This 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 innovation—about 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, isn’t a coincidence. In
the decades before the country’s best minds began migrating west to
California’s 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 world’s
most brilliant (and eccentric) men and women. In a time before Google,
the Labs sufficed as the country’s 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
world’s 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
wasn’t Bell Labs’ intended function. Rather, its role was to support the
research and development efforts of the country’s then-monopolistic
telephone company, American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), which
was seeking to create and maintain a system—the word “network” wasn’t
yet common—that could connect any person on the globe to any other
at any time. AT&T’s 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
fi bers that tied together not only all of the planet’s voices but its images
and data, too. In those evolutionary years, the world’s 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 commodity—
weightless, invisible, fleet as light itself—defined 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 decades—
millions 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
company’s 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 notorious—Shockley, 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 Shannon’s 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 institution’s
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 wasn’t always distinct. Moreover, while many
of Kelly’s 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.
Should we care about how new ideas begin? Practically speaking, if our
cell phones ring and our computer networks function we don’t 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 don’t have to understand the details of the twentieth
century in order to live in the twenty-first. And there’s a good reason we
don’t have to. The history of technology tends to remain stuffed in attic
trunks and the minds of aging scientists. Those breakthrough products
of past decades—the 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 Jersey—seem barely functional by today’s
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.
Still, good arguments urge us to contemplate scientific history. Bill
Gates once said of the invention of the transistor, “My first stop on any
time-travel expedition would be Bell Labs in December 1947.” It’s a perceptive
wish, I think. Bell Labs was admittedly imperfect. Like any elite
organization, it suffered at times from personality clashes, institutional
arrogance, and—especially in its later years—strategic missteps. Yet understanding
the circumstances that led up to that unusual winter of 1947
at Bell Labs, and what happened there in the years afterward, promises
a number of insights into how societies progress. With this in mind,
one might think of a host of reasons to look back at these old inventions,
these forgotten engineers, these lost worlds.
While our engineering prowess has advanced a great deal over the
past sixty years, the principles of innovation largely have not. Indeed, the
techniques forged at Bell Labs—that knack for apprehending a vexing
problem, gathering ideas that might lead to a solution, and then pushing
toward the development of a product that could be deployed on a massive
scale—are still worth considering today, where we confront a host of
challenges (information overloads, infectious disease, and climate change,
among others) that seem very nearly intractable. Some observers have
taken to calling them “wicked problems.” As it happens, the past offers
the example of one seemingly wicked problem that was overcome by an
innovative effort that rivals the Apollo program and Manhattan Project
in size, scope, expense, and duration. That was to connect all of us, and
all of our new machines, together.
“At first sight,” the writer Arthur C. Clarke noted in the late 1950s,
“when one comes upon it in its surprisingly rural setting, the Bell Telephone
Laboratories’ main New Jersey site looks like a large and up-to-date
factory, which in a sense it is. But it is a factory for ideas, and so its
production lines are invisible.” Some contemporary thinkers would lead
us to believe that twenty-first-century innovation can only be accomplished
by small groups of nimble, profit-seeking entrepreneurs working
amid the frenzy of market competition. Those idea factories of the past—
and perhaps their most gifted employees—have no lessons for those of
us enmeshed in today’s complex world. This is too simplistic. To consider
what occurred at Bell Labs, to glimpse the inner workings of its invisible
and now vanished “production lines,” is to consider the possibilities of
what large human organizations might accomplish.