. Shannon sat on Teledyne’s board of directors. The stock market was therefore just another puzzle, albeit one with a pleasant proof of success. He was convinced that the stock market was less efficient than some economists believed, and that a smart investor who took advantage of mispriced stocks could do quite well.26

  Len Kleinrock, Shannon’s former student, recalls that one day at MIT, Shannon mentioned that he was making a mathematical model of the stock market. “I said, ‘Mr. Shannon, you’re interested in making money?’ ” Kleinrock recalls. “He said, ‘Why yes, aren’t you?’ ”

  AS HE TURNED AWAY from academic pursuits, Shannon also focused on juggling. To him, the sport had a number of inviting aspects: It was a game, a problem, a puzzle. It produced motions he considered beautiful. And it was something he simply could not master, making it all the more tantalizing. Shannon would often lament that he had small hands, and thus had great difficulty making the jump from four balls to five—a demarcation, some might argue, between a good juggler and a great juggler. Old friends—fellow jugglers from the Bell Labs days—wrote encouraging letters suggesting he was closer to five balls than he realized. It’s likely Shannon never quite achieved that. Nevertheless, in the late 1970s he found himself consumed by the question of whether he could formulate a scientific theory of juggling to explain its unifying principles. Just as he had done years before—for his papers on cryptography, information, and computer chess—he delved into the history of juggling and took stock of its greatest practitioners.

  He began to seek out data. “One day he came to the MIT juggling club, basically with a tape measure and a stopwatch,” recalls Arthur Lewbel, an MIT graduate student who later became an economics professor at Boston College. “And he came up to some of us who were juggling. He didn’t say who he was—none of us would have known him even if he said his name. And he said he just wanted to see if he could measure our juggling.” Shannon came back a number of times, and eventually he became friendly with the students. He invited them for pizza at his house. In turn, when the juggling club decided to go to the Big Apple Circus together, they called Shannon, who was thrilled to be invited. He was now part of the gang.27

  In December 1980, he asked various jugglers he knew to wear electromagnetic sensors—“a flexible copper mesh which was fitted over the first and third fingers of the juggler’s hand”—and then had them juggle lacrosse balls covered in conducting foil. When a ball was caught, it closed the circuit between the first and third fingers, and thereby started a precision time clock; when the ball was released, microseconds later, a circuit opened and the clock stopped
. Shannon took exact measurements, comprising hundreds of pages of data, about how long each ball stayed in the juggler’s hand before release.28 From this information, he put forward a theoretical equation—(F + D)H = (V + D)N—that governed juggling’s physics. (As Shannon’s juggling friend Arthur Lewbel explains, F is the time a ball spends in the air, D is the time a ball is in a juggler’s hand, H is the number of hands, V is the time a hand is vacant, and N is the number of balls juggled.)29

  This was only one aspect, however, of a longer treatise he was composing at the time. Shannon had traced the origins of juggling back to Egyptian murals from 1900 BC and then through to the ancient Greeks and the jesters and minstrels of the medieval era. “Jugglers,” he had concluded, “are surely among the most vulnerable of all entertainers. Musicians and actors can usually cover their slips, but if a juggler makes a mistake, it’s a beaut!” When he showed the juggling draft to some editors at Scientific American, they let him know they were interested in publishing it. But then Shannon balked. He didn’t think the work was yet polished or insightful enough to merit publication. In an exchange of letters that continued for several years, the magazine would beseech him to let it print the manuscript. Shannon would pleasantly change the subject. Sometimes he would send his poetry, mostly rhyming doggerel, and suggest the magazine publish that instead. In response the editors would politely decline and change the subject back to publishing the juggling essay—would he please agree to let them?

  He never did. And in truth Shannon had no compelling reason to publish anything anymore. His legacy was secure. And his reputation was not harmed by his reclusive tendencies.30 On the contrary, his legend only appeared to grow. Each year seemed to bring a new honorary degree or prize that he and Betty collected by traveling the world. In one famous instance in 1985, Shannon showed up, unannounced, at an international conference on information theory in Brighton, England. He blended into the crowd—just another kindly, polite, slender, white-haired gentleman. He’d been absent from academic meetings for so long that apparently no one recognized him. Then a rumor spread that Shannon was there. As one of the attendees later told Scientific American, “it was as if Newton had showed up at a physics conference.”31 Later, when Shannon was asked to speak, he grew anxious, believing he had little of value to say, and took several balls out of his pocket. And then he juggled for the crowd. Afterward, the attendees, some of the leading mathematicians and engineers in the world, lined up to get his autograph.

  It may have been the case that Shannon, like Shockley, deserved a Nobel Prize. But the Nobel is not awarded for mathematics or engineering. In the mid-1980s, however, an award was established in Japan known as the Kyoto Prize that was meant for outstanding contributions in the field of mathematics. Shannon was voted the first recipient. “I don’t know how history is taught here in Japan,” he told the audience when he traveled there in 1985 to give an acceptance speech, “but in the United States in my college days, most of the time was spent on the study of political leaders and wars—Caesars, Napoleons, and Hitlers. I think this is totally wrong. The important people and events of history are the thinkers and innovators, the Darwins, Newtons, Beethovens whose work continues to grow in influence in a positive fashion.” Shannon also conveyed little doubt that machines would soon outpace humans in some respects. Forty years before, he had been one of the first to pursue a computerized chess program; now, in the 1986 Kyoto speech, he noted that chess programs had become so sophisticated that they could beat chess masters. He believed they would soon beat grandmasters. And after that he believed they would win a prize by dethroning a world champion. “If I were a betting man,” he said, “I would bet that this prize will be won before the year 2001.”

  The joke, perhaps, was that Shannon wasn’t much of a betting man. He made wagers when logic assured him he could win. Or he built games tilted in his favor. He won the chess bet in 1997, when Deep Blue, an IBM chess computer, beat the Russian grandmaster Garry Kasparov. The result, however, gave Shannon little satisfaction. At that point he was living in a Massachusetts nursing home, his mind lost to Alzheimer’s. It had begun, some of his friends recall, in the late 1980s, when there had been lapses when he tried to answer questions. At first, small things were forgotten. Then it became larger things, to the point where efforts to recall events left him skidding through broad and frightening blank patches in his memory. His handwriting became shaky. He forgot about some of his Bell Labs work. He would get lost coming home from the store. Eventually he lost the ability to place names and faces.

  It took Betty Shannon years after her husband’s death, in 2001, to clear out their Massachusetts house. There were so many awards and robes from honorary graduations, and so many books and papers, many of which Shannon had forgotten or decided never to publish. And there were, finally, so many machine parts and tools, probably tens of thousands of dollars’ worth. Betty donated some of the games and juggling toys he had built to the MIT Museum, which in a 2007 exhibit dubbed them Claude Shannon’s Ingenious Machines. His juggling clowns were included, along with games and machines such as THROBAC, the useless but amusing hand-built computer that could calculate in Roman numerals. Theseus, a remnant from the Bell Labs days—the mouse-machine built by Shannon, mostly late at night, which could navigate any maze—was one of the featured museum pieces, too.

  JOHN PIERCE OUTLIVED CLAUDE SHANNON by one year. At the very end of their lives, the two men were too ill to communicate. As Shannon suffered from Alzheimer’s, Pierce suffered from Parkinson’s. Long before either had become sick, however, they enjoyed a final hurrah.

  In the spring of 1978 the men spent a semester together in England. The idea had been Rudi Kompfner’s, Pierce’s friend and collaborator on the traveling wave tube and the Echo satellite, who had retired from the Labs and was teaching at All Souls College in Oxford. He had arranged for Shannon, Pierce, and Barney Oliver (the former Bell Labs researcher who had gone on to run Hewlett-Packard’s research labs) to come to Oxford as visiting fellows for a college term. The three men had something in common: Thirty years before, they had collaborated on a paper about pulse code modulation that had proven prescient. The men had put forward the notion that digital pulses, rather than waves, were certain to be the future of information transmission. At Oxford, they were to have only one obligation: to lecture about any aspect of their research work they deemed important. “To get something out of Claude may be the problem,” Kompfner admitted in a note to Pierce. “Could you help?”32 Pierce, too, worried that this could ruin the plan. When Shannon didn’t want to do something, Pierce knew, Shannon didn’t do it. “I don’t know how to tackle Claude effectively,” Pierce confessed to Kompfner. “Maybe Barney and I could interview him about information theory, the stock market, and other matters?”33 As it turned out, the triumphant reunion of the soothsayers of the information age became infused with melancholy. It’s unclear what, if anything, Shannon contributed while in England, with the exception of some notes he made for a mirrored contraption allowing American drivers to adjust more easily to the English custom of driving on the left side of the road. Pierce, for his part, delivered a lecture in memory of his friend Kompfner, who had died of a heart attack a few months before the reunion took place.

  Pierce went back home to Caltech. For six years he had been doing research and advising graduate students, but he was finding the adjustment difficult. At Bell Labs he had spent his days doing whatever suited him. The brunt of his management work there had consisted of dropping in, unannounced, on colleagues in their labs to ask how work was progressing. But at Caltech he had to give lectures at a prearranged time and then had to spend hours explaining complex ideas to grad students. At Bell Labs, as he recalled it, the same conversation with his colleagues would usually take minutes. (Whether his colleagues actually understood his explanations, or whether he simply walked away before he could field their questions, was a matter for debate.) “I didn’t adapt well to Cal Tech,” he later admitted. �
�Not that there was anything wrong. For years and years I’d had it too easy. There were very few times when it mattered where I was. I had very few obligations to be at a particular place at a particular time to do a particular thing at Bell Labs.” Pierce obviously seemed to favor the Bell Labs arrangement. As he saw it, the work at the Labs was vital; it was required to improve the network. “People cared about everything,” he said of colleagues there. On the contrary, he noted, in the university “no one can tell a professor what to do, on the one hand. But in any deep sense, nobody cares what he’s doing, either.”34

  Pierce may have complained about academia merely because he complained about a lot of things. He was caviling and argumentative by nature. It nevertheless remained the case that the good fortune he enjoyed throughout his life lasted long after his Bell Labs retirement. His advice to his students in California was that the key to a good life was to be lucky and smart. To be sure, he considered himself both. His complaints to the contrary, he often enjoyed working with students, and he did serious research during his spare time. He and his wife lived in Pasadena, in a home with a serene Japanese rock garden and a small bubbling waterfall. He had a vast home library where he could spend entire days reading. And like Shannon, Pierce now had the pleasure of collecting a trove of honorary degrees and prizes from around the world. Meanwhile, he maintained a large network of friends, some of whom continued to offer him work. When Pierce retired from Caltech in 1979, for instance, he spent a few years working as a technology advisor at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. And a few years later, at an age when most of his friends had retired or died, he decided to devote the rest of his life to music. Stanford offered him a visiting professorship in its Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. The school went by the abbreviation CCRMA, but it appealed to Pierce that it was commonly pronounced as “karma.” And so in 1983 Pierce moved north, from Pasadena to Palo Alto, to start anew.