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Invariably, after Baker had left the conference room and wandered off to some other pressing matter he would never explain or reveal, the men would regroup and try to decipher their boss’s rhetoric.
“He used an innocent sentence,” Pollak recalls, “something like, ‘and this particular aspect is completely understood.’ And Baker didn’t say anything, he just started asking him questions. He started with one thing, and then he asked a question about his answer, and then he asked questions about his answer to that, and so on—until he just demolished the guy.
To Pollak, this was a demonstration not of Bill Baker’s cruelty but of his acumen—in this case to push his deep belief that science rests on a foundation of inquiry rather than certainty.
(Mother and son were inseparable until her death, writing each other sometimes twice a day when they were apart.)
Helen Baker began working with pathologists at Harvard and at Merck, the New Jersey–based drug company, to fashion a medical treatment to prevent the illnesses.
Baker attended college near his home in Maryland, at tiny Washington College in Chestertown, before going on to graduate school at Princeton, where he finished a PhD in chemistry in the spring of 1939.
His parents sold the turkey farm and moved to New Jersey to be near him.
Rising early, he would make notes in his journal of the weather and any unusual birds he had spotted the day before. And then, after working hard all day at the Labs, he would return home to do his chores—...
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By substituting the lead sheathing on telephone cables with a synthetic plastic created by Bell chemists, the Bell System saved “more than the total research budget of Bell Labs for the decade in which the innovation was worked out.”
As Baker later told the New Yorker, the Young Turks “came to Bell with an interest in attacking the hard, fundamental questions of science—something that not many people thought could be done in a place like this.” In those days, Baker explained, it was assumed that such studies were done at the world’s great universities.
companionable. “Both were raised as only children,” Mike Noll, who worked with them, points out. “And both had doting, intelligent mothers.”
The public Bill Baker smiled often and doused his audience in a downpour of oratory and flattery.
“You may know the Shockley saga has come full cycle in which he has been appointed the Alexander M. Poniatoff professor of engineering science at Stanford,”
The committee’s conclusions would be directed to the then five-year-old National Security Agency, a new unit within the Department of Defense charged with securing the country’s information networks and deciphering foreign intelligence.
Baker could bring innovations in communications to the government’s attention almost instantly.
“So often,” says Ian Ross, who worked in Jack Morton’s department at Bell Labs doing transistor development in the 1950s, “the original concept of what an innovation will do”—the replacement of the vacuum tube, in this case—“frequently turns out not to be the major impact.”
Thus in addition to being an amplifier, a clump of transistors could be linked together to enable a logical decision (and thereby process information). Or a clump could be linked together to help represent bits of information (and thereby remember information).
In keeping with AT&T’s agreement with the federal government, the patents for these inventions and processes were licensed to a number of other companies, not only large industrial shops like General Electric and RCA, but also two fledgling semiconductor companies known as Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor. Fairchild had been established after its principal engineers, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, had fled Bill Shockley’s unhappy company along with several other colleagues to start a company of their own.
Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild had different, better ideas. Both men, nearly simultaneously, came up with the idea of constructing all of the components in a circuit out of silicon, so that a complete circuit could exist within one piece—one chip—of semiconductor material.
Not long after, the new idea became known as the integrated circuit.
But in just a few years’ time, the integrated circuit would represent something new for Bell Labs: a moment when a hugely important advance in solid-state engineering, though built upon the scientific discoveries at the Labs, had occurred elsewhere.
“And all the processes—diffusion, photolithography—were developed at Bell Labs. But nobody had the foresight except Noyce and Kilby.”
The maser worked by bombarding, or “pumping,” a crystal or gas with electromagnetic energy; a resulting reaction ensued (what was called a “stimulated emission”) and a tightly focused beam of tiny, millimeter-length electromagnetic waves was released by the crystal or gas.
The shorter the wavelength and the higher the frequency, the greater the capacity to hold information.
From the perspective of a communications engineer, it is coherent—meaning it is intense and ordered and nearly all one frequency, which are important qualities for carrying information.
What’s more, the great advantage is that the “bandwidth” of such light—which is related to its capacity—“is hundreds or thousands of times greater than we now have.”
“I had invested many, many years in plasma physics. And he persuaded people like me to totally throw away their past and start in a new field.”
For decades, the Bell System had realized that it was far more cost-efficient to mix together many hundreds of conversations on an intercity copper cable—by a complex technical means, the signals could be sent together at a higher frequency and then teased apart at the receiving ends.
Fibers were, as the engineers put it, too “lossy.”
Labs upper management had bet the future on waveguides, but Kao had not.
Generally speaking, Europe’s metropolitan areas were both denser than America’s and closer to other metro areas.
They wanted something easy and inexpensive to install in heavily developed areas, not high priced, huge capacity systems to span vast distances.”
Moreover, new innovations that portended a grand future—the germanium point-contact transistor, for instance—could quickly be rendered irrelevant by a new iteration of a similar idea, such as the silicon transistor or (later still) the integrated circuit.
In truth, Baker, having spent years at the bench working on chemistry experiments, knew that science and technology weren’t a matter of assured upward progress.
That September, the Corning glass company announced that it had succeeded in creating thin glass fibers so pure that they could transmit light with very low losses for thousands of feet.
One occurred when several computer scientists at Murray Hill got together to write a revolutionary computer operating system they called Unix, which was written in a new computer language called C.
would form the backbone of modern computing—the model for the Google Android and Apple Macintosh and iPhone operating systems, for example, and the programming language for every Microsoft Windows device.
The CCD was a light-sensitive electronic sensor that used the varying responses of electrons to different amounts of light to create photographs and images of extraordinary detail.
It was an instance where a technology of legitimate promise is eclipsed by a breakthrough elsewhere—in another corporate department, at another company, at a university, wherever—that solves a particular problem better.
Rather, it would come from a company like Corning, with over a century of expertise in glass and ceramics.
In the latter, an idea that developers think will satisfy a need or want does not. It may prove useless because of its functional shortcomings, or because it’s too expensive in relation to its modest appeal, or because it arrives in the marketplace too early or too late.
By lessening the need for shopping trips or for conducting in-person business, “there will be less need for dense population centers,” as well as reduced traffic.
Many years later, a computer engineer named Robert Metcalfe would surmise that the value of a networked device increases dramatically as the number of people using the network grows. The larger the network, in other words, the higher the value of a device on that network to each user.
Rudi Kompfner, for instance, positioned a still photograph of himself in front of his set—in John Pierce’s admiring recollection, the image showed Kompfner to be remarkably attentive and invariably interested in whatever was being said—so that he could move about his office during a chat.
But to an innovator, being early is not necessarily different from being wrong.
(dozens of men attired in ties and three-piece suits, and not one woman)
These competitors were helped in the late 1960s and early 1970s by a burgeoning philosophy, now finding adherents among politicians and lawyers in Washington, D.C., that American consumers would be better served through competition rather than a tight federal control of industry.
The dilemma was whether it remained in Americans’ best interests to have a regulated phone monopoly such as AT&T—a monopoly that had “an end-to-end responsibility” for telephone service—or whether the phone giant should be dismantled in the expectation of more competition, lower costs, and perhaps an even greater rate of innovation.
With one company in effect serving the country’s phone customers, some parts of the phone business that were highly profitable, such as long-distance service, could subsidize other aspects that were less profitable, such as local calling. Profits from high-paying corporate customers, moreover, could subsidize service to residential customers. Profits from dense urban areas could subsidize expansion into sparse rural areas.
But the decree forced the company out of the computer business and insisted that it make its older patents freely available and its new patents available for a reasonable charge.
