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His childhood rages had subsided, replaced by a geniality that hid a relentless competitive edge and an occasional and savage asperity.
Shockley arranged for one copy of the exam to be taken out of the classroom, solved expertly by himself and a team of graduates who had already taken the class, signed by Helvar Skaade, and then returned in time to be handed in. Skaade, the mysterious young genius, answered all the questions brilliantly except for the last one, to which he responded, “Hell, I’m too damn drunk to write anymore.” Skaade got an A-minus, the highest grade in the class.
PhD. Seitz was going to get his physics PhD at Princeton—the men agreed Shockley would drop him off there.
A few days later, on a moonlit night, Shockley dropped his new friend off in New Jersey. Princeton’s campus struck him as extremely attractive.
Results or ideas that one thought were potentially valuable were witnessed and signed by another engineer for documentation of the timing of the idea.” The scientists were not permitted to rip out pages. Nor were they encouraged to attach loose sheets of paper into the notebook. “No erasures,” says Brown. “Lines through mistakes—initialed by who drew the lines.”
Also, the notebooks were issued with registered numbers that were matched to each scientist and were tracked by supervisors and Labs attorneys. There was to be no confusion about who did what. The notebooks were proof for gaining a patent.
Under certain circumstances semiconductors are also known to be good “rectifiers”; that is, they allow an electric current passing through them to move in only one direction.
He would speculate later about what might have occurred had he continued to develop that particular amplifier experiment without interruption.
The news from Europe—beginning with Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, and its invasion of Belgium, France, and the Netherlands in the spring of 1940—put an end to business as usual.
By the middle of 1940, the research department at Bell Labs stopped doing research as nearly all of the Labs’ work—about 75 percent of it—was redirected toward developing electronic devices for wartime, first to help the Allies in Europe, and soon after to assist the U.S. Army and Navy.
One of the Labs’ first assignments as the war began in Europe resulted from Jewett’s political connections:2 finding out at the government’s behest whether it was actually possible, in light of several recent theoretical papers on nuclear reactions, to create a weapon out of ordinary uranium.
could not make a devastating weapon, they theorized that by placing “piles” of a specially enriched uranium preparation close together one might be able to create a sustained, low-level reaction. Put simply, they’d figured out how to make a nuclear reactor.
The men tried to patent the idea, but met with resistance from the government and the patent courts. As Fisk would recall, the reason was that the physicists Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard “had essentially the same idea and probably at about the same time. We may have been earlier, they may have been earlier, I don’t know. I don’t think that anybody will ever know. But they were working hard on this and we were doing this simply as an exercise to answer the question.”
That he had figured out the essential concepts for nuclear power on his own (actually, the idea came to him while he was taking a shower) merely seemed an intriguing interlude in a frenetic schedule.
Beginning in 1940, Kelly assigned Shockley to a secret effort to help develop applications for a new technology known as radar.
One day not long after he began his war work, Charles Townes was walking through Times Square when a complete stranger came up to him: “You’re not in uniform. Shame! A man your age ought to be in uniform, and helping out.”6 Townes was working fifty- and sixty-hour weeks to do precisely that. To the general public, however—largely unaware that this war would depend as much on technology as strategy—their role remained obscure.
Science had no true owners, only participants and contributors.
Kelly defined it as the application of science to a problem affecting society. Engineers dipped into the “common reservoir” of science on behalf of their own industries and countries. In peacetime, that meant they focused on making profitable commodities like automobiles and telephone equipment; in wartime, that meant they focused on building military communications equipment as well as ships, planes, and munitions.
In particular he remarked on the speed with which U.S. industry had caught up with the military economies of the Axis powers.
A six-day workweek became the norm.
This led Labs executives to hire hundreds of women to replace the men. What’s more, for the first time, the Labs began to hire Jews, bucking a strain of anti-Semitism that ran deep within the AT&T establishment, though not, apparently, within Kelly.
A slightly different explanation was that a meritocratic organization such as the Labs could perceive a competitive disadvantage of passing over the best scientists on religious grounds, an error they might have already made with the young Richard Feynman, a former colleague of Shockley’s at MIT who would eventually be drafted into the Manhattan Project.
Whatever the explanation, some of the older and most hidebound scientists at the Labs found discomfort in this aspect of the Labs’ evolution, as well as in Kelly’s war mobilization effort.
Mostly it seemed that Jewett and Buckley were primarily concerned that one of their most accomplished engineers might be a blemish on the Labs’ reputation for patriotism and national service.
The ideas of scientists thrive on publication and broad dissemination; but the ideas of engineers, especially during wartime, thrive only if secrecy is maintained.
When a three-hundred-page internal history of Bell Labs’ World War II work was later compiled, his name was never mentioned.
A memo to Bell Labs employees explained that radar could be defined as a powerful electronic “eye” that used high-frequency radio echoes to determine the presence and location of unseen objects in space: “Specifically, a radar system does the following: (1) it generates high-power electrical waves; (2) it projects these waves from an antenna, usually in a narrow beam; (3) it picks up the waves which reflect back from objects in its range; and (4) converts these into a pattern on a fluorescent screen.”
Scientists who worked on radar often quipped that radar won the war, whereas the atomic bomb merely ended it.
radar was a far larger investment on the part of the U.S. government, probably amounting to $3 billion as contrasted with $2 billion for the atomic bomb. In addition, radar wasn’t a single kind of device but multiple devices—there were dozens of different models—employing a similar technology that could be used on the ground, on water, or in the air. Perhaps most important, radar was both an offensive and a defensive weapon.
The U.S. military also used radar stations in the Pacific—indeed, the Japanese squadrons flying toward Pearl Harbor were picked up well before they arrived. The officers monitoring the stations disregarded their readings, thinking the blips to be friendly aircraft.
In early 1940, if one could by chance eavesdrop on a group of Bell Labs radio engineers discussing the ideal radar set, one would hear described a technology that with the help of vacuum tubes could transmit very brief electromagnetic pulses (perhaps a thousand per second) in a very focused beam of waves that measured perhaps ten or fifteen centimeters in length. This was a fraction of the length of regular radio waves, the ones that brought music and news, which were sometimes a hundred meters long.
And when American scientists attempted to create sets that could emit shorter waves of thirty or forty centimeters, they discovered that their vacuum tubes lacked the power to send out a strong enough signal. “The big problem in radar is to generate enough power to get a detectable echo from a distant point,” Time magazine explained. “Of the total energy sent out in a radar beam scanning the skies, only a tiny fraction hits the target (e.g., a plane), and a much tinier echo gets back to the receiver.
The magnetron whirled electrons inside its six or eight circular internal cavities to produce short waves of ten centimeters and transmissions of great power.
Engineers at the Labs knew that the gulf between an invention and a mass-produced product could in some cases be extraordinary, even insurmountable.
Instead of using scientific research for development so that he could then make a device, Fisk was reverse-engineering—analyzing an existing device so he could work out a research plan he would then use for development.
Fisk carried around with him a notebook he filled with sketches and ideas.
He was fond of putting his colleagues on mailing lists of doctors peddling dubious tonics.
the magnetron workshop in the old biscuit factory, Fisk sometimes wore a striped train engineer’s cap and, on occasion, striped overalls to meetings. “After all, we’re engineers,” he would say.
“When you don’t know what to do,” he would say, “do something.”
The low point for Fisk’s team was the day after Pearl Harbor, as the men sat among stacks of nonworking magnetrons (they had poor vacuum seals, apparently) and listened to the grim news in the Pacific.
team passed its finished work on to Western Electric, which ultimately manufactured more than half of the radar sets used in World War II.
Essentially a small think tank, the ASWORG group was staffed by statisticians and physicists and even a chess grandmaster. Together, they used sophisticated probability calculations to solve military problems.
With the help of an IBM data processing system, the team assumed record-keeping duties for the entire U.S. antisubmarine effort. They brought in a computer expert and several insurance actuaries to analyze data on “hits” and “misses.”
As his Washington schedule became increasingly demanding, in fact, Shockley moved to the capital, eventually taking a room at the University Club and coming home by train on occasional weekends to see his family in Madison, New Jersey.
His new habit was to try and organize a life that was so absurdly busy it couldn’t possibly be organized.
The war diaries suggest that his days were a blur of ideas and appointments and phone calls, all tucked between exercise regimens, doctor’s appointments, train trips, and lunch and dinner meetings.
We engineer for high quality service, with long life, low maintenance costs, [and a] high factor of reliability as basic elements in our philosophy of design and manufacture. But our basic technology is becoming increasingly similar to that of a high volume, annual model, highly competitive, young, vigorous and growing industry.”
Long-wave and shortwave radio researchers at those outposts needed distance from the interference of New York City (and from one another) to do proper research and measurements. Murray Hill was put in a similar context: A move to the suburbs would allow the physics, chemistry, and acoustics staff to conduct research in a location unaffected by the dirt, noise, vibrations, and general disturbances of New York City.
In his memo, Buckley could have added another reason for the move, but it would have been unnecessary: The new site was close to his home and Jewett’s. Buckley lived a few minutes away in the town of Maplewood; Jewett was in Short Hills, as were Kelly and Davisson. Shockley lived in nearby Madison as well. The executives were building a new laboratory in their own backyard.
“On the contrary, all buildings have been connected so as to avoid fixed geographical delineation between departments and to encourage free interchange and close contact among them.”
