by Jon Gertner
Theurer, Henry, 84, 85
THROBAC, 142
Time, 140, 165, 308, 333
Tomkins, Calvin, 196
Tordella, Louis, 249
Townes, Charles, 39–40, 41, 43, 60–61, 206–7, 254
laser work of, 254–55, 257
stimulated emission work of, 206–7
transatlantic phone cable, 37, 175–80, 183–84, 203, 205, 211
transistors, 3, 4, 98–114, 115–16, 127–28, 134, 135, 140, 150–51, 155, 163–72, 179, 180, 183, 185–86, 197, 207, 229, 244, 245, 250–53, 281, 308, 315–16, 341, 343, 349, 359
junction, 102–4, 107, 110, 111, 134
licensing of technology for, 112
Moore’s law and, 308
naming of, 98, 197
Nobel Prize for work on, 181–82, 244
patents for, 97–100, 107, 111
point-contact, 102–4, 107–8, 110, 112
quality of, 253
tyranny of numbers and, 252
unveiling of, 104–5, 127
traveling wave tube (TWT), 198–201, 202, 205–6, 207–8, 210
Truman, Harry, 157, 158, 160, 245
Tukey, John, 129, 151, 246
2001: A Space Odyssey, 197
tyranny of numbers, 252
underwater cables, 37, 81–82
University of California, 159
University of Chicago, 14
Unix, 261, 346
uranium, 51, 59–60, 68
vacuum tubes, 23, 33–36, 37, 52, 57, 67, 80, 82, 93, 97–99, 105, 107–8, 110, 113, 164, 176, 183, 194, 195, 250, 349
traveling wave, 198–201, 202, 205–6, 207–8, 210
Vail, Theodore, 18–20, 24, 27, 30, 45, 272, 275
transcontinental phone service and, 21, 22
Van Vleck, John, 42
venture economy, 347–48
Von Mehren, Robert, 304, 306
Walbridge, Mabel, 168
Walker, Larry, 70
Wall Street Journal, 337
Waters, Ernie, 193
Watson, Thomas A., 23–24
Watson, Thomas J. (Jr.), 305
Watt, James, 289
waveguides, 235–36, 258–62
wavelengths, 235–36, 254–55
Webb, James, 248, 305
Wells, H. G., 201–2
Wen Jiabao, 344
Western Electric, 25–27, 28, 31, 33, 158, 161, 298, 299, 301, 331, 335, 353
Bell Telephone Laboratories, see Bell Telephone Laboratories
Depression and, 36
military and, 157–58
White, Addison, 43–44, 56, 79, 102–3
Whyte, William, 184
wicked problems, 4, 355
Wiener, Norbert, 142
Wiesner, Jerome, 248
Wiley, Richard, 302
Willis-Graham Act, 31
Wilson, Leroy, 158, 160
wireless transmission, 27
Woolridge, Dean, 38, 41, 43, 44, 54, 79, 192
World War I, 28, 29, 60
World War II, 58, 59–74, 75, 81, 126, 149, 160, 198, 243, 270
gun firing control in, 123–24, 157
World Wide Web, 334
Young, Rae, 281–82, 286
zone refining, 114
Zuckerman, Harriet, 316
Zwicky, Fritz, 54
THE FIRST IDEA FACTORY: Western Electric’s former headquarters on West Street in lower Manhattan, which in 1925 became the original home of Bell Labs. Kelly, Shockley, Pierce, Fisk, and Shannon all began their careers at the building; after the war, the men, along with the Labs’ most important research projects, moved to New Jersey. Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center
Bettmann/Corbis
BELL LABS’ EARLY ARCHITECTS: Robert Millikan served as a friend and advisor to Bell Labs’ first president, Frank Jewett, pictured in 1938, as well as a mentor to Mervin Kelly, photographed here soon after his arrival at Western Electric in 1917. After making a name for himself at the University of Chicago, Millikan became president of Caltech.
Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center
Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center
AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection
In 1915, Theodore Vail, AT&T’s chairman, listens in on the first transcontinental phone conversation—connecting New York with San Francisco—from his vacation home on Jekyll Island, Georgia.
AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection
Photograph by Parker Studio, Courtesy of AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives
TWO YOUNG TURKS: Portraits of a young William Shockley and his friend from MIT, Jim Fisk. “If that man gets hired,” Shockley once said of Fisk, “we’ll all be working for him in ten years.” His prediction proved correct. BELOW: Building 1 on the Murray Hill, New Jersey, campus, just after World War II. Kelly considered the design of the building—where research scientists and development engineers from all disciplines were housed together in close proximity—yet another grand Bell Labs invention.
Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center
TRIUMPHS OF A MAGIC MONTH: A crucial page from the December 24, 1947, entry in Walter Brattain’s notebook, the ur-text of the transistor’s genesis; next to it, the first transistor. The germanium metal slab under the arrowhead is about one quarter the size of a penny.
Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center
The solid-state triumvirate in Brattain’s cluttered Murray Hill laboratory: from left to right, Walter Brattain, William Shockley, and John Bardeen.
Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center
THE TECHNOLOGY OF ENVY: TOP: An early junction transistor, a breakthrough device based on a 1948 theory by Bill Shockley that was built in 1951. Bell Labs’ publicity department was fond of comparing the technology to a pea or a kernel of corn. Shockley began formulating the idea as he dealt with the blow of not being one of the transistor’s original inventors. “I did not want to be left behind on this one,” he said. BOTTOM: Gerald Pearson, Daryl Chapin, and Cal Fuller, the creators of the first silicon solar cell. The circumstances of the innovation were serendipitous; all the men worked in different buildings.
Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center
Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center
Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center
Yale Joel/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
BEHOLD, THESEUS: TOP RIGHT: Claude Shannon, with the mouse-machine that could find its way through a maze and learn from its mistakes. The mouse’s logic circuits were beneath the floor of the maze. Bell Labs’ patent department was unimpressed with Theseus; Shannon’s colleagues, on the other hand, thought it brilliant. LEFT: One of 107 microwave towers that served as links in a long-distance coast-to-coast network that opened in 1951. RIGHT: John Pierce and Rudi Kompfner, circa 1951, standing before an array of traveling wave tubes.
READY FOR LAUNCH: TOP: The Echo satellite balloon was made from a thin film of Mylar and stood about ten stories high. BOTTOM: Telstar was the first active communications satellite; in addition to sending and receiving phone and television signals, it collected a trove of data about radiation in space. The black plates on the satellite face are solar cells. Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center
A LOST WORLD: The small corps of scientists and engineers at the Holmdel lab, in southern New Jersey, circa 1933. The men spent their days researching antenna technology in the “turkey shed” building. Just as often, they worked outdoors, amid hundreds of acres of mown lawns. “Lord, it was just beautiful,” one visitor recalled. Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center
THE BLACK BOX: An austere new laboratory, viewed from outside and from within its atrium, that was designed by the architect Eero Saarinen. The building, opened in 1961, replaced the old lab in Holmdel, New Jersey, and served as a dramatic contrast to the Murray Hill buildings, thirty miles to the north. “Gone completely are the old claustrophobic, dreary, prison-like corr
idors,” Saarinen remarked with pride. Ezra Stoller©Esto
AN INSTIGATOR: John Pierce in 1961, around the time of the Echo launch. “You took your life in your hands every time you went into his office,” a colleague recalls. But Pierce’s close friends realized that his tough and skeptical exterior hid the warm inner core of a romantic. Yale Joel/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Bettmann/Corbis
Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center
FAINT AND DISTANT SIGNALS: TOP: The large horn antenna atop Crawford Hill—located a few miles from the Black Box in Holmdel—that was built for the Echo satellite experiment and later served to collect data that proved the existence of the Big Bang. ABOVE AND AT RIGHT: Two teams that pioneered lightwave communications. In 1961, Donald Herriot, Ali Javan, and William Bennett work on the first gas laser; around the same time, Arthur Schawlow—a coinventor of the laser theory—works with C. G. B. Garrett on a solid-state laser technology.
Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center
THE BOSS: Mervin Kelly, around the time of his 1958 retirement from Bell Labs. “He is most certainly an empire builder,” a White House advisor wrote in a private memo just after World War II, when Kelly turned down the offer of becoming the U.S. president’s first science advisor. To John Pierce, Kelly was “an almost supernatural force.” Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center
A GREAT MISTAKE: The Picturephone model that debuted at the 1964 World’s Fair. At the fair, a survey conducted by AT&T indicated that a majority of those who tried the device perceived a need for Picturephones in their business. A near majority said they perceived a need for Picturephones in their home. The rollout of the device proved disastrous.
Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center
THE CHEMIST: Bill Baker, in his beloved research labs. His mystique, perhaps even more than his intelligence, separated Baker from his colleagues. His work in Washington and on military affairs was shrouded by secrecy. “Nobody knows what I do,” he would sometimes lament to friends and family. Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center
WITHOUT WIRES: A page from Doug Ring’s landmark 1947 memo outlining the ideas behind a nationwide mobile phone system; by the early 1970s, the Bell System mobile phone plan—as described in the company’s explanatory literature —had assumed the more sophisticated design of today’s cellular telephone and wireless data infrastructure.
Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center
THE INFORMATIONIST: Claude Shannon, at home in Massachusetts in 1962. “I think that this present century in a sense will see a great upsurge and development of this whole information business,” Shannon had remarked two years before. The future, he predicted, would depend on “the business of collecting information and the business of transmitting it from one point to another.”
Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos