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

by Jon Gertner

  12 Interview of Katherine Kelly by Lillian Hoddeson, July 2, 1976, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD; www.aip.org/history/ohilist.

  13 Author visit to 2 Widemere Terrace, Short Hills, New Jersey.

  14 Joe Parisi, the Kellys’ former gardener, author interview.

  15 Interview of Katherine Kelly by Lillian Hoddeson, AIP.

  16 Eugene Gordon, author interview.

  17 William T. Golden, Memorandum for the file, December 19, 1950. “[H]e is next in line to become President upon the expected retirement of Dr. Oliver Buckley in about a year and a half. It was completely clear to me, in fact, Buckley said so, that Kelly is the man to succeed him.”

  18 William T. Golden, oral history, 1989, conducted by Niel M. Johnson. Truman Library; http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/goldenw.htm.

  19 John R. Pierce, “Mervin Joe Kelly: 1894–1971,” National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoir, 1975.

  20 Ibid.

  21 William T. Golden, Executive Office of the President, Memorandum for the file, December 4, 1950: “Kelly spends about one quarter of his time on the United States Air Force research and development matters … another one quarter of his time on various Government matters … [t]he remaining half of his time is devoted to Bell Tel Laboratories.” American Association for the Advancement of Science, History and Archives.

  22 William T. Golden, oral history, 1989.

  23 William T. Golden, memoranda. Golden wrote on December 19, 1950, “It is clear that Kelly would be a most excellent man for scientific adviser to the President in view of the practicality and directness of his approach, his comprehensive knowledge of the military services, and his wide experience in various phases of research and development matters. … It is also clear that he does not want the job, that he is most certainly an empire builder, that it would be a sacrifice to him in terms of his status at the Bell Tel. Labs where he is next in line to become president upon the expected retirement of Dr. Oliver Buckley in about a year and a half.”

  24 Anthony Lewis, “A.T.&T. Settles Antitrust Case; Shares Patents,” New York Times, January 25, 1956.

  25 Leroy Wilson, letter to David E. Lilienthal, Chairman, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, July 1, 1949. “It is my understanding that you have discussed with Mr. Clark, the Attorney General. … I also understand that you intend to acquaint the President with the situation.” AT&T archives.

  26 Necah Stewart Furman, Sandia National Laboratories: The Postwar Decade (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990).

  27 “Pertinent Information—Sandia,” AEC memo, May 17, 1949. AT&T archives.

  28 Furman, Sandia National Laboratories: The Postwar Decade.

  29 Harry Truman, letter to Leroy A. Wilson, May 13, 1949. “I am writing a similar note direct to Dr. O. E. Buckley,” Truman noted. AT&T archives.

  30 David E. Lilienthal, letter to Mervin J. Kelly, July 13, 1949. AT&T archives.

  31 “Nike Added to Nation’s Defense Arsenal,” Bell Laboratories Record, February 1954.

  32 Mervin Kelly, “The Contribution of Industrial Research to National Security,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Boston, December 29, 1953. AT&T archives.

  33 These innovations included a radio technique called “tropospheric scatter” and “over-the-horizon” radio transmission.

  34 Remarks by Dr. M. J. Kelly, “Before Bell System Lecturers’ Conference,” October 2, 1951. AT&T archives.

  CHAPTER TEN: SILICON

  1 Francis Bello, “The Year of the Transistor,” Fortune, March 1953.

  2 Ernest Braun and Stuart Macdonald sum up the military’s reasons concisely: “The military in the early fifties was not primarily concerned with price. Instead it was more concerned with such matters as availability, whether performance could match military specifications, and whether semiconductor devices would be reliable. … One considerable attraction of the new devices was the reduction in weight they offered, both in the components themselves and in the batteries of power supplies required.” Ernest Braun and Stuart Macdonald, Revolution in Miniature: The History and Impact of Semiconductor Electronics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 70.

  3 The automatic routing device, a fabulously complex piece of machinery, was known as the “card translator”; it used both a phototransistor and a current-amplifying transistor.

  4 Mervin J. Kelly, “The First Five Years of the Transistor,” Bell Telephone Magazine, Summer 1953.

  5 Remarks by Dr. M. J. Kelly, “Before Bell System Lecturers’ Conference,” October 2, 1951. AT&T archives.

  6 Long before the transistor came along, there is some historical evidence that if a Bell Labs innovation seemed a threat to company revenue it could be suppressed by upper management at AT&T. One instance, described by technology historian Mark Clark, is the Labs’ work on magnetic recorders during the 1930s. While it seems likely that the Bell engineers in that period developed the best magnetic recording devices in the world, Clark concludes that AT&T “management feared that the availability of a recording device would make customers less willing to use the telephone system.” Recording devices, for instance, by providing a permanent record of phone conversations, could threaten a loss of privacy. They might also make managers less likely to use the phone system to conduct business and sensitive negotiations. The development work on magnetic recorders was discontinued after World War II. I came across no similar examples after the war—indeed almost the opposite seemed to hold true. Innovations that should have been discontinued (such as the waveguide and Picturephone) were not; meanwhile, innovations that seemed a conceivable threat to wireline service, such as cellular telephony, were funded.

  7 “The Bell Is Ringing,” Time, May 29, 1964.

  8 There were some good reasons to favor germanium over silicon, too. For instance, electrons move faster within a germanium crystal than within silicon. Moreover, some of the essential advantages of silicon—that it could grow a surface oxide layer that makes it ideal for etching and fabrication—were not yet clear.

  9 Morris Tanenbaum, author interview.

  10 “DuPont Says It Can Make Pure Silicon, May Find Use in Transistors,” Wall Street Journal, May 11, 1953.

  11 Calvin S. Fuller, interviewed by James J. Bohning, Vero Beach, Florida, April 29, 1986, Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia, Oral History Transcript 0020. Used by permission of the Chemical Heritage Foundation.

  12 As Fuller went on to explain in his oral history, the taint within the germanium crystals being grown at Bell Labs “was a curious property of germanium that nobody seemed to understand called ‘thermal conversion.’ … I found out that it had to do with the way people were handling the crystals when they etched and washed them. If one took very great pains to make very pure water, better than conductivity type, and then looked for this thermal effect in the germanium crystal, it did not happen. That is, if you were good enough to use extremely pure conditions of preparation, the crystal was so sensitive that if you went into a laboratory and grabbed the doorknob and then happened to lightly touch the crystal, it would convert; that is it would change type from n to p on subsequent heating above about 500 degrees C. With the highly purified water as a post-etchant rinse the effect would not occur.” Ibid.

  13 D. M. Chapin, C. S. Fuller, and G. L. Pearson, “The Bell Solar Battery,” Bell Laboratories Record, July 1955.

  14 Interview of G. L. Pearson by Lillian Hoddeson, August 23, 1976, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD; www.aip.org/history/ohilist.

  15 Chapin, Fuller, and Pearson, “The Bell Solar Battery.”

  16 Calvin S. Fuller, interview by James J. Bohning.

  17 Ibid.

  18 According to the front page of the New York Times.

  19 Interview of Gerald Pearson by Lillian Hoddeson, AIP.

  20 John Perlin, Space to Earth: The Story of So
lar Electricity (Ann Arbor, MI: Aatec Publications, 1999), p. 36. Perlin also points out that in 1956 Chapin put the cost of a one-watt cell at $286.

  21 Remarks by Dr. M. J. Kelly, “Before Bell System Lecturers’ Conference,” October 2, 1951.

  22 Eugene O’Neill, ed., A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System: Transmission Technology (1925–1975) (New York: AT&T Bell Laboratories, 1985), p. 187.

  23 “Radio Phone Line Links East, West,” New York Times, August 18, 1951.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: EMPIRE

  1 I have borrowed the quote, with apologies, as it appears in Voice Across the Sea, a history of transatlantic communications by Arthur C. Clarke (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), p. 39. The British royal astronomer (or astronomer royal, as Clarke called him) was Sir George Airy.

  2 Mervin J. Kelly, “Oliver Ellsworth Buckley: 1887–1959,” National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoir, 1964, p. 14.

  3 Clarke, Voice Across the Sea, p. 141.

  4 M. J. Kelly, Sir Gordon Radley, G. W. Gilman, and R. J. Halsey, “A Transatlantic Telephone Cable,” Bell Telephone System technical publications monograph, 1954–1955.

  5 Kelly, “Oliver Ellsworth Buckley,” p. 15.

  6 Kelly, Radley, Gilman, and Halsey, “A Transatlantic Telephone Cable.”

  7 In August 1954, for instance, the Bell System closed down a twenty-five-year test on phone poles—buried halfway in the “adobe-type” soil—in Limon, Colorado. “Limon was chosen as the site for the tests because of its location in a typically dry, ‘dust-bowl’ climate noted for its severe exposure conditions.” Bell Laboratories Record, August 1954, p. 290. This issue of the Record also noted that there was a phone pole test in Gulfport, Mississippi, that had been ongoing since 1925, making it even older than the Colorado investigation.

  8 Eugene O’Neill, ed., A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System: Transmission Technology (1925–1975) (AT&T Bell Laboratories, 1985), p. 342.

  9 In reacting to a journal paper Kelly had written about Bell Labs, for instance, Shockley, citing deficiencies with laboratory supplies available to the scientists, chided Kelly. According to Shockley, Kelly had displayed “a glaring lack of knowledge … a tone expressed … which implies a lack of knowledge of shortcomings that is surprising.” Shockley Collection, Stanford University.

  10 Ian Ross, author interview.

  11 In her book The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), Leslie Berlin offers additional details on the “intense” courtship between Terman and Shockley. As Berlin notes, “Terman envisioned a symbiotic relationship in which technically oriented companies would support advanced research at Stanford while at the same time benefiting from a supply of well-educated graduates and professors interested in consulting work” (p. 57).

  12 T. R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution (New York: Random House, 2001), p. 87.

  13 John Pierce, “Mervin Joe Kelly: 1894–1971,” National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoir, 1975.

  14 William Shockley, letter to Mervin Kelly, November 20, 1956. Shockley Collection, Stanford University.

  15 “What the Anti-Trust Suit Consent Decree Means,” January 31, 1956. Issued by the Public Relations Department, American Telephone and Telegraph Company, “For Administrative People of AT&T General Departments.” No author. AT&T archives.

  16 Eileen Shanahan, “Company Replies—‘Astonished,’ It Says, Warns a Break-up Would Raise Rates,” New York Times, November 21, 1974.

  17 Peter Temin, with Louis Galambos, The Fall of the Bell System (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 15.

  18 Mervin J. Kelly, “Semiconductor Electronics: A New Technology—A New Industry,” June 17, 1958.

  19 William H. Whyte Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1957), p. 230.

  20 Francis Bello, “The World’s Greatest Industrial Laboratory,” Fortune, November 1958.

  21 Robert Gallager, MIT, author interview.

  22 Max Mathews, author interview.

  CHAPTER TWELVE: AN INSTIGATOR

  1 John R. Pierce, “The Wings of the Wind,” in Science, Art, and Communication (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1968), p. 17.

  2 John R. Pierce, interviewed by Harriet Lyle, Pasadena, California, April 16, 23, 27, 1979. Oral History Project, California Institute of Technology Archives. Used with permission.

  3 William C. Jakes, author interview.

  4 Steven M. Spencer, “Dial ‘S’ for Satellite,” Saturday Evening Post, January 14, 1961.

  5 Henry Landau, author interview.

  6 John Pierce, oral history conducted by Andy Goldstein, IEEE History Center, New Brunswick, NJ, August 19–21, 1992. “My father was a good man. He was a quiet man, not brilliant, not dumb. My mother had a sharper mind than he did.”

  7 John R. Pierce, My Career as an Engineer: An Autobiographical Sketch (University of Tokyo, 1988), p. 54.

  8 John Pierce, oral history conducted by Andy Goldstein.

  9 Ibid.

  10 The instructor was S. S. Mackeown, whom Pierce also credited for getting him a job at Bell Laboratories.

  11 Pierce was an active and effective self-promoter. His profile in the New Yorker, which focused on his communication satellite work, was published a few years after Pierce and his deputy, Rudi Kompfner, sent a long, unsolicited letter (August 12, 1959) to the editor of the magazine, suggesting the editor assign someone to cover the events leading up to the Echo satellite launch. “We have little doubt that the news media will dish out the usual exaggerated, distorted and unbalanced accounts, regardless of the accuracy of the data supplied to them,” Kompfner wrote. He then suggested that a reporter from the august publication, by spending significant amounts of time with the Bell Labs team, could produce an account of the satellite experiment “which will be all that the usual newspaper accounts are not, something written by grown-ups for grown-ups, and which may in due course become a document of our time.” An editor at the magazine (Eugene Kinkead, letter to Rudi Kompfner, September 9, 1959) responded positively a few weeks later: “We may well want to look into these and, if we decide they’re our dish, you should be hearing before long from one of our writing staff.” AT&T archives.

  12 Chuck Elmendorf, author interview.

  13 John R. Pierce, interview by Harriet Lyle. Used by permission.

  14 Pierce himself later acknowledged this to Elmendorf, who was amused by the concession.

  15 Pierce, My Career as an Engineer: An Autobiographical Sketch.

  16 The close colleague was William O. Baker, who made the observation at Pierce’s retirement.

  17 John Pierce, oral history conducted by Andy Goldstein.

  18 Calvin Tomkins, “Woomera Has It!,” New Yorker, September 21, 1963.

  19 John Pierce, oral history conducted by Andy Goldstein.

  20 Pierce’s various explanations for his derivation of the word “transistor” are fairly technical and not wholly clarifying. In his interview with Lincoln Barnett, for instance, he said, “There are already resistors and thermistors in the Bell System … there is a term ‘conductance,’ and vacuum tubes have ‘transconductance.’ Well, there’s a term ‘resistance.’ The transistor is supposed to be the dual of the vacuum tube, so if you had transconductance, why shouldn’t you have transresistance? So I thought we should call it the transistor.”

  21 “An interview of Dr. J. R. Pierce by Mr. Lincoln Barnett for the American Telephone & Telegraph Company,” February 13, 1963. AT&T archives.

  22 W. S. Shockley, daily planner, December 31, 1947. Shockley files, Stanford University. Reviewed by author.

  23 Clarke dedicated Voice Across the Sea, his book on overseas communications, “To John Pierce, who suggested this book and bullied me into writing it.”

  24 Clarke made an extended visit to Bell Labs in the late 1950s. In My Career as an Engineer, Pierce writes, “A great deal
of effort went into generating samples representing speech. At Bell Labs, Max Mathews, John Kelly, Peter Denes, Jim Flanagan and others were pioneers in such work. As a part of this work, a computer sang ‘A Bicycle Built for Two’ (‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true …’). Arthur Clarke heard this, and the computer Hal sang the song in the movie 2001.”

  25 As it happened, Pierce was also commanding a team in the lab next door to Jim Fisk during the Second World War. While Fisk was doing his wartime work on magnetrons for radar, Pierce was working on a related technology known as klystrons. One night, Pierce filled Fisk’s magnetrons with tiny scraps of paper laced with thyme oil, so that when Fisk’s group gave supervisors a demonstration of the magnetrons the next day, the first step of the demonstration—blowing cold air through the devices—resulted in a blizzard of perfumed confetti.

  26 H. L. McDowell, “The Traveling-Wave Tube Goes to Work,” Bell Laboratories Record, June 1960.

  27 Walter Brown, author interview.

  28 J. R. Pierce and H. D. Hagstrum, “Report on Visit to British Electronics Laboratories.” Pierce Collection, Stanford Special Collections archive.

  29 T. R. Kennedy Jr., “New Tube Expands Radio Possibilities,” New York Times, July 6, 1946.

  30 Ernest Braun and Stuart Macdonald, Revolution in Miniature: The History and Impact of Semiconductor Electronics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

  31 “I wanted to write for Astounding Science Fiction; I had found I could sell factual articles, and I didn’t want to annoy the Publications Department or have them annoyed with me by sending all this junk through for release.” “An Interview of Dr. J. R. Pierce by Mr. Lincoln Barnett for the American Telephone & Telegraph Company.”