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It was part of the Marshall Islands and had been the site of a significant battle during World War II. A largely secret installation, where engineers now worked on radar communications and antiballistic systems known as Nike-Zeus missiles,
A local Marshallese population traveled to the island each morning on U.S. military launches to work as merchants and maids. The island’s king and landlord carried around with him his rent money—purportedly a million dollars, paid by the U.S. government—in a bag.
Bell Labs decided to get out of missile work when it became apparent that the United States would sign an anti–ballistic missile treaty with the Soviet Union.
“They were going to tell us to find a job within Bell Labs.”
They pitched their own talents in the hope of being brought in.
They had little time to contemplate their legacy, but some of the decisions made by DiPiazza’s team proved indelible—for instance, the height of a cellular tower and the close arrangement of its antennas.
That way, the mobile caller would be less rushed; also, the call would be connected for a shorter time, thus putting less strain on the network.
Motorola, whose radio business could conceivably be jeopardized by the Bell Labs plan, made a variety of seemingly contradictory arguments against it.
Thus the handset business would be opened up to companies like Motorola or Japanese vendors.
Vertical integration meant that the company controlled its research, development, manufacturing, and deployment.
The bottom box, where ideas and innovations began, was Bell Laboratories. Above that was Western Electric, where those innovations were in turn mass-produced. Above that was the top box, AT&T, which deployed the new technologies in the long-distance and local markets.
It was the horizontal integration he considered unacceptable.
The government believed that AT&T’s control of almost all the local networks created a bottleneck preventing long-distance competition, such as MCI, from thriving. It also created a barrier to companies that wanted to build their own telecommunications equipment.
Brown worried that if he spun off Western Electric—the middle box on the vertical stack—then AT&T wouldn’t be able to take new discoveries from Bell Labs and move them up into the telecommunications network. Spinning off the local operating companies presented a similarly unappealing prospect: It would drastically reduce the funding available to Bell Labs, since those local companies represented a large portion of AT&T’s annual revenue.
Popular technologies spread quickly through society; inevitably, they are duplicated and improved by outsiders. As that happens, the original innovator becomes less and less crucial to the technology itself.
An intriguing question, at least to Mayo, is why the leadership that preceded him at Bell Labs—Jewett, Kelly, Fisk, Pierce, Baker, and the rest—nonetheless decided to invest so heavily and so consistently in research and in exploring what he calls “the unknown.” They were not forced to; other government-run phone companies around the world did not.
Tanenbaum notes that Bell Labs’ most significant research and development efforts—transistors, microwave towers, digital transmission, optical fiber, cellular telephone systems—all fit a pattern. They took years to be developed and deployed, and soon became essential parts of the network. Yet many of the essential patents were given away or licensed for a pittance. And those technologies that weren’t shared were duplicated or improved upon by outsiders anyway. And eventually, the results were always the same. All the innovations returned, ferociously, in the form of competition.
On its face, the pact was simple: AT&T would agree to divest its local phone companies, which would all become separate corporations in their own right. At the same time, AT&T would be released from the old consent decree, made in 1956, that prevented it from entering into other industries.
But the divestiture itself—figuring out how to split up the world’s biggest company—would take two years in itself.
Americans would now be allowed to buy their own phones and pick their long-distance provider—a prospect that some politicians worried could lead to mass confusion.
The Labs would no longer be forced to give away its technologies—as it had done, for instance, with the transistor.
As those discoveries and inventions had spread around the world, however, they had made telephone technology indistinct. To Drucker, telecommunications was now just a part of the immense field of information and electronic technology.
The main users have been others—that is, non-telephone industries—with Bell Labs getting little out of its contributions other than an occasional footnote in a scientific paper.
On the one hand, Bell Labs could become a standard industrial lab, much like the ones that supplied technology to General Electric or RCA.
A retiring executive of Bell Labs had entrée to a vast world of genteel opportunity. Kelly soon accepted seats on the corporate boards of several large technology companies; he also joined a variety of committees that advised the science and engineering departments at MIT, Harvard, and the University of Rochester.
“We were moving faster than Bell Labs would,” Gunther-Mohr says, noting that Bell Labs had a thirty-year schedule for applying its inventions to the phone network.
He would want to begin by focusing on what was not known.
It was more common practice, at least in the military, to proceed with what technology would allow and fill in the gaps afterward.
Fifteen years before, the Stanford graduates Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard had founded a successful technology business in the area. Their company, which the men had named Hewlett-Packard, was focused mostly on building precision laboratory equipment.
Eventually, Moore would become famous for cofounding the Intel Corporation and for making an observation about the rapid rate of progress in semiconductor engineering—namely, that the number of transistors that can fit on a silicon chip tends to double about every two years.
In 1957, Moore and seven other colleagues, later nicknamed the “traitorous eight,” decided to leave Shockley’s company to form their own.
“He was inclined to believe that society should be governed by what one might regard as an intellectually elite group . . . rather than by majority decisions as in a democratic society.”
Several Bell Labs veterans recall that the difference between Shockley’s own scores and other Bell Labs employees was not significant.
In Shockley’s case, the leap from his early question (How does intelligence translate into scientific creativity?) to his later question (How do genes influence intelligence?) was not especially controversial.
Often he would ask journalists who sought to meet him to undergo a series of “pre-interview interviews”; sometimes, too, he would provide inquiring reporters with quizzes on science and statistical concepts and belittle their performance.
(Morton had been murdered following a disagreement at a New Jersey bar—his body was retrieved from his burning car, which had evidently been set alight by his attackers.)
“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.”
During any given year, going back to the late 1930s, there had been pocket-sized diaries, booklet diaries, large notebook diaries, and so forth.
He seemed mainly interested in observing the behavior of the birds in his backyard, where he would sometimes sit for hours and note their habits and gestures. He fed the birds lovingly.
Brattain said he cherished the fact that transistor radios could now bring information to people living in the most remote and impoverished corners of the world. Bardeen pointed to communications with the Apollo astronauts. He also noted the invention’s tremendous financial impact in the fledgling computer industry, “which wouldn’t have been possible without the transistor, and now runs in this country—I think—the order of $20 billion a year.”
Shockley suggested that the greatest innovation arising from the transistor might be the compact tape recorder.
In the 1920s, a professor named Benjamin Brown, at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, had changed Brattain’s life by introducing him to advanced physics. Brattain wanted to do the same thing for someone else. “I’ve gotten to the place where I will retire to my small alma mater out there and do a little teaching,” he told the sociologist Harriet Zuckerman, who interviewed him at Murray Hill in the early 1960s.
In other words, he and several colleagues explained the reasons why some substances, at very cold temperatures, can conduct electricity without any resistance.
In 1972, Bardeen was awarded a second Nobel Prize in Physics for the work. He is the world’s only physicist to have such a distinction.
Visitors to his large, elegant house in the Boston suburbs would get a tour of his juggling machines, his unicycles, his collection of pianos and musical instruments, and all his hand-built gadgets and automata.
Mostly, Pierce wanted to chat with his friend about ideas and the future. When Pierce was at the Shannon house, Betty Shannon recalls, he and Claude would take a boat out on the lake that adjoined the property and paddle around, talking for hours.
Shannon had become wealthy, too, through friends in the technology industry. He owned significant shares in Hewlett-Packard, where his friend Barney Oliver ran the research labs, and was deeply invested in Teledyne, a conglomerate started by another friend,
The stock market was therefore just another puzzle, albeit one with a pleasant proof of success. He was convinced that the stock market was less efficient than some economists believed, and that a smart investor who took advantage of mispriced stocks could do quite well.
Nevertheless, in the late 1970s he found himself consumed by the question of whether he could formulate a scientific theory of juggling to explain its unifying principles. Just as he had done years before—for his papers on cryptography, information, and computer chess—he delved into the history of juggling and took stock of its greatest practitioners.
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.
