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

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The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation Page 40

by Jon Gertner


  There may be one other observation worth adding to Pierce’s list. In recounting what he learned from Bell Labs, John Mayo, among other things, offers this: “We learned that the impossible is not impossible. We learned that if you think you can do something you may very well be able to do one thousand times better once you understand what’s going on.” It may be easy to overlook something crucial in what Mayo is saying. But it relates back to Bell Labs’ origins—back when Frank Jewett and Harold Arnold set about creating the laboratory at Western Electric that ultimately became Bell Labs. The men built it upon the notion that by encouraging their staff to understand a technology, they could create advances that were not only useful but revolutionary. An industrial lab, Jewett explained, was a group of intelligent men “specially trained in a knowledge of the things and methods of science.” As he saw it, a properly staffed and organized lab could avoid the mistakes of cut-and-try experimentation and in turn “bring to bear an aggregate of creative force on any particular problem which is infinitely greater than any force which can be conceived of as residing in the intellectual capacity of an individual.”20 The vacuum tube repeater, which allowed a phone call to reach from New York to San Francisco, was only the first great proof of this. And then many others followed.

  A drive for understanding separated the great scientists and engineers of the twentieth century from their predecessors. And it separated their inventions and business successes, too. The thin, slow-moving physicist named Clinton Davisson, who was hired at the Western labs just before World War I, found that it was the only thing he cared about. And that, in turn, made a permanent impression on Davisson’s best friend and office mate, the young and impetuous physicist from Missouri named Mervin Kelly. They were there to get ahead. But Kelly could see that they were only going to get ahead by understanding what they were doing.

  COMPARING THE INFORMATION BUSINESS of Kelly’s era to that of the present can be enlightening as well as tricky. How do the technology giants of today—companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, or Facebook—measure up to Bell Labs? To be sure, there are similarities. All of these companies have carved out a near-monopoly status in various electronic hardware or computer software markets. All are sitting on enormous reserves of cash—tens of billions of dollars in some cases—that they could invest at will on research or new ideas. All of these companies seem intent on controlling, or at least dominating, our communications markets.

  All of these companies meanwhile employ some of the finest engineers and computer scientists on the planet. And to house those employees, corporate executives have built citadels on expansive, grassy campuses—informal, creative environments that reward innovative thinking with financial rewards and (thanks to the easy proliferation of software) speedy product rollouts. Google has even picked up on an old Bell Labs tradition: It encourages workers to spend part of their time—up to 20 percent—on a project that captures their interest, just as Joel Engel did when he planned a cellular phone system in Holmdel’s Black Box in the late 1960s.

  Still, the contrasts between these organizations and Bell Labs are crucial. “This was a company that literally dumped technology on our country,” the physics historian Michael Riordan has said of Bell Labs. “I don’t think we’ll see an organization with that kind of record ever again.”21 The expectation that, say, Google or Apple could behave like Bell Labs—that such companies could invest heavily in basic or applied research and then sprinkle the results freely around California—seems misplaced, if not naive. Such companies don’t exist as part of a highly regulated national public trust. They exist as part of our international capital markets. They are superb at producing a specific and limited range of technology products. And at the end of the day, new scientific knowledge matters far less to them than the demands—for leadership, growth, and profits—of their customers, employees, and shareholders.

  Perhaps information technology, then, is the wrong place to look for a new Bell Labs. We might do better to poke around in other parts of the economy. One place to consider is a complex of buildings set amid a 689-acre campus some thirty miles north of Washington, D.C. Known as Janelia Farm, the campus serves as an elite research center for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Janelia opened in 2006 with the intent of attacking the most basic biomedical research problems; it is patterned after Bell Labs and backed by a multibillion-dollar endowment. The primary goal is to understand consciousness and how the human brain processes information, but the approach to innovation is familiar: a close, interdisciplinary exchange of ideas between the world’s brightest science researchers, all of whom are given ample funding and tremendous freedom. The directors of Janelia urge their researchers to take risks and to flirt with failure as they “explore the unknown.” There are no classes to teach, no papers to grade, no federal grants to pursue. And while the scale of the research effort is smaller than at the Labs—Janelia is home to about three hundred researchers and a hundred visiting scholars—it’s difficult not to conclude, just as Kelly might have, that it’s very much an institute of creative technology. By early indications, too, the results at Janelia and Howard Hughes outshine the results of academics working within the existing structure for federally financed medical research.22

  Also, there is another place to look for a new Bell Labs. Moving the global economy from one that runs on fossil fuels to one that runs on renewables is almost certainly the most difficult challenge—the wickedest problem—of the twenty-first century. Whether we succeed or fail at these efforts, which are only now in their infancy, will determine how dramatically our climate will change in the coming century. It will also determine the political and economic strength of nations that now rely on the production or consumption of oil, gas, and coal. As U.S. secretary of energy, Steven Chu, who won the Nobel Prize for his research at Bell Labs in the early 1980s, has proposed a number of research projects to spur clean energy innovation. Chu calls these projects “innovation hubs,” which are effectively meant to function as miniature copies of his old employer. So far, the hubs focus on making breakthroughs in synthetic fuels, nuclear power, and energy efficiency. “I believe that to solve the energy problem,” Chu said in 2009 at a U.S. Senate committee hearing, “the Department of Energy must strive to be the modern version of Bell Labs in energy research.”23

  In size and scope, the hubs are a modest first step. But on a number of counts, Bell Labs represents a useful model for energy innovation—a model that’s arguably better than the Manhattan Project (for the first atomic bomb) or the Apollo program (for the first moon landing). Both aimed for a lofty but singular goal. By contrast, the creation of a clean-energy economy will be a process without end. It will involve the management of vast, sophisticated, interconnected systems, much like communications networks, that require great technological leaps forward as well as constant, incremental improvements. The Labs’ research department was conceived upon the notion of constantly looking far ahead, toward the goal of big and risky breakthroughs. The search for clean, affordable energy undoubtedly requires such dramatic advances. Yet in 2012, a host of newly fashioned inventions (in solar, wind, and tidal power, among others) already await the ingenuity of engineers who are able to develop them into innovations that are cheaper and better than what we currently use.24 And in this respect, Bell Labs’ other dimension—the ability to exhaustively develop a product and get it ready for mass manufacturing and deployment—is perhaps even more crucial. To think long-term toward the revolutionary, and to simultaneously think near-term toward manufacturing, comprises the most vital of combinations.

  The need for an energy quest, as it happens, might not surprise the founders of the Labs. In the spring of 1923, an editor at the New York Times wrote to Frank Jewett, soon to become Bell Labs’ first president, and invited him to contribute to a symposium of ideas sponsored by the newspaper. Jewett agreed, and his four-hundred-word piece, appearing on the May 20, 1923, front page, set the tone for the edition. “Water, Energy Limi
ted; Scientists Look to the Sun Next,” the headline read. Jewett wrote, “It seems clear that a great, if not the greatest, present day need is the development of some new source of cheap utilizable energy.” With the tools of “research and invention,” Jewett urged scientists to figure out ways to take advantage of solar or tidal power, or “fuel from the luxuriant vegetable growths of the tropics”—a predecessor, most likely, of today’s biofuels.25

  The question the Times editor had posed to Jewett was, “What invention does the world need most?”

  . . .

  RALPH BOWN, the director of research who pondered the significance of the transistor as a snowstorm moved in on New Jersey on Christmas Eve 1947, would sometimes ask his colleagues: What was Bell Labs? As John Pierce recounted it, Bown would say: If we marched all the people out and destroyed the buildings and the equipment and the records, would Bell Laboratories be destroyed? Bown’s answer was no, it would not. On the other hand, he would say that if the buildings, equipment, and records remained intact but the people were removed, Bell Laboratories would be destroyed. His obvious point was that Bell Labs was a human and not a material organization. Yet perhaps it was more complicated than that. For instance, Bown never explained whether the institution’s success was a result of thousands of engineers and scientists working together, or of the few exemplars who towered above everyone else.

  “Everybody has their own list,” remarks Bob Lucky, the former Bell Labs executive who succeeded John Pierce as executive director of communications sciences. On Lucky’s list are the mathematicians Claude Shannon, Steve Rice, and David Slepian. And the physicist Sol Buchsbaum, who rose to an executive position with Bell Labs in the 1970s. “Shockley of course,” he adds. “Certainly Pierce and Baker.” In Lucky’s view, the exceptional individuals lent the institution its reputation of exceptionalism. “I just don’t think they make people like the kind of people we had,” Lucky says. “Not that nature doesn’t make them, just that the environment doesn’t make them. We had these people who were bigger than life back then. And we don’t seem to have them anymore—though people might say Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.” In Lucky’s view, a list of Bell Labs’ exemplars captures the essence of the organization. “They set the examples that permeated the whole place. They created the fame and were what other people aspired to be. They were the leaders, even if they weren’t high up in management. If you knew them, you knew Bell Labs.” While it’s true that the handful of famous people overshadows tens of thousands of other people, he adds, if you take that handful away, “you don’t have Bell Labs.”

  There is another way of answering Bown’s question, however. Chuck Elmendorf, John Pierce’s friend from Caltech who roomed with Pierce in New York City in the late 1930s, sees the institution of Bell Labs as far more important than what he calls “the great men.” Elmendorf asks, “How do you capture the aspects of the institution that have nothing to do with these great names? What I’m troubled about is—even though these are great names … John Pierce was practically my brother; Barney Oliver, we were buddies; hell, I learned solid-state physics sitting on the couch in Bill Shockley’s living room, because John Pierce sent me up there. I knew these guys. But they weren’t Bell Laboratories.” Nor, Elmendorf adds, were the other Nobel Prize winners. To him, the essence of Bell Labs was its immense and complete institutional capabilities—how it could develop anything from the tiniest element of a small electronic device to the grand plan for a national network; also, how it could develop people, turning callow college graduates into competent researchers and managers. As a result, it could solve the biggest of problems. “I worked with guys who made some tremendous contributions and you’ve never heard of them,” he says. So maybe this argument—the individual versus the institution; the great men versus the yeomen; the famous versus the forgotten—is insoluble. Or maybe the argument is easily deflected. Perhaps the most significant thing was that Bell Labs had both kinds of people in profusion, and both kinds working together. And for the problems it was solving, both kinds were necessary.

  Amazement is a common thread in conversations with Bell Labs veterans. Some of the amazement is in simple observations—for instance, in the speed and capabilities of our present-day information networks, as well as in the processing power and versatility of our cellular phones. Or it comes in the realization that connectivity in today’s world is far more important than, say, fidelity. That phone calls often crackle or fade or echo is something that never would have been permissible thirty years ago, where perfect transmission and victory over noise were the ultimate goals. Some of the amazement, however, runs deeper. It resides in the fact that the world of Bell Labs is disappearing, and the contribution of its staff is mostly forgotten. “Frankly,” Bob Lucky observes, “if you ask people on the street who invented the transistor, they don’t have the foggiest idea.”

  John Pierce, the most eloquent of the Young Turks, seemed to have a deep respect for the destructive quality of new technology. Pierce carried this understanding with him from his youth until his death. Upon receiving the Japan Prize in the mid-1980s, he wrote, “However nostalgic I may be about the world of my childhood, it is gone, and so are the sorts of people who lived in it. Science and technology destroyed that world and replaced it with another.” Typical of Pierce, he could sound bloodless in public about the process of change and innovation. But confidentially, some aspects of these social disruptions seemed to rankle him.

  Pierce hoped privately that the work he and his colleagues did would someday be broadly recognized. This was not a late-in-life wish; rather, it was something he considered as early as the 1950s, before the launch of Echo, before he had even reached his fiftieth birthday. “In general we are no more sentimental about the relics of science and technology than Shakespeare’s contemporaries were about his house and possessions,” Pierce wrote in an unpublished essay from 1959. “What mementos will our heirs have of our romantic present to tell them that men created the things which they take for granted?” For someone sentimental enough to actually believe that the origins of technology were worth seeking out, Pierce noted, it might be possible to find the old laboratory that Mervin Kelly shared with his friend Clinton Davisson at the West Street labs in Manhattan. You might be able to locate the room in which Davisson worked, Pierce noted, even if the walls have been moved and the configuration of the laboratory had been changed. But in the case of then-recent inventions such as the maser, which Pierce already saw as a momentous development, “it will probably be impossible a few years from now even to find the movable partitions which surrounded the work. It is clear that we build for the day and not for the ages, and what we build has a community and functional rather than an individual character.”26

  There was no way around the conclusion. Pierce and his friends were making ideas and things that would either disappear in an instant, or would be absorbed into the ongoing project of civilization. He feared that any memories of the makers would perish, too. “I am afraid that there will be little tangible left in a later age,” Pierce wrote of his world at Bell Labs, “to remind our heirs that we were men, rather than cogs in a machine.”

  Acknowledgments

  To a certain extent, my interest in Bell Labs arose out of personal experience. I grew up in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, just a few hundred yards from Bell Labs’ Murray Hill campus. From an early age, I was familiar with every building at Murray Hill. I also knew—long before I understood its significance—that the transistor had been invented there. I never imagined my parents’ decision to settle nearby would someday enrich the texture of this book, but it did, and I thank them for that twist of fate. The more important point, of course, is the debt I owe my parents, Doreen and Bud Gertner, for their love and encouragement. They were supportive of my writing career from the beginning, and never wavered (though they always worried). My father, the true scientist in the family, died unexpectedly a week before I finished this manuscript. Had he gotten the opportunity, I imagin
e he would have been immensely relieved to see this book complete. I am finished now, Dad.

 

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