Following a bubble-like trajectory, executives set a goal as arbitrary as it was ambitious. In 1910, management decided AT&T would be able to offer cross-country phone calls before the 1915 World’s Fair in San Francisco. 244 AT&T’s engineers did not know how to achieve what was being asked of them. With the help of newly hired physicists, they set about doing basic research. In other words, the goal and the deadline predated the means and the risk of failure was high. Ultimately, the AT&T team discovered they could use a type of vacuum tube called a triode to amplify signals over longer
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