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

by Jon Gertner

Even sixty years after the fact, it is worth pausing to consider what Kelly was trying to do in the London speech, for he not only tried to explain the empire he was building, but why he was building it.

development—began using the word regularly.4 What he went on to describe in London, though, was a systematized approach to innovation, the fruit of three decades of consideration at the Labs. To Kelly, inventing the future wasn’t just a matter of inventing things for the future; it also entailed inventing ways to invent those things.

there is also something paradoxical in the thought that there should be established methods of creating the revolutionary.”

Bell Labs had the advantage of necessity; its new inventions, as one of Kelly’s deputies, Harald Friis, once said, “always originated because of a definite need.” In Kelly’s view, the members of the technical staff had the great advantage of working to improve a system where there were always problems, always needs.

the institute of creative technology should take it upon itself to further the education and abilities of its promising but less accomplished employees, not for reasons of altruism but because industrial science and engineering had become so complex that it now required men and women who were trained beyond the level that America’s graduate schools could attain.

and computer systems. Or to put it another way, the solution to a technological problem invariably created other problems that needed solutions. So making something truly new seemed to ensure that you would be making something else truly new before too long.

“He had one official driver for his car, a company car,” Brock McMillan, the Bell Labs mathematician, says. “And he would beat on this guy—‘drive faster, drive faster, get going, get going.’” When Kelly once hectored the driver so intently that he hit a car pulling out of the company lot, Kelly left the wreck without pause. He walked back to the office to get another car.

“You get paid for the seven and a half hours a day you put in here,” Kelly often told new Bell Labs employees in his speech to them on their first day, “but you get your raises and promotions on what you do in the other sixteen and a half hours.”

“Twice he submitted his resignation to the president of AT&T, stating that important work at Bell Laboratories was not being adequately funded,” a colleague would recall. “In each case, he got the funds.”

The constant travel and constant meetings and constant speaking engagements—and almost certainly, too, his constant chain-smoking—sometimes resulted in bouts of utter exhaustion, requiring him to take time off and convalesce near his tulip gardens.20 But within a week or two he would come roaring back.

The success of the work had thrust Kelly, willingly, into a shadow society of wise men—people like Frank Jewett, or Vannevar Bush—whose scientific training and large social networks allowed them to move smoothly between the elite circles of industry, academia, military intelligence, and public policy.

Being a physicist with Shockley, well then, you had better be very, very good or you’re going to have a hell of a time.”

Working with silicon, as Tanenbaum soon discovered, was far more frustrating than working with Shockley.

What was striking but almost always overlooked about its invention, Fuller later recalled, was that all three inventors of the device were working in different buildings. “The solar cell just sort of happened,” he said. It was not “team research” in the traditional sense, but it was made possible “because the Labs policy did not require us to get the permission of our bosses to cooperate—at the Laboratories one could go directly to the person who could help.”

Robert Noyce famously described what it was like for a young solid-state physicist, toiling in obscurity, to discover that Bill Shockley was calling him: “It was like picking up the phone and talking to God.”

“Of all corporations’ research groups these two have been the two outstandingly profitable ones … of all corporation research groups these two have consistently attracted the most brilliant men. Why? The third fact explains the other two. Of all corporation research groups these two are precisely the two that believe in ‘idle curiosity.’”

When he happened to reflect back on the glider book many years later, for instance, he wondered if his work had done actual harm: “Because of me, did human beings build crazy gliders without benefit of engineering, and kill themselves therewith? I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.” He seemed less troubled by that prospect than by the poor quality of his prose.

Lucky recalls that during a phone call Pierce might suddenly hang up in the middle of his own sentence, leaving the person on the other end with the impression that a technical glitch had ended the call. No one could imagine that he would hang up on himself.

Years later, Pierce would avoid giving reporters, as well as readers of his own voluminous writings, the sense that he was calculating or unusually accomplished, sometimes offering the impression instead that his life at Caltech, and the successes that followed, were mostly serendipitous.

The money, a substantial amount in a country just emerging from the Great Depression, was ostensibly meant to reimburse him for his first-class train ticket. “Ernie, I didn’t travel first class on the train,” Elmendorf admitted. Waters looked up at Elmendorf. “If we thought you’d have gone first class,” he replied, “then we wouldn’t have hired you.”

“Too much freedom is horrible,” he would say in describing his first few months at the Labs. Indeed, he eventually came to believe that freedom in research was similar to food; it was necessary, but moderation was usually preferable to excess.

Pierce always gravitated toward the smartest people in the building,

Pierce, like Kelly, was a man of action, a man of strong opinions, and above all things a pragmatist in regard to science and innovation. Pierce, like Kelly, ran up and down staircases. He needed to get where he was going as fast as possible.

AN INSTIGATOR is different from a genius, but just as uncommon. An instigator is different, too, from the most skillful manager, someone able to wrest excellence out of people who might otherwise fall short.

“I tried to get other people to do things, I’m lazy,” Pierce once told an interviewer. “Do you think this has helped your career?” the interviewer asked. “Well, it was my career,” Pierce replied.

Pierce’s real talent, according to Friis and Pierce himself, was in getting people interested in something that hadn’t really occurred to them before.

with a five-drawer file cabinet that he had labeled “bottom drawer,” “next-to bottom drawer,” “middle drawer,” “next-to top drawer,” and “top drawer”

“Rudi invented the traveling wave tube and I discovered it”—

Humans all suffered from a terrible habit of shoving new ideas into old paradigms. “Everyone faces the future with their eyes firmly on the past,” Pierce said, “and they don’t see what’s going to happen next.”

Some of Pierce’s writing was published under his own name; some of it, however, was done under the pseudonyms John Roberts and j.j. coupling, the latter of which he borrowed on a whim from the physics literature (a j-j coupling described the spin and orbital functions of electrons), so that he would not have to seek clearance from the Bell Labs publications department, a sometimes formidable obstacle, each time he wanted to disseminate one of his new ideas.

Pierce let Wells know that one of his science fiction concepts—an atomic bomb—was coming true: America was building one. He had deduced this from the way most of the country’s good physicists were disappearing and being directed to secret laboratories around the country.

Often Pierce’s books on technology weren’t nearly as accessible as he imagined; frequently they were disorganized and dense with mathematics.

When Kelly said something was dead, it was dead. Except to Pierce.

“Kelly was a great hero of mine,” Pierce later reflected, “and a great leader of Bell Laboratories. Even great men can be wrong.”

“It is important for the Bell Laboratories to assume a leading role in research on satellite communications. This would enable us to evaluate satellite communication technically and to exploit it expeditiously if it proves advantageous to us.”

At times the younger man would remark to Pierce, empathetically, that it must have bothered him that he didn’t get to run Echo’s day-to-day operations. “I don’t know what I said, but it certainly wasn’t the full truth,” Pierce later wrote. “The Echo ground terminal would never have got built or worked had I been the project engineer. Through a mixture of ineptitude or boredom, I would have flubbed.”

the bandleader Guy Lombardo would sometimes look at his watch and momentarily stop his orchestra’s summer evening concert. Then he would suggest that everyone in the audience pause to look up and see Echo, at one point just a curious idea, and now something more, pass overhead.

Pierce would later observe that Project Echo proceeded quickly and smoothly in part because it was considered eccentric: Few people in the business community perceived its practical importance, and as a result Pierce and his crew on Crawford Hill were largely left alone.

Telstar was not one invention but rather a synchronous use of sixteen inventions patented at the Labs over the course of twenty-five years. “None of the inventions was made specifically for space purposes,” the New York Times pointed out. On the other hand, only all of them together allowed for the deployment of an active space satellite.

Pierce was confident—one of his hallmark traits. He found it continually astonishing that a complex apparatus such as the phone system even worked, but on individual projects he rarely doubted the capability of his fellow Bell engineers.

Even the collapse of the Bell System satellite business didn’t change Pierce’s views on his employer, however. As he later reflected, “I liked Bell Laboratories better than I liked satellites.

In his view, it wasn’t so much that technologies were changing society; rather, a new web of instantaneous information exchanges, made possible largely by the technologies of Bell Labs, was changing society.

The “switching art,” as it was known at Bell Labs, was suitably captured by a specialized technical jargon describing relays, registers, translators, markers, and so forth and a bevy of convoluted, mind-twisting flow charts. Those who had mastered the switching art were members of a technological priesthood.

Bell Labs’ engineers had been encouraged by the public relations department to remark to journalists that ESS had the capacity “to provide services we haven’t even thought of yet.”

John Pierce—“so smart that he frightened people,”

He talked like a writer, and normal people don’t do that. His cadence, his prosody, he was an amazing speaker—but always you had no idea what he said, even as you were mesmerized by the way he said it.”

“The story Baker used to tell—not about himself, but it fitted him—was that there are two men sitting in a meeting where a man is making a presentation. And when the man finishes, one guy in the back turns to the other and says, ‘What was he talking about?’ And the other says, ‘I don’t know, he didn’t say.’

“A very small number of times in my life I’ve been in the presence of somebody who didn’t necessarily answer the question I asked. They answered the question I should have asked,”

NSA’s very existence was then considered a national secret. So Baker was organizing a committee that did not officially exist to write a top secret report about how to improve an organization that didn’t officially exist either.

The day after Javan’s team got their laser working, a team of Labs engineers used the focused beam of light to carry a telephone call.12 That sort of thing made AT&T executives actually sit up and pay attention.