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

The
Idea
Factory

Bell Labs and the
Great Age of
American Innovation

JON GERTNER

THE PENGUIN PRESS
New York
2012

THE PENGUIN PRESS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in 2012 by The Penguin Press,

a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright Jon Gertner, 2012

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gernter, Jon.

The idea factory : the Bell Labs and
the great age of American innovation / Jon Gernter.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-101-56108-9

1. Bell Telephone LaboratoriesHistory20th century.
2. TelecommunicationUnited StatesHistory20th century.
3. Technological innovationsUnited StatesHistory20th century.
4. Creative abilityUnited StatesHistory20th century. 5. InventorsUnited StatesHistory20th century. I. Title.

TK5102.3.U6G47 2012

384dc23

2011040207

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

DESIGNED BY AMANDA DEWEY

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ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

For Liz, Emmy, and Ben

CONTENTS

T. S. Eliot, The Rock

Introduction

WICKED PROBLEMS

T his book is about the origins of modern communications as seen through the adventures of several men who spent their careers working at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Even more, though, this book is about innovationabout how it happens, why it happens, and who makes it happen. It is likewise about why innovation matters, not just to scientists, engineers, and corporate executives but to all of us. That the story is about Bell Labs, and even more specifically about life at the Labs between the late 1930s and the mid-1970s, isnt a coincidence. In the decades before the countrys best minds began migrating west to Californias Silicon Valley, many of them came east to New Jersey, where they worked in capacious brick-and-glass buildings located on grassy campuses where deer would graze at twilight. At the peak of its reputation in the late 1960s, Bell Labs employed about fifteen thousand people, including some twelve hundred PhDs. Its ranks included the worlds most brilliant (and eccentric) men and women. In a time before Google, the Labs sufficed as the countrys intellectual utopia. It was where the future, which is what we now happen to call the present, was conceived and designed.

For a long stretch of the twentieth century, Bell Labs was the most innovative scientific organization in the world. It was arguably among the worlds most important commercial organizations as well, with countless entrepreneurs building their businesses upon the Labs foundational inventions, which were often shared for a modest fee. Strictly speaking, this wasnt Bell Labs intended function. Rather, its role was to support the research and development efforts of the countrys then-monopolistic telephone company, American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), which was seeking to create and maintain a systemthe word network wasnt yet commonthat could connect any person on the globe to any other at any time. AT&Ts dream of universal connectivity was set down in the early 1900s. Yet it took more than three-quarters of a century for this idea to mature, thanks largely to the work done at Bell Labs, into a fantastically complex skein of copper cables and microwave links and glass fibers that tied together not only all of the planets voices but its images and data, too. In those evolutionary years, the worlds business, as well as its technological progress, began to depend on information and the conduits through which it moved. Indeed, the phrase used to describe the era that the Bell scientists helped create, the age of information, suggested we had left the material world behind. A new commodityweightless, invisible, fleet as light itselfdefined the times.

A new age makes large demands. At Bell Labs, it required the efforts of tens of thousands of scientists and engineers over many decadesmillions of man-hours, in the parlance of AT&T, which made a habit of calculating its employees toil to a degree that made its workers proud while also keeping the U.S. government (which closely monitored the companys business practices and long-distance phone monopoly) at bay. For reasons that are conceptual as well as practical, this book does not focus on those tens of thousands of Bell Laboratories workers. Instead, it looks primarily at the lives of a select and representative few: Mervin Kelly, Jim Fisk, William Shockley, Claude Shannon, John Pierce, and William Baker. Some of these names are notoriousShockley, for instance, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 and in his later years steadfastly pursued a scientific link between race and intelligence. Others, such as Shannon, are familiar to those within a certain area of interest (in Shannons case, mathematics and artificial intelligence) while remaining largely unknown to the general public. Pierce, a nearly forgotten figure, was the father of satellite communications and an instigator of more ideas than can be properly accounted for here. Kelly, Fisk, and Baker were presidents of the Labs, and served as stewards during the institutions golden age. All these men knew one another, and some were extremely close. With the exception of Mervin Kelly, the eldest of the group, they were sometimes considered members of a band of Bell Labs revolutionaries known as the Young Turks. What bound them was a shared belief in the nearly sacred mission of Bell Laboratories and the importance of technological innovation.

The men preferred to think they worked not in a laboratory but in what Kelly once called an institute of creative technology. This description aimed to inform the world that the line between the art and science of what Bell scientists did wasnt always distinct. Moreover, while many of Kellys colleagues might have been eccentrics, few were dreamers in the less flattering sense of the word. They were paid for their imaginative abilities. But they were also paid for working within a culture, and within an institution, where the very point of new ideas was to make them into new things.

S HOULD WE CARE ABOUT how new ideas begin? Practically speaking, if our cell phones ring and our computer networks function we dont need to recall how two men sat together in a suburban New Jersey laboratory during the autumn of 1947 and invented the transistor, which is the essential building block of all digital products and contemporary life. Nor should we need to know that in 1971 a team of engineers drove around Philadelphia night after night in a trailer home stocked with sensitive radio equipment, trying to set up the first working cell phone system. In other words, we dont have to understand the details of the twentieth century in order to live in the twenty-first. And theres a good reason we dont have to. The history of technology tends to remain stuffed in attic trunks and the minds of aging scientists. Those breakthrough products of past decadesthe earliest silicon solar cells, for example, which were invented at Bell Labs in the 1950s and now reside in a filing cabinet in a forlorn warehouse in central New Jerseyseem barely functional by todays standards. So rapid is the evolutionary development of technological ideas that the journey from state-of-the-art to artifact can occur in a mere few years.