The Idea Factory

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

Lecture on the Book:

• About 20% of the people at Bell Labs were working on military matters during its heyday in the 1950's and 1960's. The inventions of the transistor and solar cell were invented in the same laboratories on the fourth floor of the Murray Hill building.

• AT&T was a true monopoly that was vertically integrated. At the bottom was the R&D arm Bell Labs. At the end of the 1940's about 9,000 people. By the 1960's there was 15,000. By the end of its time, there were 25,000 people working of which 3,300 were PhD's. The ideas would move up to Western Electric and implement them in the larger phone system AT&T LongLines. They also had horizontal integration by owning part or whole of 23 operating companies (Pacific Bell or New York Telephone). 
• Bell Labs started in 1925 and in the early days it was on West Street in New York, and after World War II they moved to their second site in Murray Hill, New Jersey. The driver of the Murray Hill operation was Mervin Kelly who was the leader of the labs. 
• Transistors: Kelly was running the vacuum tube shop and they needed them as 101-D repeater tubes and amplifiers to get them across the country. Kelly was good at making vacuum tubes and increased the life from 1,000 hours to 80,000 hours. He complained that they broke often, they heated up too much, and soaked up too much energy. Kelly's best friend was Clinton Davisson. They were polar opposite- Kelly was high strung while Clinton was slow and quiet. When people had a problem at Bell Labs and Davisson would answer it by giving them a deeper understanding of what was happening inside. Understanding that knowledge is power. In 1937, Davisson shares an office with Shockley (Physics MIT) and Kelly gives Shockley a speech on the problems with switches which stuck in his mind. So Shockley starts working on the solid-state amplifier and the war begins, but in 1945 they regroup. In 1945, Kelly forms the Solid State group or Transistor group and makes Shockley the leader. The group was very interdisciplinary (physicists, experiments, chemists, metallurgists, and best technical experience). If it succeeds, it makes everything in Kelly's life obsolete and irrelevant. Germanium and gold points made up the first transistor forcing Shockley to create the junction transistor the next year. Begins age of miniaturization and low power electronics. 
• Solar Cells: Gerald Pearson, Cal Fuller (chemist), and Daryl Chapin. Pearson shares the lab with Brattain on the day of the invention of the transistor. Pearson and Fuller were working on a silicon power rectifier in 1953-1954, which was specially doped silicon. They were more photosensitive than anything in the scientific literature. At the time, Chapin was working on supplying power to remote repeater stations. They were wondering if silicon could be useful for that and they develop the silicon solar battery or silicon solar cell. Invention can be quick, but innovating can be exhaustive. It wasn't until communication satellites came along that cost and a use was not a problem for solar cells. 
• Fun Fact: While others were using transistors for replacements of vacuum tubes, Jay Forester from MIT was asking Bell Labs for transistors and was wondering if they could send him some so that he could use them for applications in computers.
• Bell Labs also developed C++, UNIX operating System, radio astronomy, the laser, and its scientists earned 8 Nobel Prizes. 

Main Points of the Book:

• Part 1: The Making of the Lab
• 1920's = open
• 1940's = Transistor
• 1950's = Solar cell
• 1960's = Golden Age - 15,000 workers and 1,200 PhD's
• 1970's = Cell phone
• 1980's = Demise
• Book is about the Presidents of the Lab or the "Young Turks" 
• Mervin Kelly, Jim Fisk, William Baker, William Shockley, Claude Shannon
• Thomas Edison in 1894 had the original Bell Labs at New Jersey site
• Theodore Vail, the president of AT&T in 1907, needed students to build transcontinental phone line. He was UChicago physics teacher.
• Robert Millikan who started Caltech and earned the 1923 Nobel Prize had a young student named Mervin Kelly join his lab in 1915 to work on the famous "oil drop" experiment to measure charge of an electron.
• Transcontinental Call
• Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1914 
• New York to San Francisco needed vacuum tubes, repeaters, copper wires, and loading coils.
• Structure of AT&T
• Each region had a local phone company (Pacific Bell)
• Western Electric built cables and phones
• AT&T Long Lines for long distance calls
• West street + Clinton Davisson "Davy"
• Near Greenwich, CT was the original homes of Bell Labs
• Clinton was the 1937 Nobel Prize winner for electron diffraction he was thin, tall, sickly, and very strong about the fundamentals
• Willis Graham Act of 1921
• US Government makes AT&T exempt from antitrust laws to create a "natural monopoly" 
• Vacuum Tubes
• West Street developed 100 different 101-D vacuum tubes/year
• Pumped to 1 millionth of an atm to turn AC to DC power and amplify signal
• Marvin Kelly hires William Shockley and Jim Fisk post US Depression from MIT, Woolridge and John Pierce from Caltech, and William Baker fromPrinceton
• William Shockley grew up in Palo Alto and attended MIT and Caltech where he worked on electronic amplifiers and semiconductor rectifiers
• World War II
• Radar lead to copper cylinders used for vacuum tubes and magnetrons
• SONAR which was developed by MIT and Bell Labs "Rad Lab" with Jim Fisk
• Nuclear bomb
• Future of Bell Labs (post-war) would be focused on TV and radio electronics
• Murray Hill Facility (New Jersey)
• Marvin Kelly's interdisciplinary groups
• Staff and Oil develop the p and n-type silicon pieces 
• Shockley coined the term the "field effect"
• December 1947- Creation of the Transistor
• Walter Brattain and John Bardeen create the dual contact transistors 
• Shockley creates the junction transistor
• Pfann invents the "zone refining" process for silicon ingots on his rocking chair
• Claude Shannon
• Student of Vannevar Bush (MIT) worked on differential analyzer
• Creates Mathematical Theory of Cryptography
• Founds the field of information theory
• bits/binary/redundancy and compression
• Fun Fact: he juggled and wrote an equation on juggling while he was part of the MIT juggling club
• Chess Machines
• Claude developed the 1st computer chess machine
• Made magnet mouse that learned how to navigate a maze named "Theseus"
• Formula for Bell Labs success
• Necessity- economic need for long range telephone
• Best People- Shockley and Shannon, training program "Kelly College"
• Stable stream of money
• Market for products
• A new device -> a new problem -> new devices
• Silicon
• 1952- Morris Tannenbaum (PhD from Princeton) makes silicon transistor
• germanium -> silicon
• Cal Fuller uses diffusion to manipulate impurity in silicon thus creating better semiconductors for electronics
• Fuller + Pearson + Chapin- invent the silicon solar battery
• 1951- this led to the development of microwave relay antennas
• Empire
• November 2nd, 1956 - Shockley, Barden, and Brattain win Nobel Prize because Marvin Kelly is on Swedish Academy of Sciences
• January 24,1956- US Judicial case allows Bell Labs to be a monopoly under two conditions :

                                1.) Will not enter the computer/ consumer electronics market

                                2.) All past and future patents can be licensed

• Part 2: The Launch of the Telecommunications Industry
• Transistor
• The Horn Antenna- 1956 made by Bell Labs' Harold Friis - received signals in focused manner and removes noise/ interference
• The Traveling Wave Tube- 1943-  Oxford's Rudi Kompfner made a spiral wire around a center beam of electrons (amplified signal and capacity/bandwidth)
• The Solar Cell- 1951 - Chapin, Fuller, Pearson made to power relay towers in case that batteries to power these vacuum tube relays would die
• The MASER (later down as Laser)- Charles Townes in 1954 left Bell Labs and build the microwave amplification by stimulated emission)
• John Pierce - the "Instigator"
• grew up in Long Beach and attended Caltech for PhD
• invented many vacuum devices (electron multipliers)
• writer: in 1952 wrote an essay for Astounding Science Fiction "Don't write: telegraph" which talked about space communications
• Marvin Kelly chose not to support satellite communication, state of relations between AT&T and government
• Marvin Kelly left in 1958 and Fisk took charge of Bell Labs
• 1959- Project Echo= bounce signals off of satellite balloon of thin mylar
• practiced with moon bounces (radio signal from earth to moon)
• Beginning of military industrial complex -> Bell Labs, NASA, Jet Propulsion, and MIT Lincoln Labs for Cold War weapons
• Telstar = 1st satellite from Bell Labs Development Arm
• transmitted TV signal to France of the US flag
• Fred Koppel talks to LBJ
• Communications Satellite Act of 1962
• Created government communications COMSAt
• Prevented AT&T from joining the international satellite communications bus
• Bill Baker- the "Chemist"
• 1964- Labs develop the electronic switching station (ESS)
• this allows customers to be mobile
• Two Exciting Problems to Solve:
• Picture Phone- more capacity, Skype, mistakes of judgment
• Waveguides- more info/ small wavelength/ higher frequency mistakes of perception -> optical fibers make hollow pipes obsolete
• Head of Bell Labs research/ memorize facts about people
• Grew up in a turkey farm in Maryland, with a PhD from Princeotn
• Part of the Young Turks - Shockley, Shannon, Fisk, Pierce
• "Materials represent the grand alliance of science and engineering" - Baker
• Noted that switching from lead sheathing to polymer/plastic saves Bell $2.5 billion
• 1956- Baker committee setup by Eisenhower to break Soviet Code  and finally ways information could be hidden/ transmitted
• 1960- Baker becomes member of President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
• 1951- NSA is founded
• Bell Labs 1950-1960
• Integrated Circuit- made by TI Kilby and Noyce
• Laser- made by Maiman (h=Hughes Aircraft) based on theory of Townes
• Optical Fibers- 1966- Charles Kao (Bell) talks about possibility of glass fibers transferring light and corning glass (1970) makes the first fiber
• CCD- charged coupling device launches memory for photographs/images
• Picturephone- dies because it is too expensive and not popular
• Relations between US Government and Bell
• 1913- antitrust suit prevents Bell from buying other companies
• 1930's- FCC investigates Bells' billing practices of manufacturing arm Western Electric
• 1939- government uses Bell to develop radar and communication
• 1948- antitrust suit from Justic Department
• 1958- constant agreement on patents and computer industry
• Nov. 20, 1974- Department of Justice vs. AT&T , Bell Labs and Western Electric 
• engaging in "unlawful conspiracy"
• Jan 8, 1982- The Big Breakup: Agreement AT&T and local phone companies will split but AT&T can enter other industries
• AT&T  becomes:
• local telephone companies or "Baby Bells" (New England, Southern Bell)
• AT*T and Western Electric split in 1996
• Last 2 technologies:
• Cell phone made by Engel Frenkist and Porter in 1917
• Hexagonal shape of cell tower splits
• Logic of integrated circuits
• Electronic switching stations
• Understanding Noise
• Optical fibers become flexible
• John Pierce said "I am afraid there will be little tangible left in a later age, to remind our heirs that we are men rather than cogs in a machine."
• Steven Chu once said, "Working in this atmosphere of applied technology doesn't compromise you, but it sharpens your mind."

Listen to Jon Gertner's talk at Microsoft Research on the formation of the Silicon Valley!

Read this Nature article on how Bell Labs also had a physicist falsify data on field-effect transistors!