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

by Jon Gertner

in a place where people neither walked fast nor talked fast, young Mervin Kelly did both.

IN 1910, when Kelly set off for mining school, few Americans recognized the differences between a scientist, an engineer, and an inventor.

When necessary, Edison relied on assistants trained in math and science to investigate the principles of his inventions, since theoretical underpinnings were often beyond his interest. “I can always hire mathematicians,” he once said at the height of his fame, “but they can’t hire me.”

The Vail strategy, in short, would measure the company’s progress “in decades instead of years.”

inventions are a valuable part, but invention is not to be scheduled nor coerced.”

The point of this kind of experimentation was to provide a free environment for “the operation of genius.” His point was that genius would undoubtedly improve the company’s operations just as ordinary engineering could. But genius was not predictable. You had to give it room to assert itself.

The Labs, which had typically hired a few hundred young employees every spring, sending out a team of recruiters to speak with professors at colleges around the country in search of graduate students who might be well suited for industrial research,

Almost all of them had found a way out—a high school teacher, oftentimes, who noticed something about them, a startling knack for mathematics, for example, or an insatiable curiosity about electricity, and had tried to nurture this talent with extra assignments or after-school tutoring, all in the hope (never explained to the young men but realized by them all, gratefully, many years later) that the students could be pushed toward a local university and away from the desolation of a life behind a plow or a cash register.

In Townes’s view, those “farms and small towns are good training grounds for experimental physics.”

And so Townes sat on the Mexico City train in third class in the summer of 1939, “on slatted wood benches that were none too comfortable, and played a Nazi’s accordion and sang songs with Mexican fruit pickers on their way home from the fields in the United States.”

“The [Bell] System,” Danielian pointed out, “constitutes the largest aggregation of capital that has ever been controlled by a single private company at any time in the history of business.

There were no telephone ringers at the very start; callers would get the attention of those they were calling by yelling loudly (often, “ahoy!”) into the receiver until someone on the other end noticed.

“There is always a larger volume of work that is worth doing than can be done currently,”

Shockley schooled himself in parlor tricks and amateur magic. Sometimes he would use it to entertain a crowd at parties; other times he would use it to interrupt a sober affair or gently humiliate a lecturer. Bouncing balls materialized from nowhere, flowerpots exploded, bouquets popped suddenly from his sleeve in place of a handshake—incidents that created a distraction from the seriousness of institutional life

Science had no true owners, only participants and contributors.

Frank Jewett and Oliver Buckley were appalled by Espenschied’s “incredible stupidity”—though it was not clear whether their displeasure related to the content of Espenschied’s opinions or his willingness to share them.

“We have now successfully passed all our deadlines without meeting any of them.”

Shockley would have spent his career trapped in a prison of elegant theory.

“A research man,” he later remarked, “is endlessly searching to find a use for something that has no use.”

There isn’t an S.O.B. in the group, he thought to himself, pleased with the prospect of joining in. Then after a minute he had a second thought: Maybe I’m the S.O.B. in the group.

Brattain realized that when Bardeen did choose to interpret data or ask a question, a profundity was likely to tumble forth.

in fact there were occasions where I had to go to another department and Bardeen was left in the lab and he was anxious to get the experiment done and I said, ‘Well, there it is, John, I’ll be back in about an hour.’ And I’d come back in about an hour and John would be gone and I’d ask the other people in the lab what happened and they’d say, ‘Oh, he worked for about five minutes and said, “Oh, damn!” and left.’”

they would get in their cars and drive a few miles south along Diamond Hill Road, a narrow, sinuous county highway, to visit a small hamburger joint called Snuffy’s. The Bell Labs cafeteria didn’t serve beer. Snuffy’s did.

Eccentricity—not wearing socks, say, or using company time to build gadgets that had perhaps not even a glancing relationship to the phone business—could be forgiven. Other behaviors could not. MTSs were never to seduce the secretaries. They were not to work with their doors closed. They were not to refuse help to a colleague, regardless of his rank or department, when it might be necessary. And perhaps most important, the supervisor was authorized to guide, not interfere with, the people he (or she) managed.

The development expert who was chosen for this responsibility—a brilliant, bullying, hard-drinking engineer

“No time to waste,” Kelly told him. “I’m going to Europe for the next month, Morton, and when I get back I’d like to see your recommendations as to how we should go about developing this thing. Goodbye.”

if you haven’t manufactured the new thing in substantial quantities, you have not innovated; the second is that if you haven’t found a market to sell the product, you have not innovated.

But these realizations would come together later. After hearing Kelly’s orders to produce a road map for transistor production, Morton spent the next twenty-nine days in a state of terror. On the thirtieth he settled on a development plan.

He had long understood that innovation was a matter of economic imperatives.

Pfann had returned to his office after lunch—“I put my feet on my desk and tilted my chair back to the window sill for a short nap, a habit then well established,” he recalled. He had scarcely dozed off when he suddenly awoke with a solution. “I brought the chair down with a clack I still remember,” he said.43 Pfann envisioned passing a molten zone—a coil of metal, in effect, creating a superheated ring—along the length of a rod of germanium; as the ring moved, it would strafe the impurities out of the germanium. Kelly would eventually tell people that Pfann’s idea—it was called “zone refining,” and was an ingenious adaptation of a technique metallurgists had used on other materials—ranked as one of the most important inventions of the past twenty-five years. Kelly didn’t tell people it resulted from a man sleeping on the job.

One professor at MIT, informed in the late 1930s that young Shannon was taking piloting lessons, considered intervening so the scientific community wouldn’t risk losing him prematurely in an air crash.4 There was, in other words, a quiet accord among the professors at MIT: People like Shannon come along so rarely that they must be protected.

“I believed it was a classic, a comment which I very seldom make,” Bush said of Shannon’s thesis.

Still only twenty-three years old, and not at all certain what to do with himself, the young man wrote to Vannevar Bush to ask what he should work on next. . . .

Bush delighted in connecting students and friends to one another within his large social and professional web.

At Shannon’s suggestion, they made love one evening—“he wooed me,” Norma says—in the differential analyzer room, to which Shannon had a key.

as Shannon took a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where Albert Einstein was in residence. “I poured tea for him,” Norma recalls of Einstein, “and he told me I was married to a brilliant, brilliant man.”

At least as it was originally conceived, Fry’s department was not supposed to do research; it was meant to be a consulting organization to the engineers, physicists, and chemists at the Labs who needed help. “At that time engineers of all types were pathetically ignorant of mathematics,”

it “was full of people who had a major area where they worked, just like I did, too. But they couldn’t turn a good problem down. If one came by you dropped what you were doing and had fun with it. Our job was to stick our nose into everybody’s business.”

would end up taking them more than a decade. “I am very seldom interested in applications,” he later said. “I am more interested in the elegance of a problem. Is it a good problem, an interesting problem?”

the realization of those dreams didn’t only depend on the hardware of new technologies, such as the transistor. A mathematical guide for the system’s engineers, a blueprint for how to move data around with optimal efficiency, which was what Shannon offered, would be crucial, too. Shannon maintained that all communications systems could be thought of in the same way, regardless of whether they involved a lunchroom conversation, a postmarked letter, a phone call, or a radio or telephone transmission.

The semantic aspects of communication were irrelevant to the engineering problem, he wrote. Or to say it another way: One shouldn’t necessarily think of information in terms of meaning. Rather, one might think of it in terms of its ability to resolve uncertainty.

“To make the chance of error as small as you wish?” Robert Fano, a friend and colleague of Shannon’s, later pointed out. “How he got that insight, how he even came to believe such a thing, I don’t know.” All modern communications engineering, from cell phone transmissions to compact discs and deep space communications, is based upon this insight.

In the midst of Shannon’s career, some lawyers in the patent department at Bell Labs decided to study whether there was an organizing principle that could explain why certain individuals at the Labs were more productive than others. They discerned only one common thread: Workers with the most patents often shared lunch or breakfast with a Bell Labs electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. It wasn’t the case that Nyquist gave them specific ideas. Rather, as one scientist recalled, “he drew people out, got them thinking.” More than anything, Nyquist asked good questions.

With Shannon’s startling ideas on information, it was one of the rare moments in history, an academic would later point out, “where somebody founded a field, stated all the major results, and proved most of them all pretty much at once.”

Eventually, mathematicians would debate not whether Shannon was ahead of his contemporaries. They would debate whether he was twenty, or thirty, or fifty years ahead.

“He never argued his ideas,” Brock McMillan says of Shannon. “If people didn’t believe in them, he ignored those people.”

They wrote to the oracle at Bell Labs to ask about computers or chess or information theory, and then tried to tease out what he was thinking and why he was thinking it.

obviously that was interesting as well as pleasing to Shannon. “My characterization of his smartness is that he would have been the world’s best con man if he had taken a turn in that direction,” Slepian says.

“We’ve got boxes full of unfinished papers,” Betty would remark to visitors.18 Many years later Shannon would leave behind these half-written papers along with scraps of ideas and mathematical scribbles that were titled “good problems”—but with no indication as to whether he had ever found it worth his time to discover good answers.

finally, he would not come at all. Shannon’s office, its nameplate burnished and its door always closed, stood in wait. He remained in the Bell Laboratories telephone book. Those who phoned his office discovered they would instead be directed to a Bell Labs secretary, who would inform them that no, no, unfortunately, Dr. Shannon wasn’t in today.