More to the point, the thrust of the work at Bell Labs seemed to have shifted decisively to big projects involving hundreds of people. Frenkiel’s Bell Labs didn’t seem to have anything to do with heroic research on a new amplifier, done by a few men in a hushed lab. It was about large teams attacking knotty problems for years on end. Jim Fisk’s 1947 dinner party—the Bell Labs of Kelly and Pierce and Shockley, “an ancient place of grainy and fading photographs,” as Frenkiel later viewed it, “where giants of science produced their individual monuments and left behind their personal legends”—was
...more
