The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

by Jon Gertner

But in the process Kelly was learning some things about Davisson. 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. Increasingly, Kelly recalled, he and the rest of the staff went to Davy as a matter of last resort.

Davisson used to tell people he was lazy, but Kelly believed otherwise: “He worked at a slow pace but persistently.” Years later, Kelly noted that Davy might well be called “the father of basic research” at Bell Labs. It was another way of saying that early on, long before either man had gained power or fame, Kelly recognized in Davisson not only a friend and gifted scientist but a model for what might come later.

The young Bell Labs recruits had other things in common. 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.

Some years later the physicist Richard Feynman would elegantly explain that “it was discovered that things on a small scale behave nothing like things on a large scale.”

By intention, everyone would be in one another’s way. Members of the technical staff would often have both laboratories and small offices—but these might be in different corridors, therefore making it necessary to walk between the two, and all but assuring a chance encounter or two with a colleague during the commute. By the same token, the long corridor for the wing that would house many of the physics researchers was intentionally made to be seven hundred feet in length. It was so long that to look down it from one end was to see the other end disappear at a vanishing point. Traveling its length without encountering a number of acquaintances, problems, diversions, and ideas would be almost impossible. Then again, that was the point. Walking down that impossibly long tiled corridor, a scientist on his way to lunch in the Murray Hill cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.