Vail persuaded his new board of directors that to solve these problems, the company should create a quarantined group working on “fundamental” research. Like Bush, he understood the need for separating and sheltering radical ideas—the need for a department of loonshots run by loons, free to explore the bizarre. Vail put a physicist from MIT, Frank Jewett, in charge. Over the next several years, Jewett’s group worked through the science and eventually solved the problem of the fading signals. They invented the vacuum tube: the world’s first amplifier, the forerunner of all modern electronics.
