The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn

by Richard Hamming

First, I never went to the office of my vice president, W.O. Baker; we only met in passing in the halls and we usually stopped to talk for a few, very few, minutes. One time, around 1973–1974, when I met him in a hall, I said to him that when I came to Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1946 I had noticed the Laboratories were gradually passing from relay to electronic central offices, but a large number of people would not convert to oscilloscopes and the newer electronic technology, and they were moved to a different location to get them out of the way. To him they represented a serious economic loss, but to me they were a social loss, since they were disgruntled, to say the least, because they were passed by (though it was their own fault). I went on to say I had seen the same thing happen when we went from the earlier analog computers (on which Bell Telephone Laboratories had many experts because they had developed much of the technology during wwii) to the more modern digital computers—that we again left a large number of engineers behind, and again they were both an economic and a social loss. I then observed that we both knew the telephone company was going to total digital transmission about as fast as they could, and this time we would leave behind a very much larger number of disgruntled engineers. Hence, I concluded, we should do something now about the situation, such as get adequate elementary books and other training devices to ease more of them into the future a...