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There was no real distinction at West Street between an engineer and a scientist. If anything, everyone was considered an engineer and was charged with the task of making the thousands of necessary small improvements to augment the phone service that was interconnecting the country.
These young scientists, many of whom came through Millikan, were encouraged to implement Theodore Vail’s long-term vision for the phone company—to look beyond the day-to-day concerns that shaped the work of their fellow engineers (to think five or ten years ahead was admirable) and focus on how fundamental questions of physics or chemistry might someday affect communications.
His point was that genius would undoubtedly improve the company’s operations just as ordinary engineering could.
The line wasn’t always distinct (sometimes applied research could yield basic scientific insights, too), but generally speaking it was believed that basic research preceded applied research, and applied research preceded development. In turn, development preceded manufacture.
Until the end of the war, there wouldn’t be time for applied research, let alone basic research.
If the Western Electric engineers in the tube shop confronted a baffling question, they would approach Davy, who would give a deep and thoughtful and ultimately convincing response—though it sometimes took him days to do so.
And he planned his experiments with such rigor and unhurried meticulousness that his output was considered meager, though in truth Davisson’s work was often interrupted by his colleagues’ questions.
If he was helpful to the researchers working on real-world problems, he was worth keeping around.
Davisson used to tell people he was lazy, but Kelly believed otherwise: “He worked at a slow pace but persistently.”
They chose the name Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc.
The new entity—owned half by AT&T and half by Western Electric—was somewhat perplexing, for you couldn’t buy its stock on any of the exchanges.
The Bell Labs employees would be investigating anything remotely related to human communications, whether it be conducted through wires or radio or recorded sound or visual images.
The industrial lab showed that the group—especially the interdisciplinary group—was better than the lone scientist or small team.
Tubes could do much more than amplify a weak phone signal or radio transmission: They could change alternating current into direct current, making them a crucial component in early radios and televisions, which received AC from the power grid but whose mechanisms required DC to operate. What’s more, the tubes could function as simple and very fast switches that turned current on and off.
The anode was a tiny flattened, hollow box of sheet nickel; the grid was a mesh fashioned from nickel wire of several different diameters; the cathode was a ribbon of metal, M-shaped, made from a platinum-alloy core coated with other trace elements.
He knew they soaked up vast amounts of electricity to operate and gave off tremendous amounts of heat. Most of all he knew they had to be perfect, and often they weren’t.
In the months after the stock market crash of 1929, when the black depths of the Great Depression weren’t yet apparent, Kelly and a few other colleagues belonged to a buoyant “three-hours-for-lunch” club, a group of Labs employees intent on trying the newest Manhattan speakeasies (Prohibition was still in force) before the police could shut them down.
The Bell Labs hierarchy was now established for the next decade: Frank Jewett on top, Buckley below him, then Kelly. Though Kelly was not technically in charge, that mattered little.
(In an experiment, Davisson had bombarded a piece of crystalline nickel with electrons, and the results demonstrated a theory first put forward by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger that electrons moved in a wave pattern.)
The country’s universities had drastically pared their budgets and teaching positions were almost impossible to come by.
Most had been trained at first-rate graduate schools like MIT and Chicago and Caltech; they had been flagged by physics or chemistry or engineering professors at these places and their names had been quietly passed along to Kelly or someone else at the Labs.
Almost all of them had found a way out—a high school teacher, oftentimes, who noticed something about them, a startling knack for mathematics, for example, or an insatiable curiosity about electricity, and had tried to nurture this talent with extra assignments or after-school tutoring, all in the hope (never explained to the young men but realized by them all, gratefully, many years later) that the students could be pushed toward a local university and away from the desolation of a life behind a plow or a cash register.
Almost all had grown up with a peculiar desire to know more about the stars or the telephone lines or (most often) the radio, and especially their makeshift home wireless sets. Almost all of them had put one together themselves, and in turn had discovered how sound could be pulled from the air.
A chemist named William Baker was hired from Princeton.
A certain fearlessness about life characterized the recruits.
At one point during the first few days the freshmen were asked to sell the rights to their future patents, whatever these might be; their research, wherever it took them, was to benefit Bell Labs and phone subscribers. None of the young men refused. And in exchange for their signatures, each was given a crisp one-dollar bill.
Usually the ideas came inside an envelope, printed in a formidable journal—Annalen der Physik from Germany, for instance, or Physical Review from New York—transported by the mail trains to New England, the Midwest, or the West Coast, where the package would be eagerly received by young physicists at places like Harvard, Chicago, or Caltech. The ideas also came to willing readers, in clear and eloquent English, via a publication named the Bell System Technical Journal, where a physicist named Karl Darrow, another former student of Millikan’s, had a gift for summarizing what he called
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Before Harold Arnold died, however, he had recognized in Darrow a useful skill for disseminating information.
From then on his job involved traveling to Europe in the summers and effectively serving as an intermediary between scientific ideas there and in the United States.
Some years Karl Darrow would visit California to lecture; some years students in various locations would learn from a physics professor named John Van Vleck, who was permitted to ride the nation’s passenger trains free of charge because he had helped work out the national rail schedules with exacting precision.
Bell Labs had been forced to reduce its employees’ hours, but some of the young staffers, now with extra time on their hands, had signed up for academic courses at Columbia University in uptown
Some of the Labs’ newest arrivals after the Depression had decided to further educate themselves through study groups where they would make their way through scientific textbooks, one chapter a week, and take turns lecturing one another on the newest advances in theoretical and experimental physics.
The material was a challenge for everyone in the group except Shockley, who could have done the work in his sleep, Wooldridge would recall.
As the study group wound down for the evening, the men would often make their way over to Brattain’s Greenwich Village apartment for a drink. By then it was 8 or 9 p.m.—time for dinner at a restaurant in the Village and then bed.
The larger the system became, the larger the challenges would be in managing its complexity and structural integrity. It was also likely that the larger the system became, the higher the cost might be to individual subscribers unless technologies became more efficient.
But the engineers weren’t merely trying to improve the system functionally; their agreements with state and federal governments obliged them to improve it economically, too.
By the late 1930s, in fact, AT&T was in the midst of a federal investigation that focused closely on whether it was overpaying for phone equipment from Western Electric, and thus overcharging phone users as a result.
It is larger than the Pennsylvania Railroad Company and United States Steel Corporation put together. Its gross revenues of more than one billion dollars a year are surpassed by the incomes of few governments of the world. The System comprises over 200 vassal corporations. Through some 140 companies it controls between 80 and 90 percent of local telephone service and 98 percent of the long-distance telephone wires of the United States.”
The overseers of the phone company, those top-hatted executives at AT&T, were mercenary and aggressive and as arrogant as any captains of industry. But the phone service offered to subscribers was reliable and of high quality and not terribly expensive.
AT&T’s aggressive strategy to patent its inventions, meanwhile, made it difficult for individuals and smaller companies to compete; it was also a tool for generating profits. But Danielian likewise acknowledged that the discoveries at Bell Labs had been essential to the progress of society at large.
There were no telephone ringers at the very start; callers would get the attention of those they were calling by yelling loudly (often, “ahoy!”) into the receiver until someone on the other end noticed. There were no hang-up hooks, no pay phones, no phone booths, no operator headsets. The batteries that powered the phones worked poorly. Proper cables didn’t exist, and neither did switchboards, dials, or buttons. Dial tones and busy signals had to be invented. Lines strung between poles often didn’t work, or worked poorly; lines that were put underground, a necessity in urban centers, had even
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The system required that teams of chemists spend their entire lives trying to invent new, cheaper sheathing so that phone cables would not be permeated by rain and ice; the system required that other teams of chemists spend their lives working to improve the insulation that lay between the sheathing and the phone wires themselves.
Measurement devices that could assess things like loudness, signal strength, and channel capacity didn’t exist, so they, too, had to be created—for it was impossible to study and improve something unless it could be measured.
What’s more, almost every part of the system was designed and built to stay in service for forty years.
AT&T lines carried transmissions from the Teletype, a machine that could send and translate written messages over long distances—so Labs engineers likewise found it necessary to invent a better teletypewriter oiler, a small square oil can, named the 512A tool. And the Labs engineers were not necessarily content with designing any oil can; this one had to be built with a complex inner mechanism for dispensing up to (but no more than) fifteen drops of lubricant.
A sturdy telephone cable that carried hundreds of calls at the same time would do so at different frequencies, much as daylight carries within it different colors of the spectrum.
WE USUALLY IMAGINE that invention occurs in a flash, with a eureka moment that leads a lone inventor toward a startling epiphany. In truth, large leaps forward in technology rarely have a precise point of origin. At the start, forces that precede an invention merely begin to align, often imperceptibly, as a group of people and ideas converge, until over the course of months or years (or decades) they gain clarity and momentum and the help of additional ideas and actors. Luck seems to matter, and so does timing, for it tends to be the case that the right answers, the right people, the right
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As we’ve seen, tubes were extremely delicate and difficult to make; they required a lot of electricity and gave off great heat. Switches—the mechanisms by which each customer’s call was passed along the system’s vast grid to the precise party he was calling—were prone to similar problems. They were delicate mechanical devices; they used relays that employed numerous metal contacts; they could easily stop working and would eventually wear out. They were also, because they clicked open and closed, far slower than an electronic switch, without moving parts, might be.
Perhaps the Labs could fashion solid-state switches, or solid-state amplifiers, with no breakable parts that operated only by way of electric pulses, to replace the system’s proliferating relays and tubes.
His fitful work schedule left him home often enough to tutor his son in math and encourage his early curiosity about science. But Shockley would say that his largest influence was a neighbor named Pearley Ross, a professor at Stanford who worked with X-rays and whose young daughters were Shockley’s main companions. Ross taught Shockley the fundamentals of physics.
