What Hath Bell Labs Wrought? The Future
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI NEW YORK TIMES
THE IDEA FACTORY
Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
By Jon Gertner
In today’s world of Apple, Google and Facebook, the
name may not ring any bells for most readers, but for decades — from the 1920s
through the 1980s — Bell Labs, the research and development wing of AT&T,
was the most innovative scientific organization in the world. As Jon Gertner
argues in his riveting new book, “The Idea Factory,” it was where the future was
invented.
Indeed, Bell Labs was behind many of the innovations
that have come to define modern life, including the transistor (the building
block of all digital products), the laser, the silicon solar cell and the
computer operating system called Unix (which would serve as the basis for a host
of other computer languages). Bell Labs developed the first communications
satellites, the first cellular telephone systems and the first fiber-optic cable
systems.
The Bell Labs scientist Claude Elwood Shannon
effectively founded the field of information theory, which would revolutionize
thinking about communications; other Bell Labs researchers helped push the
boundaries of physics, chemistry and mathematics, while defining new industrial
processes like quality control.
In “The Idea Factory,” Mr. Gertner — an editor at Fast
Company magazine and a writer for The New York Times Magazine — not only gives
us spirited portraits of the scientists behind Bell Labs’ phenomenal success,
but he also looks at the reasons that research organization became such a fount
of innovation, laying the groundwork for the networked world we now live in.
It’s clear from this volume that the visionary
leadership of the researcher turned executive Mervin Kelly played a large role
in Bell Labs’ sense of mission and its ability to institutionalize the process
of innovation so effectively. Kelly believed that an “institute of creative
technology” needed a critical mass of talented scientists — whom he housed in a
single building, where physicists, chemists, mathematicians and engineers were
encouraged to exchange ideas — and he gave his researchers the time to pursue
their own investigations “sometimes without concrete goals, for years on end.”
That freedom, of course, was predicated on the steady
stream of revenue provided (in the years before the AT&T monopoly was broken
up in the early 1980s) by the monthly bills paid by telephone subscribers, which
allowed Bell Labs to function “much like a national laboratory.” Unlike, say,
many Silicon Valley companies today, which need to keep an eye on quarterly
reports, Bell Labs in its heyday could patiently search out what Mr. Gertner
calls “new and fundamental ideas,” while using its immense engineering staff to
“develop and perfect those ideas” — creating new products, then making them
cheaper, more efficient and more durable.
Given the evolution of the digital world we inhabit
today, Kelly’s prescience is stunning in retrospect. “He had predicted grand
vistas for the postwar electronics industry even before the transistor,” Mr.
Gertner writes. “He had also insisted that basic scientific research could
translate into astounding computer and military applications, as well as
miracles within the communications systems — ‘a telephone system of the future,’
as he had said in 1951, ‘much more like the biological systems of man’s brain
and nervous system.’ ”
Mr. Gertner’s portraits of Kelly and the cadre of
talented scientists who worked at Bell Labs are animated by a journalistic
ability to make their discoveries and inventions utterly comprehensible —
indeed, thrilling — to the lay reader. And they showcase, too, his novelistic
sense of character and intuitive understanding of the odd ways in which clashing
or compatible personalities can combine to foster intensely creative
collaborations.
Mr. Gertner deftly puts these scientists’ work in the
context of what was known at the time (and what would rapidly evolve from their
initial discoveries in the decades since), even as he describes in remarkably
lucid terms the steps by which one discovery led — sometimes by serendipity,
sometimes by dogged work — to another, as well as the process by which ideas
were turned by imaginative engineers into inventions and eventually into
products that could be mass-produced.
Most notably, there’s the team
that would win a Nobel Prize for its work on semiconductors and the
transistor: the brilliant, aggressive physicist William Shockley (later to
become infamous for his unscientific views on race), who “enjoyed finding a
hanging thread so he could unravel a problem with a swift, magical pull”; the
soft-spoken John Bardeen, who “was content to yank away steadfastly, tirelessly,
pulling on various corners of a problem until the whole thing ripped open”; and
Walter Brattain, “a skeptical and talkative experimentalist” who played
extrovert to Bardeen’s introvert.
Restlessness and curiosity were traits shared by many
of Bell Labs’ most creative staff members. Mr. Gertner describes John Robinson
Pierce, father of the communications satellite, as an “instigator” who “had too
many interests (airplanes, electronics, acoustics, telephony, psychology,
philosophy, computers, music, language, writing, art) to focus on any single
pursuit” but possessed a knack for pushing others to do their best work.
As for Shannon, the mathematician and engineer whose
information theory laid the groundwork for telecommunications and the computer
industry, he burned off excess energy by riding his unicycle up and down the
long hallways of Bell Labs (sometimes juggling as he rode) and building
whimsical machines like a primitive chess computer and an electronic mouse that
could learn to navigate a maze, demonstrating the ability of a machine to
remember.
Many Bell Labs scientists, including Brattain, Kelly
and the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Charles
H. Townes, who helped develop the principles of the laser, grew up on farms
or in small towns, which Dr. Townes argued were the perfect “training grounds
for experimental physics.” Such childhoods, he contended, taught a person how to
“pay attention to the natural world, to work with machinery and to know how to
solve practical problems and fix things innovatively, with what is on hand.”
Mr. Gertner nimbly captures the collegial atmosphere
of Bell Labs and the mood of intellectual ferment — a blending of
entrepreneurial zeal, academic inquiry and passion to achieve things that
initially seemed technologically impossible — that suffused its New Jersey
campuses.
The very success of Bell Labs, he notes, contained the
seeds of its destruction. Not only was it producing too many ideas for a single
company to handle, but some of its innovations (like the transistor) also
altered the technological landscape so much that its core business would be
reduced to a mere part of the ever-expanding field of information and electronic
technology — a field increasingly dominated by new rivals, with which a
post-monopoly AT&T had difficulty competing.
In addition, as a Bell Labs researcher named Andrew
Odlyzko observed, the new business environment meant that “unfettered research”
was no longer a logical or necessary investment for a company, which, in Mr.
Gertner’s words, “could profit merely by pursuing an incremental strategy rather
than a game-changing discovery or invention.”
AT&T’s original mission — to create and maintain a
system of modern communications — has largely been fulfilled. And according to
Mr. Gertner, the current Bell Labs president, Jeong Kim, believes that the
future of communications may be defined by an industry yet to be created: a
business that does not simply deliver or search out information, but also
somehow manages and organizes the vast flood of data that threatens to overwhelm
our lives.
The larger idea, Mr. Gertner concludes, is that
“electronic communication is a miraculous development but it is also, in excess,
a dehumanizing force. It proves Kelly’s belief that even as new technology
solves one problem, it creates others.”
