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

by Jon Gertner

Karl Darrow, another former student of Millikan’s, had a gift for summarizing what he called “contemporary advances” in science, such as the newest model of the structure of the atom.

Quantum mechanics, as it was beginning to be called, was a science of deep surprises,

where theory had largely outpaced the proof of experimentation.

Indeed, the Bell Labs experimentalist Walter Brattain, the physicist son of a flour miller, was taking a summer course at Michigan when he heard Sommerfeld talk about atomic structure.

In the 1920s, a one-hour colloquium was set up at 5 p.m. on Mondays so that outside scholars like Robert Millikan and Enrico Fermi or inside scholars like Davisson, Darrow, and Shockley—though only twenty-seven years old at the time—could lecture members of the Bell Labs technical staff on recent scientific developments.

Usually the recruits enrolled in a class taught on the Columbia campus by a professor named Isidor Isaac (I. I.) Rabi, who was destined for a Nobel Prize.

Oliver Buckley, the Labs vice president, told his new employees, “Our job, essentially, is to devise and develop facilities which will enable two human beings anywhere in the world to talk to each other as clearly

as if they were face to face and to do this economically as well as efficiently.”

scientists like Jewett, Buckley, and Kelly, that the growth of the system produced an unceasing stream of operational problems meant it had an unceasing need for inventive solutions.

Kelly would maintain—sometimes under oath, in front of a state or federal utility commission—that Bell Labs’ purpose was to give AT&T and its regional operating companies “the best and most complete telephone service at the lowest possible cost.”

Times when asked to testify due to the ongoing development of the telephone monopoly. This indication advances the understanding that the goal was to provide a unanimous service to the citizens that was of quality and affordability. Bells labs and Western were to show the goal was not for the c-suite executives to gain wealth.

The Labs management made an effort to isolate its scientists from the gritty day-to-day political concerns of the business.

and it was the primary job of people like Mervin Kelly to keep the business robust—so did the Labs.

The scientists and engineers at Bell Labs inhabited what one researcher there would aptly describe, much later, as “a problem-rich environment.”

The pace of development, accompanied with the maintenance required on existing technology became ever increasing. Due to this there was never a time that work was not available.

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 more perplexing transmission problems.

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.

Implementation of quality metrics which could side in a structured development process and ensure quality metrics.

Indeed, the system demanded so much improvement, so much in the way of new products, so much insurance of durability, that new methods had to be created to guarantee there was improvement and durability amid all the novelty.

Walter Shewhart invented a statistical management technique for manufacturing that was soon known, more colloquially, as “quality control.”

Donald Quarles, who was in charge of the Chester plant, wrote a long treatise entitled “Motion of Telephone Wires in the Wind.”

His men made rigorous, multiyear tests on the proper spans (how far should the poles be spaced apart?), proper lashing (how tight should the wires be tied together?), proper vertical spacing between horizontal strings of wires (company practice suggested twelve inches, but engineers discovered eight inches could be enough to prevent abrasion).

Bell Labs managers set up an extraordinary supply chain so they could get the perfect quartz, so they could make the perfect quartz filters, so they could try to perfect the system that, by its very nature, could never be perfected.

In a system that required supreme durability and quality, there were, in other words, two crucial elements that had neither: switching relays and vacuum tubes.

Shockley considered Kelly’s lecture as the moment when a particular idea freed his ambition, and in many respects all modern technology, from its moorings.

Inclusion of the upbringing of Shockley indicated that he often exhibited extreme outbursts. These outbursts left Shockley inconsolable and often lead to outlasting. Provided this - his maturity indicated that this behavior was only present during his adolescence

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.

incidents that created a distraction from the seriousness of institutional life while turning attention back on Shockley.

Dean Wooldridge, one of Kelly’s young recruits who also attended Caltech, would later recall. “You could use any books that you wanted to. The procedure was for the professor to come in and write down the questions on the board, and Zwicky always had five problems, and then he would leave the room and come back at the end of the hour.”

In the summer of 1932, he and an acquaintance, Fred Seitz, drove from California in Shockley’s 1929 DeSoto Roadster.

But MIT nevertheless turned out to be a good experience for Shockley. It gave him a strong background in quantum mechanics and introduced him to two friends who would prove crucial to his later career: Jim Fisk, a classmate, and Philip Morse, a professor.

In Kelly’s research department on West Street, Shockley found he could go mostly where his curiosity led him, which was often to solid-state physics.

The notebooks were proof for gaining a patent.

These notebooks were instrumental in Kelly’s development to ensure patents were given the appropriate allocation to the inventor.

At some point in late 1939, Shockley had settled on an idea for how to make an electronic amplifier—much like the old repeater tube that Harold Arnold had improved—but this time out of solid materials.

Shockley recalled later that his “first notebook entry on what might have been a working [solid-state amplifier] was as I recall late 1939.”

so named because they are neither good conductors of electricity (like copper) nor good insulators of electricity (like glass), but somewhere in between—might be an ideal solid replacement for tubes.

On the other hand, Walter Brattain, his colleague at West Street, was about as good an experimentalist as could be found at Bell Labs.

In the early winter months of 1940, Brattain built a couple of units to Shockley’s specifications. “It was tested and the result was nil,” he recalled. “I mean, there was no evidence of anything.”20