The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

by Walter Isaacson

The tale of their teamwork is important because we don’t often focus on how central that skill is to innovation.

Finally, I was struck by how the truest creativity of the digital age came from those who were able to connect the arts and sciences.

The people who were comfortable at this humanities-technology intersection helped to create the human-machine symbiosis that is at the core of this story.

Lady Byron’s first cousin Viscount Melbourne (who had the misfortune of having been married to Lady Caroline Lamb, by then deceased) was the prime minister, and he arranged that, in Queen Victoria’s coronation list of honors, William would become the Earl of Lovelace. His wife thus became Ada, Countess of Lovelace. She is therefore properly referred to as Ada or Lady Lovelace, though she is now commonly known as Ada Lovelace.

Ada’s ability to appreciate the beauty of mathematics is a gift that eludes many people, including some who think of themselves as intellectual. She realized that math was a lovely language, one that describes the harmonies of the universe and can be poetic at times.

In the 1640s, Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician and philosopher, created a mechanical calculator to reduce the drudgery of his father’s work as a tax supervisor. It had spoked metal wheels with the digits 0 through 9 on their circumference. To add or subtract numbers, the operator used a stylus to dial a number, as if using a rotary phone, then dialed in the next number; an armature carried or borrowed a 1 when necessary. It became the first calculator to be patented and sold commercially.

Babbage’s new idea, which he conceived in 1834, was a general-purpose computer that could carry out a variety of different operations based on programming instructions given to it. It could perform one task, then be made to switch and perform another. It could even tell itself to switch tasks—or alter its “pattern of action,” as Babbage explained—based on its own interim calculations. Babbage named this proposed machine the Analytical Engine. He was one hundred years ahead of his time.

This insight would become the core concept of the digital age: any piece of content, data, or information—music, text, pictures, numbers, symbols, sounds, video—could be expressed in digital form and manipulated by machines.

Babbage got no more funding for his machines; they were never built, and he died in poverty. As for Lady Lovelace, she never published another scientific paper. Instead her life spiraled downward, and she became addicted to gambling and opiates. She had an affair with a gambling partner who then blackmailed her, forcing her to pawn her family jewels. During the final year of her life, she fought an exceedingly painful battle with uterine cancer accompanied by constant hemorrhaging. When she died in 1852, at age thirty-six, she was buried, in accordance with one of her last requests, in a country grave next to the poet father she never knew, who had died at the same age.

Drawing on the way that railway conductors punched holes in various places on a ticket in order to indicate the traits of each passenger (gender, approximate height, age, hair color), Hollerith devised punch cards with twelve rows and twenty-four columns that recorded the salient facts about each person in the census.

Using Hollerith’s tabulators, the 1890 census was completed in one year rather than eight. It was the first major use of electrical circuits to process information, and the company that Hollerith founded became in 1924, after a series of mergers and acquisitions, the International Business Machines Corporation, or IBM.

Another approach to computing was to build devices that could mimic or model a physical phenomenon and then make measurements on the analogous model to calculate the relevant results. These were known as analog computers because they worked by analogy.

Innovation occurs when ripe seeds fall on fertile ground. Instead of having a single cause, the great advances of 1937 came from a combination of capabilities, ideas, and needs that coincided in multiple places.

“Alan was slow to learn that indistinct line that separated initiative from disobedience.”3

The first problem he tackled was how to store numbers in a machine. He used the term memory to describe this feature: “At the time, I had only a cursory knowledge of the work of Babbage and so did not know he called the same concept ‘store.’ . . . I like his word, and perhaps if I had known, I would have adopted it; I like ‘memory,’ too, with its analogy to the brain.”

Einstein once said, “but intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.”

“A physicist is one who’s concerned with the truth,” he later said. “An engineer is one who’s concerned with getting the job done.”

Turing was assigned to a team working in Hut 8 that was trying to break the German Enigma code, which was generated by a portable machine with mechanical rotors and electrical circuits. It encrypted military messages by using a cipher that, after every keystroke, changed the formula for substituting letters.

Unlike most math professors, she insisted that her students be able to write well. In her probability course, she began with a lecture on one of her favorite mathematical formulasI and asked her students to write an essay about it. These she would mark for clarity of writing and style. “I’d cover [an essay] up with ink, and I would get a rebellion that they were taking a math course not an English course,” she recalled. “Then I would explain, it was no use trying to learn math unless they could communicate it with other people.”4 Throughout her life, she excelled at being able to translate scientific problems—such as those involving trajectories, fluid flows, explosions, and weather patterns—into mathematical equations and then into ordinary English. This talent helped to make her a good programmer.

“We had to learn their vocabularies in order to be able to run their problems. I could switch my vocabulary and speak highly technical for the programmers, and then tell the same things to the managers a few hours later but with a totally different vocabulary.” Innovation requires articulation.

Because of her ability to communicate precisely, Aiken assigned her to write what was to become the world’s first computer programming manual.

So he clung to the use of time-tested and dependable electromechanical relays even after it became clear to the people at Penn and Bletchley Park that vacuum tubes were the wave of the future. His Mark I could execute only about three commands per second, while the ENIAC being built at Penn would execute five thousand commands in that time.

In addition to school, he had private tutors in math and languages, and by age fifteen he had completely mastered advanced calculus.

One of von Neumann’s great strengths was his talent—questioning, listening, gently floating tentative proposals, articulating, and collating—for being an impresario of such a collaborative creative process.

In 2011 a milestone was reached: Apple and Google spent more on lawsuits and payments involving patents than they did on research and development of new products.

They hired Betty Snyder, who, under her married name, Betty Holberton, went on to become a pioneer programmer who helped develop the COBOL and Fortran languages, and Jean Jennings, who married an engineer and became Jean Jennings Bartik.

There he met the colorful genius Claude Shannon, the former MIT graduate student who wrote the seminal master’s thesis in 1937 that showed how Boolean algebra, which rendered logical propositions into equations, could be performed by electronic circuits.

Turing’s test, which he called “the imitation game,” is simple: An interrogator sends written questions to a human and a machine in another room and tries to determine from their answers which one is the human.

Turing proposed a punishment and reward system, which would cause the machine to repeat certain activities and avoid others. Eventually such a machine could develop its own conceptions about how to figure things out.

Like Xerox PARC and other corporate research satellites that followed, Bell Labs showed how sustained innovation could occur when people with a variety of talents were brought together, preferably in close physical proximity where they could have frequent meetings and serendipitous encounters.

They knew that creativity came through chance encounters. “All buildings have been connected so as to avoid fixed geographical delineation between departments and to encourage free interchange and close contact among them,”

The corridors were extremely long, more than the length of two football fields, and designed to promote random meetings among people with different talents and specialties, a strategy that Steve Jobs replicated in designing Apple’s new headquarters seventy years later.

There was initially no separate office for Bardeen, so he ensconced himself in Brattain’s lab space. It was a smart move that showed, once again, the creative energy generated by physical proximity. By sitting together, the theorist and the experimentalist could brainstorm ideas face-to-face, hour after hour.

He posed the naming question, and after just a moment Pierce came up with a suggestion. Since the device had the property of transresistance and should have a name similar to devices such as the thermistor and varistor, Pierce proposed transistor

Bell Labs was a cauldron of innovation. In addition to the transistor, it pioneered computer circuitry, laser technology, and cellular telephony.

As part of a regulated company that had a monopoly on most phone services, it was not hungry for new products, and it was legally restrained from leveraging its monopoly to enter other markets. In order to stave off public criticism and antitrust actions, it liberally licensed its patents to other companies.

Despite these promiscuous policies, one fledgling firm had trouble wrangling a license: a Dallas-based oil exploration company that had reoriented and renamed itself Texas Instruments. Its executive vice president, Pat Haggerty, who would later take over the firm, had served in the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics and become convinced that electronics were about to transform almost all aspects of life. When he heard about transistors, he decided that Texas Instruments would find a way to exploit them.

Haggerty came up with the idea of a small pocket radio. When he tried to convince RCA and other big firms that made tabletop radios to become a partner in the venture, they pointed out (rightly) that consumers were not demanding a pocket radio. But Haggerty understood the importance of spawning new markets rather than merely chasing old ones.

The Regency radio, the size of a pack of index cards, used four transistors and sold for $49.95. It was initially marketed partly as a security item, now that the Russians had the atom bomb. “In event of an enemy attack, your Regency TR-1 will become one of your most valued possessions,” the first owner’s manual declared. But it quickly became an object of consumer desire and teenage obsession. Its plastic case came, iPod-like, in four colors: black, ivory, Mandarin Red, and Cloud Gray. Within a year, 100,000 had been sold, making it one of the most popular new products in history.40

More fundamentally, the transistor radio became the first major example of a defining theme of the digital age: technology making devices personal.

People with the halo effect seem to know exactly what they’re doing and, moreover, make you want to admire them for it. They make you see the halos over their heads.

“I grew up in small town America, so we had to be self-sufficient. If something was broke you fix it yourself.”55

Some leaders are able to be willful and demanding while still inspiring loyalty. They celebrate audaciousness in a way that makes them charismatic.

The knack is to get people to follow you, even to places they may not think they can go, by motivating them to share your sense of mission.

Many transformative innovators have been similarly stubborn about pushing a new idea, but Shockley crossed the line from being visionary to being hallucinatory, turning him into a case study in bad leadership.

“The business culture that existed in this country was that you go to work for a company, and you stay with that company, and you retire with that company,”

It was a fine match. Fairchild, the owner of Fairchild Camera and Instrument, was an inventor, playboy, entrepreneur, and the largest single stockholder in IBM, which his father had cofounded.

Fairchild readily put up $1.5 million to start the new company—about twice what the eight founders had originally thought necessary—in return for an option deal. If the company turned out to be successful, he would be able to buy it outright for $3 million.

One aspect of innovation is inventing new devices; another is inventing popular ways to use these devices.

So they were perfect partners, except in one way: with their shared aversion to hierarchy and unwillingness to be bossy, neither was a decisive manager. Because of their desire to be liked, they were reluctant to be tough. They guided people but didn’t drive them. If there was a problem or, heaven forbid, a disagreement, they did not like to confront it. So they wouldn’t.