by Jon Gertner
14 An undated explanatory flyer about the Bell laser research explained, “When Picturephone service becomes common, when high-speed data communication between computers is more widespread, and when all of today’s communications services have expanded, present message carrying capacities may not be enough.” AT&T archives.
15 Stewart Miller, “Communication by Laser,” Scientific American, January 1966.
16 C. G. B. Garrett, “The Optical Maser,” Electrical Engineering (April 1961): 248–51.
17 The waveguide pipes, as Jeff Hecht points out in City of Light (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), his history of optical communications, were also sensitive to temperature changes and vibrations, not to mention seismic activity.
18 One possible solution to keeping a light beam focused within the pipe seemed to be the insertion of gas “lenses” inside the tubes that would continually refocus the light wave as it moved along. Still, waveguide transmissions might still be ruined by fluctuations in air temperature, ground vibrations, and tremors (see above). The problem appeared to be vexing.
19 Hecht, City of Light, p. 111.
20 Tingye Li, author interview. In Li’s view, Kao deserves enormous credit for three separate aspects that hastened the introduction of fiber optics. The first was proposing fused silica as the material for the glass strands. “The second thing was that [Kao] went ahead and measured a very low loss to the material. And the third was, he went around the world to get people to work on this. He came to Bell Labs, and he went to Corning.”
21 Ira Jacobs, author interview.
22 Memo, “Work Forecast,” S. E. Miller to R. Kompfner and J. R. Pierce, July 18, 1969. As Stew Miller put it to his bosses, “Our current mainstream effort is centered around laser transmission systems. Primary effort has been on the transmission media, the following being of prime interest: 1) Glass-lens (beam) waveguides …; 2) Gas-lens waveguides; 3) Glass fiber waveguides.” The memo goes on to detail the Labs’ efforts at all three and acknowledges its work on fiber was lagging behind the work at Corning, which had been described to the Bell Labs’ team through “a private communication.”
23 William O. Baker, “Testimony of William O. Baker,” May 31, 1966. F.C.C. Docket No. 16258.
24 Memo, R. Kompfner to J. K. Galt, November 30, 1970. AT&T archives.
25 Unix was created primarily by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna.
26 Willard Boyle and George Smith were credited as inventors of the CCD device and were awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize—to be shared with Charles Kao, the early champion of fiber optics. Immediately after Boyle and Smith won the award, Eugene Gordon, another Bell Labs veteran, challenged the credit they received and claimed that some of the ideas for the device originated with him. And as for making the device usable in a camera? That credit would probably go to Michael Tompsett, another Bell Labs engineer, who worked on developing the actual invention with Carlo Sequin and Ed Zimany. A series of articles in Spectrum, the magazine of the IEEE (the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), ably summarized the dispute: http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/devices/nobel-controversy-former-bell-labs-employee-says-he-invented-the-ccd-imager. Without question, the unsettled controversy highlights the inadequacy of the Nobel awards in singling out a small number of individuals for industrial advances where authorship and credit could be more broadly dispersed. The transistor award that went to Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain—but not to any of the material scientists who fabricated the silicon and germanium—is arguably another case in point.
27 William O. Baker, National Reconnaissance Office Oral History, conducted by R. Cargill Hall, May 7, 1996. There is some confusion as to the date that Baker brought the CCD to Washington. He claims in this interview, probably mistakenly, that it was 1963. Almost certainly it was several years later.
28 In missing the invention of the integrated circuit, however, Bell Labs and AT&T were not at all precluded from using the idea. Patent agreements guaranteed that the Labs would have access to the technology—though not the glory.
29 By several estimates, the Picturephone cost nearly half a billion dollars to develop.
30 J. P. Molnar, memo, “PICTUREPHONE Program,” August 19, 1966. Baker Collection, Princeton University.
31 “Exploratory Study of the Market Potential for Picturephone Service,” American Telephone & Telegraph Company, Business Research Division, December 1967. AT&T archives.
32 James B. Fisk, speech given at the Midwest Research Institute, Kansas City, Missouri, May 22, 1968. Whether or not the technological hunch behind the Picturephone was correct, Bell Labs executives could rightly point to the device as a significant feat of engineering, one that indirectly yielded not only the CCD device but a variety of new applications in integrated circuits and (during the manufacturing process) ruby lasers.
33 To some extent, there was an expectation that in preparing the Bell System for Picturephones, Bell Labs was also laying the groundwork for high-speed network services for businesses. “The switching and transmission capacity provided for Picturephone service will also enable us to move into flexible high-speed message data services which customers could use as easily as they place an ordinary call today,” Ray Ralston, the Picturephone’s engineering chief, remarked (195 Magazine, November–December 1967). Indeed, the Picturephone was able to connect with a computer and thereby provide rudimentary data to its user.
34 Julius Molnar, “Technical Program of Bell Laboratories: Talk to Department Heads,” March 2, 1972. AT&T archives.
35 One of the more curious things about Picturephones emerged from research in John Pierce’s communications science department. Tests showed that it was easier to lie to someone during a Picturephone conversation than in an ordinary telephone conversation. The researchers concluded that when not distracted by a visual image, a caller attends more closely to the content and veracity of the exchange.
36 I’m indebted to Bob Lucky for this comparison. More precisely, Metcalfe’s law suggests that the value of a network grows in proportion to the square of its number of users.
37 John R. Pierce, “Rudolf Kompfner: 1909–1977,” National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoir, 1983.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: COMPETITION
1 The album of black-and-white photographs is part of the Shockley Collection, housed at the Stanford University archives. In addition to Kelly, Fisk, Shockley, Bown, Baker, Bardeen, Brattain, Molnar, and Pierce, other men at the party included Cal Fuller and Gerald Pearson, who would collaborate nine years later on the solar silicon cell. On the dais with Fisk was Harald Friis, the Danish-born antenna wizard who ran the Holmdel lab and served as a mentor to John Pierce and his Caltech friend Chuck Elmendorf. Friis had been instrumental in work leading to the construction of the microwave long-distance network.
2 Joe Baker, author interview.
3 Peter Temin with Louis Galambos, The Fall of the Bell System: A Study in Prices and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 10.
4 Steve Coll, The Deal of the Century: The Breakup of AT&T (New York: Atheneum, 1986), p. 59.
5 The post-1956 legal tangles between AT&T, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the FCC are compelling but highly involved; moreover, because those legal tangles were often unrelated (or indirectly related) to the science and engineering of Bell Labs, they are not fully detailed here. Some of the competition to the Bell System dates back to the 1950s and 1960s, to cases involving two independent companies and their devices, Hush-a-Phone and Carterfone. Hush-a-Phone was an attachment to a handset’s mouthpiece that allowed customers to talk or whisper into the phone with more confidentiality; Carterfone was a device that allowed mobile radios to be tied into the landline network. AT&T contended that both could conceivably harm the network, an assertion that was ultimately proven unfounded. Eventually, based on court appeals and FCC decisions, both devices were allowed. A number of books offer a useful presen
tation of the issues, players, and implications. See The Deal of the Century, above, for instance, or The Fall of the Bell System, also above. A concise and valuable summary is also given in the introduction to the three-volume set Decision to Divest: Major Documents in U.S. v. AT&T, 1974–1984, edited by Christopher H. Sterling, Jill F. Kasle, and Katherine T. Glakas (Washington, DC: Communications Press, 1986).
6 MCI was started by the entrepreneur Jack Goeken. McGowan joined in the late 1960s and soon became its singular, driving force. Goeken was forced out in the early 1970s.
7 The 1971 FCC decision was known as Specialized Common Carrier. It followed on the heels of several earlier decisions that opened the door for MCI. These were Above 890 (1959), which allowed for private companies to build “point-to-point” microwave systems, such as those that might connect one corporate branch to another; Carterfone (1968), which allowed non-AT&T equipment to be connected to the network; and Microwave Communications Inc. (1969), which allowed MCI to build a point-to-point microwave service between Chicago and St. Louis.
8 Complaint, November 20, 1974, United States of America v. American Telephone and Telegraph Company; Western Electric Company, Inc.; and Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc., pp. 11–14. As published in Decision to Divest: Major Documents in U.S. v. AT&T, 1974–1984. MCI also initiated its own private antitrust suit against AT&T.
9 John deButts, letter to John Pierce, March 31, 1975. DeButts had seen an article that Pierce wrote in the Money Manager. Pierce Collection, Huntington Library.
10 Mervin J. Kelly, memo, “A First Record of Thoughts Concerning an Important Post War Problem of the Bell Telephone Laboratories and Western Electric Company,” May 1, 1943. AT&T archives.
11 Bell Labs News, “Special Report: An Interview with W. O. Baker,” May 1973.
12 Rudi Kompfner, letter to Mr. J. R. Pierce, April 13, 1970. AT&T archives.
13 I. Hayashi and Mort Panish developed the first breakthrough room-temperature semiconductor laser at Bell Labs. A Russian team made a simultaneous discovery. Shortly thereafter, in 1971, Herwig Kogelnik and C. V. Shank invented the first distributed feedback laser.
14 Morton B. Panish, “Heterostructure Injection Lasers,” Bell Laboratories Record, November 1971.
15 Along with the new lasers, a group of Bell Labs scientists also discovered that they could make light-emitting diodes into a satisfactory source for light-pulse communications. These were tiny semiconductor sandwiches, too, but were slightly different than lasers (the light was not as bright, for instance). The upside was that the diodes promised to last longer. The LEDs, too, could be modulated—that is, impressed with a communications signal. They blinked at rates of up to 100 million times per second.
16 Bernard C. DeLoach Jr., “On the Way: Lasers for Telecommunications,” Bell Laboratories Record, April 1975. The ends of the crystal laser were polished to a mirrorlike finish so that some of the energy emitted from the laser could be sent back to stimulate even more radiated light.
17 Rudi Kompfner, handwritten note on memo from Dean Gillette, October 20, 1971. AT&T archives.
18 A good overview of the process for making fiber during that era is given in the Bell System Technical Journal, July–August 1978.
19 Eugene O’Neill, ed., A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System: Transmission Technology (1925–1975) (AT&T Bell Laboratories, 1985), p. 665.
20 Ira Jacobs, “Lightwaves System Development: Looking Back and Ahead,” Optics & Photonics News, February 1995.
21 John R. Pierce, letter to Dr. W. O. Baker, November 23, 1976. Pierce Collection, Huntington Library.
22 O’Neill, A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System: Transmission Technology (1925–1975), p. 401. In 1929, “commercial service to ships on the high seas was inaugurated … the first ship equipped was the SS Leviathan, the largest ship in the world at the time, and the first shore stations were at Ocean Gate and Forked River, New Jersey.”
23 W. R. Young, “Advanced Mobile Phone Service: Introduction, Background, and Objectives,” Bell System Technical Journal, January 1979.
24 D. A. (Donald) Quarles, “Organization of Mobile Radio Development,” memo to M. J. Kelly, April 16, 1945. AT&T archives.
25 William C. Jakes, ed., Microwave Mobile Communications (New York: IEEE Press, 1993).
26 D. H. Ring, “Mobile Telephony—Wide Area Coverage—Case 20564,” December 11, 1947. Though W. R. Young is not credited as an author of the nine-page memo, he is credited in the text: “As pointed out by W. R. Young in his report … the best general arrangement of frequency assignments for the minimum interference and with a minimum number of frequencies is a hexagonal layout in which each station is surrounded by six equidistant adjacent stations.” AT&T archives.
27 “Hearing Before Federal Communications Commission on Opening of UHF Band to Television, Docket No. 8976: Statement of Dr. O. E. Buckley, President of Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc.” The statement is undated, but a companion letter to Buckley, written by John Gepson (October 26, 1950), summarized the FCC proceedings: “Hearings on the Bell Laboratories petition … commenced on June 5, 1950, and continued for five days thereafter. … The witnesses were Dr. Buckley, Mr. Gilman, Mr. Hanselman and Mr. Ryan.” AT&T archives.
28 Richard H. Frenkiel, “Creating Cellular: A History of the AMPS Project (1971–1983),” IEEE Communications Magazine, September 2010.
29 “An interview of Dr. J. R. Pierce by Mr. Lincoln Barnett for the American Telephone & Telegraph Company,” February 13, 1963. AT&T archives. Pierce said, “And people—sometimes I think of science as really bringing the one thing—suppressing the individual—those two things—it suppresses him through television, but it frees him through the telephone, if you wish.”
30 Also in 1964, the Bell System began offering “Improved Mobile Telephone Service,” or IMTS. The improvements over the existing system were technical—you could dial a number directly, for instance. But the system’s capacity was still limited.
31 “High Capacity Mobile Telephone System: Summary,” unsigned memo, September 14, 1965, 9 pages. AT&T archives.
32 C. H. Elmendorf, letter to Mr. D. Gillette, March 13, 1967. AT&T archives.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: APART
1 H. J. Wallis, “The Holmdel Laboratories,” Bell Laboratories Record, April 1961. Saarinen designed Holmdel between 1957 and 1959. He died before it was completed. The building was intended to have reflective glass, which was not yet available when it opened. It was meanwhile covered in gray glass.
2 Ibid. As Saarinen put it, “Emerging from concentration in laboratory or office, the individual will come upon the sweeping, uninterrupted views of gently rolling hills and formal planting and of the winter-garden interior court. At such moments of relaxation, walking down the periphery corridor, he can feel refreshed by the encounter with these views and really appreciate them.” Bell Laboratories Record, April 1961.
3 Richard H. Frenkiel, Cellular Dreams and Cordless Nightmares: Life at Bell Laboratories in Interesting Times, 2009. Downloaded from http://www.winlab.rutgers.edu/~frenkiel/dreams.
4 Richard Frenkiel, author interview.
5 Frenkiel was also given an important 1960 Bell Labs paper on cellular service by W. D. (Deming) Lewis, H. J. Schulte, and W. A. Cornell.
6 Joel Engel, author interview.
7 “Notes on Cellular Mobile Telephone Service,” AT&T internal memo (unsigned), November 27, 1979, distributed to F. H. Blecher, R. H. Frenkiel, J. L. Troe, and J. T. Walker. “We have spent approximately 100 million dollars developing and demonstrating the feasibility of cellular technology capable of nationwide application in serving the public need.” In 2010 dollars, the cost would therefore have been about $300 million. What’s more, the actual costs of developing cellular were undoubtedly higher, since service was not approved until several years later. AT&T archives.
8 As Frenkiel notes in his book Cellular Dreams and Cordless Nightmares, the ESS used “stored program contr
ol.” In essence it functioned like a computer. Unlike the crossbar switches of earlier generations, it did not have “fixed” logic. It could be programmed for a variety of functions.
9 Jakes focused, in part, on studying what’s known as “diversity.” It involves what happens to transmission and reception when multiple antennas are spaced closely together.
10 William C. Jakes, ed., Microwave Mobile Communications (New York: IEEE Press, 1993), p. 11.
11 “Nike Zeus,” Bell Laboratories Record, March 1963. The Record puts the size of the horseshoe-shaped island at 819 acres, “up to one-half of a mile wide and about 2½ miles long. It has a tropical marine climate which is fairly constant most of the year, since it is only about 8 degrees above the equator. Annual rainfall averages 102 inches; both the relative humidity and temperature average a steady 82.”
12 Gerry DiPiazza, author interview.
13 DiPiazza worked on something known as “discriminatory radar.” The technology was meant to identify an enemy warhead amid an obscuring cloud of tiny foil decoys.
14 Within a few years, Motorola would propose a competing system and would develop the first portable, handheld cell phone. The Motorola handset, developed by Martin Cooper, is a good example of how technological leaps are often perceived reductively. The handset invention demonstrated that cellular receivers could be portable and handheld, as many people at Bell Labs—John Pierce especially—had long imagined. But without the development of the cellular system, Cooper’s important advances would have had little impact.
15 These were not transmission “trunks” connecting intercity routes, nor were they transmission “loops” connecting subscribers to local switching offices. Rather, they were something of a hybrid: “metropolitan trunks,” for what Ira Jacobs calls “backbone routing.”
16 In Atlanta, Bell Labs would also, by agreement, test Corning’s fiber.
17 Ira Jacobs, author interview.