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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jon Gertner
Read between
January 7 - January 13, 2018
failure was a large part of the job. Experiments sometimes literally exploded; results often disappointed; gut feelings frequently turned out to be indigestion.
to an innovator, being early is not necessarily different from being wrong.
Bell Labs did work on military programs. Why? Not really to make money. It was part of being invaluable.”
“We would meet,” he recalls, “the three of us, and we would grab a conference room and stand around a blackboard and draw hexagons.”
It had to do with how his former boss would advise members of Bell Labs’ technical staff when they were asked to work on something new. Whether it was a radar technology for the military or solid-state research for the phone company, Kelly did not want to begin a project by focusing on what was known. He would want to begin by focusing on what was not known.
In 1957, Moore and seven other colleagues, later nicknamed the “traitorous eight,” decided to leave Shockley’s company to form their own. Shockley felt that someone within the office was sabotaging the firm’s work. “The final straw,” Moore noted, had been when Shockley asked his entire staff to take polygraph tests.
he held an endowed chair at Stanford’s engineering school. He had already become the subject of student demonstrations. Shockley seemed to relish the attention. At the same time, it didn’t seem to detract from his abilities as an instructor. Students who were willing to take his physics class—sometimes he gave it in the living room of his own home—were fortunate to encounter one of the great college physics teachers of the twentieth century.
He decided in his seventies to declare publicly, in the Los Angeles Times, that he had donated his sperm to a project that was attempting to create a sperm bank of Nobel Prize winners. When Playboy magazine asked him about it in a lengthy interview, he defended the idea; at least to him, a sperm bank of superachievers made perfect sense. When he was asked in the interview how his own children turned out, he replied, “In terms of my own capacities, my children represent a very significant regression. My first wife—their mother—had not as high an academic achievement standing as I had.”
Shannon had never been especially interested in the everyday value of his work. He once told an interviewer, “I think you impute a little more practical purpose to my thinking than actually exists. My mind wanders around, and I conceive of different things day and night. Like a science-fiction writer, I’m thinking, ‘What if it were like this?’ or, ‘Is there an interesting problem of this type?’ … It’s usually just that I like to solve a problem, and I work on these all the time.”
Len Kleinrock, Shannon’s former student, recalls that one day at MIT, Shannon mentioned that he was making a mathematical model of the stock market. “I said, ‘Mr. Shannon, you’re interested in making money?’ ” Kleinrock recalls. “He said, ‘Why yes, aren’t you?’
he put forward a theoretical equation—(F + D)H = (V + D)N—that governed juggling’s physics. (As Shannon’s juggling friend Arthur Lewbel explains, F is the time a ball spends in the air, D is the time a ball is in a juggler’s hand, H is the number of hands, V is the time a hand is vacant, and N is the number of balls juggled.)
when Shannon was asked to speak, he grew anxious, believing he had little of value to say, and took several balls out of his pocket. And then he juggled for the crowd. Afterward, the attendees, some of the leading mathematicians and engineers in the world, lined up to get his autograph.
“I don’t know how history is taught here in Japan,” he told the audience when he traveled there in 1985 to give an acceptance speech, “but in the United States in my college days, most of the time was spent on the study of political leaders and wars—Caesars, Napoleons, and Hitlers. I think this is totally wrong. The important people and events of history are the thinkers and innovators, the Darwins, Newtons, Beethovens whose work continues to grow in influence in a positive fashion.”
“no one can tell a professor what to do, on the one hand. But in any deep sense, nobody cares what he’s doing, either.”
Pierce helped invent a scale, known as the Bohlen-Pierce scale, that was not built upon a standard octave but a different arrangement of thirteen ascending tones. It was a characteristically complex endeavor, and his efforts to explain it were laced with technical jargon about the scale’s frequency ratios.36 A composer and friend of Pierce’s described its musical effect more directly, in words that almost seemed to describe Pierce himself. Pierce’s scale, the friend said, has “ear-catching dissonances [and] warm and pure consonances.” But music tends to resist easy description. The experience
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The old world was already gone, he explained, it was just that most people hadn’t yet noticed.
“One immediate problem for which no amount of corporate bulk can compensate is the firm’s lack of marketing expertise,” one journalist, Christopher Byron of Time, noted. It was a wise point. Bell Labs and AT&T had “never really had to sell anything.”3 And when they had tried—as was the case with the Picturephone—they failed. Government regulation, as AT&T had learned, could be immensely difficult to manage and comply with. But markets, they would soon discover, were simply brutal. AT&T’s leaders, such as CEO Charlie Brown, “had never had the experience or the training to compete,”
“Unfettered research,” as Odlyzko termed it, was no longer a logical or necessary investment for a company. For one thing, it took far too long for an actual breakthrough to pay off as a commercial innovation—if it ever did. For another, the base of science was now so broad, thanks to work in academia as well as old industrial laboratories such as Bell Labs, that a company could profit merely by pursuing an incremental strategy rather than a game-changing discovery or invention.
“science and technology is now a production line. If you want a new idea, you hire some people, give them a budget, and have fairly good odds of getting what you asked for. It’s like building refrigerators.”
the remaining employees—at the company whose engineers perfected the telephone—were asked to limit their calls at work.
(Intel, moreover, manufactures about 10 billion transistors every second.)
Jeong Kim, the most recent president of Bell Labs, has suggested that the future of communications will be defined by an industry yet to be created—not the kind of business that simply delivers or searches out information, but one that manages the tide of information so that it doesn’t drown us.
“The only really important thing about communication is how well it serves man,”
“While only four percent of the [U.S.] work force is composed of scientists and engineers,” the National Academy report points out, “this group disproportionately creates jobs for the other 96 percent.”
A corollary to his vision was that size and employee numbers were not the only crucial aspect. A large group of physicists, certainly, created a healthy flow of ideas. But Kelly believed the most valuable ideas arose when the large group of physicists bumped against other departments and disciplines, too.
“It’s the interaction between fundamental science and applied science, and the interface between many disciplines, that creates new ideas,”
John Pierce did not flatter himself so much as to think that success in basic or applied research—those big leaps in scientific knowledge—were necessarily more heroic than development. “You see, out of fourteen people in the Bell Laboratories,” he once remarked, “only one is in the Research Department, and that’s because pursuing an idea takes, I presume, fourteen times as much effort as having it.”
Pierce wasn’t about managing people. Pierce was about managing ideas.
“Pierce did not let people get in the way of his pursuit of ideas,” Mayo adds. “He did not compromise because it would make people feel good. He did his thing because he felt it was necessary to accomplish the development of ideas the way he wanted.
the progress of business now, Mayo adds, is to become accustomed to watching successful technology companies offer new engineers rich incentives for their work. Pierce and Bell Labs couldn’t do that because they were funded like a public utility. But they also couldn’t do that because it chafed against their belief in how innovations arise. “Incentives are fine,” Mayo says, “but they produce incremental improvements in what’s there. That’s not what Pierce was about.”
“CAN WE LEARN SOMETHING FROM THE EXAMPLE OF BELL LABS?” John Pierce asked, in all capital letters,
Back in the 1940s and 1950s, moreover, smart and talented graduate students could never be wooed away from the Labs by the prospect of making millions. It wasn’t even thinkable. You were in it for the adventure.
What about Bell Labs’ formula was timeless?
In his 1997 list, he thought it boiled down to four things: A technically competent management all the way to the top. Researchers didn’t have to raise funds. Research on a topic or system could be and was supported for years. Research could be terminated without damning the researcher.
It is now received wisdom that innovation and competitiveness are closely linked. Companies that are good at innovating are good at competing in the market; the uncompromising nature of the market, in turn, is a powerful force on companies to innovate. But Bell Labs’ history demonstrates that the truth is actually far more complicated.
in regard to innovation, capitalism is more deeply intertwined with government than many of us realize.
“We learned that the impossible is not impossible. We learned that if you think you can do something you may very well be able to do one thousand times better once you understand what’s going on.”
If we marched all the people out and destroyed the buildings and the equipment and the records, would Bell Laboratories be destroyed? Bown’s answer was no, it would not. On the other hand, he would say that if the buildings, equipment, and records remained intact but the people were removed, Bell Laboratories would be destroyed.
In Lucky’s view, a list of Bell Labs’ exemplars captures the essence of the organization. “They set the examples that permeated the whole place. They created the fame and were what other people aspired to be. They were the leaders, even if they weren’t high up in management.
To him, the essence of Bell Labs was its immense and complete institutional capabilities—how it could develop anything from the tiniest element of a small electronic device to the grand plan for a national network; also, how it could develop people, turning callow college graduates into competent researchers
“However nostalgic I may be about the world of my childhood, it is gone, and so are the sorts of people who lived in it. Science and technology destroyed that world and replaced it with another.”
is clear that we build for the day and not for the ages, and what we build has a community and functional rather than an individual character.”
