The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (15 page)

By mid-June 1948, the patent application on the transistor had been filed and a press conference on the new device had been scheduled for the end of the month at the large auditorium in Bell Labs’ West Street offices in Manhattan. Crafting the news release had been something of a nightmare, with at least a half dozen cooks (Shockley, Bardeen, Bown, and Brattain included) adding to the broth. “It has been rewritten at least N times, where N > 6,” Shockley noted.
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The transistor was not much larger than the tip of a shoelace, the news release said, and more than a hundred of them could fit easily in an outstretched hand. Yet it was quite complicated. The explanation of the device took up seven typed pages.
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Bardeen and Brattain’s letter to the
Physical Review
that announced their breakthrough, meanwhile, was impenetrable to all but an accomplished solid-state physicist. If anyone really wanted to know what the scientists had accomplished over the past few years, they would need a world-class understanding of metallurgy, quantum physics, and electrical engineering.
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W
HEN HE WAS A TEENAGER
in the 1920s, William Shockley took a high school mathematics exam that haunted him for an entire weekend. “It reflects a personality aspect which may be common to a number of persons who work hard at technical endeavors,” he later explained. It wasn’t that Shockley felt he had failed his math test. “I was especially concerned
about my relative grade to that of another student—one who was not at all remarkable,” he said. “All weekend I worried over whether I had done better than he.”
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As Bardeen and Brattain closed in on the transistor in the autumn of 1947, Shockley, their supervisor, had become increasingly interested in their work, sometimes offering suggestions and periodically receiving updates from the men. When the breakthrough came in December, Shockley would admit to a complex set of reactions—“I must confess to a little disappointment that I hadn’t been more personally involved in it,” he later admitted.
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On another occasion he conceded, “My elation with the group’s success was balanced by not being one of the inventors.”
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Perhaps far more than Bardeen and Brattain, Shockley understood the implications of the new device; he had been dreaming of its possible existence since Kelly had visited his office, so many years before, to talk about his idea of an electronic switch.

Walter Brattain would later recall that shortly after the December 23 transistor demonstration for the Bell Labs executives, Shockley called both Bardeen and Brattain into his office, separately, to say, “Sometimes the people who do the work don’t get the credit for it.”
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In Brattain’s telling, Shockley seemed confident that he himself could write a patent that covered his field effect idea and that would overshadow subsequent work done by his two colleagues. This would prove to be impossible for a number of reasons. First, many people at the Labs already knew that Bardeen and Brattain had built the first transistor together, and their lab notebooks could verify it. But in a patent search on Shockley’s field effect, it also appeared that an inventor named Julius Lillienfield had come upon a similar idea two decades before. There was little evidence that Lillienfield had made a working model of his device, or that the device outlined in his patent would work. What’s more, there was no likelihood that he had any theoretical understanding of semiconductors, let alone a knowledge of the movements of holes and electrons at the subatomic level. Still, legally speaking, Lillienfield had been there first. And—though they used a different approach—so had Bardeen and Brattain.

Shockley’s Christmas was a holiday of torment. He left New Jersey
at the end of the week for a conference in the Midwest. “On New Year’s Eve I was alone in Chicago between two meetings that came so close together that a return to New Jersey seemed impractical,” he later explained. In fact his mind was afire. Alone in his hotel room, he went to work. “In 2 days I wrote enough to fill a bit more than 19 notebook pages. My notebook was at the Laboratories and I used a pad of paper and mailed the disclosures back to my co-supervisor, S.O. Morgan, who witnessed them and asked Bardeen to do the same. Later these pages were rubber-cemented into my notebook.”
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For the next three weeks, Shockley kept up a furious pace. By late January he had come up with a theory, and a design, for a transistor that both looked and functioned differently than Bardeen and Brattain’s. Theirs had been described as the point-contact transistor; Shockley’s was to be known as the junction transistor. Rather than two metal points jammed into a sliver of semiconducting material, it was a solid block made from two pieces of n-type germanium and a nearly microscopic slice of p-type germanium in between. The metaphor of a sandwich wasn’t far off. Except the sandwich was about the size of a kernel of corn.
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In some respects, Shockley’s idea was illicit. At Bell Labs, there were boundaries, much like surface states, that members of the technical staff were not meant to pass through. Eccentricity—not wearing socks, say, or using company time to build gadgets that had perhaps not even a glancing relationship to the phone business—could be forgiven. Other behaviors could not. MTSs were never to seduce the secretaries. They were not to work with their doors closed. They were not to refuse help to a colleague, regardless of his rank or department, when it might be necessary. And perhaps most important, the supervisor was authorized to guide, not interfere with, the people he (or she) managed. “The management style was, and remained for many years, to use the lightest touch and absolutely never to compete with underlings,” recalls Phil Anderson, a physicist who joined Bell Labs soon after the transistor was developed. “This was the taboo that Shockley transgressed, and was never forgiven.”
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To Addison White, another manager who years before had been a privileged member of Shockley’s solid-state study group, the forces that drove
Shockley to compete were clear to those who knew him. White said, “I’ve never encountered a more brilliant man, I think. And he just wasn’t going to sacrifice that in the interests of the members of his group.”
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Shockley kept the design a secret for another month. At a conference with the solid-state group in mid-February, however, a colleague of Shockley’s named John Shive stood up to inform the group about his recent findings that related closely to some of Shockley’s new ideas for the junction transistor. Knowing the alertness of the group—Bardeen and Brattain were in the audience—Shockley sensed that within a few minutes someone would make the leap to propose something akin to the theoretical construct, known as “minority carrier injection,” that he had developed on his own the month before. “From that point on,” he noted, “the concept of using p-n junctions rather than metal point contacts would have been but a small step and the junction transistor would have been invented.”
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So Shockley made the leap, literally. He jumped from his seat and proceeded to give a presentation to the group on his newest theories and design. “I felt I did not want to be left behind on this one,” he recalled. Many of the men were dumbstruck. The solid-state group that Shockley led had been built upon the principles of an open exchange of ideas, and Shockley had apparently ignored those principles. At the same time, it was hard not to be awed—the men were witnessing another breakthrough on the level of Bardeen and Brattain’s earlier work. Did it matter whether it was the product of Shockley’s brilliance and effort, or his cunning and bruised ego?

By Shockley’s calculations, the junction transistor was almost certainly superior to the point-contact transistor as a practical device. But there was a problem. Unlike the point-contact transistor, the junction transistor could not actually be built by anyone at the labs. It was still theoretical. And it looked to be exceedingly challenging for the metallurgists to create the materials—that tiny sandwich of n-p-n germanium. An irony, at least for that moment, was that Shockley’s phantom invention (the junction transistor) had improved upon another invention (the point-contact transistor) that wasn’t useful in any meaningful sense of
the word. Lest anyone forget, the point-contact transistor was a device that had never been manufactured, had never been sold, and was still so secret that perhaps only a few dozen people in the world knew it existed.

T
HE UNVEILING
of the two most important technologies of the twentieth century—the atomic bomb and the transistor—occurred almost exactly three years apart. The nuclear test blast at the Trinity site in the New Mexico desert took place at 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945. It was in many respects a demonstration of the power, and the terror, of new materials; a baseball-sized chunk of purified metal—about eleven pounds of newly discovered plutonium—could level a midsized city.
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The transistor, too, was a demonstration of the power of new materials—less than a gram of germanium containing a slight impurity—but its significance was far less obvious. Its unveiling, a modest affair in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village on June 30, 1948, offered only the most obvious suggestions—the new device was a replacement for the vacuum tube. It was smaller, more rugged, and used less power. The analogy most often used was that the transistor was like a faucet. Rather than water, it could either switch electricity on or off or make it pour out in a torrent. A small turn on the handle, so to speak, could produce big effects.

Ralph Bown, the head of research at Bell Labs who had demanded that Bardeen and Brattain make their transistor circuit oscillate before he would concede its legitimacy, led the conference. Shockley—gifted with a deep, sonorous voice that exuded confidence and calm amusement—handled most of the questions.

Each member of the audience was given a pair of headphones. Bown, tall and elegantly dressed, stood alongside a huge, human-sized replica of a point-contact transistor. The demonstration had three highlights: First, the attendees experienced the amplification properties of the transistor as Bown’s voice was switched (and boosted) through its circuitry. Next, the audience heard a radio broadcast from a set constructed with transistors rather than vacuum tubes. Finally, a transistor was used to generate a frequency tone, thus showing it could oscillate. Bown and his
colleagues had spent the past six months considering the potential applications of the transistor. They had no intention of soft-pedaling their device. As the transistor historians Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson would later recount it, Bown told the audience that this “little bitty” thing could do “just about everything a vacuum tube can do, and some unique things which a vacuum tube cannot do.”
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Most newspapers couldn’t discern the value of the tiny device. The
New York Times,
in a famous lapse of editorial judgment, relegated a report on the West Street demonstration to a four-paragraph mention on page 46, in a column called “The News of Radio.” Oliver Buckley, the Bell Labs president, chose to keep a copy of the
Times
story, either out of amusement or chagrin, in his personal files until his death. Yet there is little evidence that the Bell scientists were daunted by a perceived lack of excitement. Any apathy on the public’s part was balanced by enthusiasm within the electronics industry, whose executives were given a special presentation soon after the public announcement. Earnest, chummy, beseeching letters—to Bown; to Kelly; to Buckley; to Shockley; to Bardeen; to Brattain; to anyone, in fact, with any connection to the solid-state work—began arriving at Bell Labs from executives in all corners of the electronics business, begging for samples of the new device. RCA wanted one, and so did Motorola, and so did Westinghouse and a host of other radio and television manufacturers. Moreover, the announcement had piqued the interest of the academy, leading professors at Harvard, Purdue, Stanford, Cornell, and a half dozen other schools to request a sample of the device for their own laboratories. “It appears that Transistors might have important uses in electronic computer circuits,” Jay Forrester, the associate director of MIT’s electrical engineering department, wrote to Bown in July 1948. “In view of this fact, we would like to obtain some sample transistors when they become available in order to investigate their possible applications to high-speed digital computing apparatus.”
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Whether Bown, Shockley, or Kelly had considered how the transistor might be used as a logic circuit in a computer—vacuum tubes were already being used, with mixed success, due to their tremendous energy requirements and fragility—the Forrester letter
surely validated such applications. “We are interested that you think the transistor may be useful in connection with computing apparatus,” Bown quickly responded. The men at the Labs, he added, would be happy to hear from the MIT scientists about how the device could be used or improved for computing purposes.
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It was still far too early for the press or the public to visualize how the invention of the transistor might pay off in practical terms. In time, however, the Bell scientists were confident that the public would figure out what the academics, electronics executives, and the Bell scientists already knew. On the day after the unveiling, Buckley had taken out a sheet of stationery to scribble a note to Bell Labs chairman Frank Jewett, now in declining health, who was vacationing at his summer home on Martha’s Vineyard. He attached the long news release on the transistor. “The attached press release explains my recent hint of things to come,” Buckley wrote his friend and former boss, who had apparently not been informed about the developments. “This looks very important to us.”

T
HE LANGUAGE
that affixes to new technologies is almost always confusing and inexact. If an idea is the most elemental unit of human progress, what comes after that? For instance, had Brattain and Bardeen made a discovery, or an invention? The distinctions could be real enough. A discovery often describes a scientific observation of the natural world—the first observation of Jupiter’s moons, for example, or the isolation of a bacteria that causes a deadly plague. Also, a discovery could represent a huge scientific achievement but an economic dead end. In the early 1930s, for instance, at the Bell Labs radio facility in Holmdel, New Jersey, a young engineer named Karl Jansky created a movable antenna to research atmospheric noise. With this antenna, he observed a steady hiss emanating from the Milky Way. In this moment, Jansky had essentially started the field of radio astronomy—a discovery that paid a lasting dividend to his and Bell Labs’ renown. On the other hand, it never led to any kind of profitable telecommunications invention or device.
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