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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.
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.
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.
Like any elite organization, it suffered at times from personality clashes, institutional arrogance, and—especially in its later years—strategic missteps.
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.
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.
His father—kindly and bookish, and not nearly the go-getter his son was turning out to be—was named Joseph Fennimore Kelly.
The clear reason was its location at the intersection of two train lines, the Rock Island and the Wabash, both of which stopped in town to take in and disgorge passengers.
The Old West—the Wild West—had not quite receded, and so you listened quite regularly to reminiscences about the trial of Frank James, Jesse’s outlaw brother, which Gallatin had hosted a few decades before.
There were no radio stations yet—the device was mostly a new toy for hobbyists—so instead there might be a primitive Edison phonograph or a string band at the party, some friends who could play fiddle and mandolin.
250 miles away. To someone from Gallatin, such a distance was almost unimaginably far,
IN 1910, when Kelly set off for mining school, few Americans recognized the differences between a scientist, an engineer, and an inventor.
Thus it was almost certainly the case that the inventor of machinery seemed more vital to the modern age than someone—a trained physicist, for example—who might explain how and why the machine worked.
Edison usually worked eighteen hours a day or longer, pushing for weeks on end, ignoring family obligations, taking meals at his desk, refusing to pause for sleep or showers.
When fatigue overcame him he would crawl under his table for a catnap or stretch out on any available space (though eventually his wife placed a bed in the library of his West Orange, New Jersey, laboratory).
Though Edison became rich and famous for his phonograph and his filament for the electric light bulb, some of his less heralded inventions were arguably as influential on the course of modern life.
(He had first tried lead, copper, manganese, graphite, osmium, ruthenium, silicon, boron, iridium, platinum, and a wide variety of other liquids and fibers.)
He read compulsively, for instance—classics as well as newspapers. Edison often said that an early encounter with the writings of Thomas Paine had set his course in life. He maintained a vast library in his laboratory and pored over chemistry texts as he pursued his inventions.
In the boom times of the Industrial Revolution, in the words of one science historian, inventing products such as the sewing machine or barbed wire “required mainly mechanical skill and ingenuity, not scientific knowledge and training.”
Indeed, by the time Mervin Kelly began his studies at the Missouri School of Mines around 1910, any sensible American boy with an eye on the future might be thinking of engineering; the new industrial age mostly needed men who could make bigger and better machines.
Americans still knew almost nothing about the sciences, but they were beginning to hear about a stream of revelations, all European in origin, regarding the hidden but fundamental structure of the visible world.
FOR DECADES, any serious American science student had to complete his education in Europe, most often at schools in Berlin and Gottingen, Germany, where he could sit at the feet of the masters as they lectured or carried on laboratory research. (The language of science was German, too.) But early in the twentieth century a handful of American schools, notably Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and the University of Chicago, began turning out accomplished graduates in physics and chemistry.
He worked himself not quite to Edison’s extreme, but close, which suggested the bootstrap ethic could apply to physicists as well as inventors. As a younger man, the professor had almost missed his own wedding because he was so busy reviewing a scientific manuscript in his office.
And yet Jewett wasn’t exactly a snob; he was agile-minded and glib; he could talk with and befriend almost anyone. He was especially adept at earning the trust of older men.
Midway through his year as a physics instructor, he had a chance meeting with one of the engineers at American Telephone & Telegraph, who was quickly charmed and impressed by him.
Contrary to its gentle image of later years, created largely through one of the great public relations machines in corporate history, Ma Bell in its first few decades was close to a public menace—a ruthless, rapacious, grasping “Bell Octopus,” as its enemies would describe it to the press.
In its later battles with independent phone companies, however, it would often move beyond battles in the courtroom and resort to sabotaging competitors’ phone lines and stealthily taking over their equipment suppliers.
All the while, the company maintained a policy of “noncompliance” with other service providers.
Residents or businesses sometimes needed two or even three telephones so they could speak with acquaintances who used different service providers.
it was in the long-term interests of AT&T to buy independent phone companies whenever possible. And when it seemed likely a few years later that the government was concerned about this strategy, Vail agreed to stop buying up companies without government permission. He likewise agreed that AT&T would simply charge independent phone companies a fee for carrying long-distance calls.
He saw that a possible route to monopoly—or at least a near monopoly, which was what AT&T had always been striving for—could be achieved not through a show of muscle but through an acquiescence to political supervision.
He argued that telephone service had become “necessary to existence.”13 Moreover, he insisted that the public would be best served by a technologically unified and compatible system—and that it made sense for a single company to be in charge of it. Vail understood that government, or at least many politicians, would argue that phone subscribers must have protections against a monopoly; his ...
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Still, he believed that in return for regulation Ma Bell deserved to find the path cleared for reasonable profits and industry dominance.
“Eventually it came to be assumed within the Bell System that there would never be a time when technological innovation would no longer be needed.” The Vail strategy, in short, would measure the company’s progress “in decades instead of years.”
The telephone essentially converted the human voice into an electrical signal; in turn-of-the-century phones this was done by allowing sound waves produced by a voice to vibrate a taut diaphragm—usually a disc made of thin aluminum—that was backed by another thin metal disc. A mild electric current ran between the two discs, which were separated by a chamber filled with the tiny carbon granules Edison had invented. As sound waves from a voice vibrated the top diaphragm, waves of varying pressure moved through the granules below it. The varying pressure would in turn vary the resistance to the
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But a telephone voice signal was weak—much weaker and more delicate than a telegraph’s simple dot-dash signal. Even worse, the delicate signal would grow thinner—or “attenuate,” to use the phone company’s preferred term—after even a few miles.
Copper wire worked better than iron wire, and stiff, “hard-drawn” copper wire seemed to work even better. Best of all was extremely thick-gauge hard-drawn copper wire.
But you could only install a few repeaters on a line before the advantages of boosting a call’s volume were undone by distortion and the attenuation of the signals.
The tricks of their trade might allow them to conquer a distance of about 1,700 miles, roughly from New York to Denver.
“Let us have one or two, or even three, of the best of the young men who are taking their doctorates with you and are intimately familiar with your field. Let us take them into our laboratory in New York and assign to them the sole task of developing a telephone repeater.”
It resembled a small incandescent light bulb, yet instead of a hot wire filament strung between two supporting wires it had three elements—a metal filament that would get hot and emit electrons (called a cathode); a metal plate that would stay cool and attract electrons (called an anode); and between them a wire mesh, or “grid.” A small electrical current, or signal, that was applied to the audion’s grid could be greatly amplified by another electrical current that was traveling from the hot cathode to the cool anode.
Soon to be known as the vacuum tube, it and its descendants would revolutionize twentieth-century communications.
Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor who had long since stopped having any day-to-day responsibilities at the company he founded, was stationed in New York to speak with his old assistant, Thomas Watson, in San Francisco. “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you,” the old man quipped, paraphrasing what he had said to Watson on the day the two discovered the working telephone in Boston nearly forty years before.
Millikan, meanwhile, didn’t stop serving as the link between his Chicago graduates and his old friend.
For that there was Western Electric, another subsidiary of AT&T. On its own, Western Electric was larger than almost any other American manufacturing corporation.
Long Lines built and provided long-distance service to customers.
Generally speaking, the standards and long-term goals of the Bell System were determined by engineers at AT&T. Western Electric’s engineers, in turn, invented, designed, and developed all new equipment and devices.
The engineers on the waterfront comprised a twentieth-century insurgency in a receding nineteenth-century world.
And oftentimes, “at dusk, a man with a lantern on horseback led the trains.”
In their first days at the Western Electric shop, Kelly and Fletcher encountered a small city of men, along with a number of female assistants.
