The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (21 page)

“I wish you could come east some time so I could show you the beautiful new laboratories we have here at Murray Hill, and some of the many new scientific developments in progress,” Shannon wrote to Irene Angus, a beloved high school science teacher of his, just after the
Time
story appeared in 1952. “Probably the most important is work on the transistor, the small germanium device which competes with the vacuum tube. I consider it very likely the most important invention of the last fifty years. As soon as the final manufacturing ‘bugs’ are out and large scale production starts, electronic devices that we only dream about today will become realities.” Shannon told his teacher that the electronic mouse
Time
described was “a demonstration device to make vivid the ability of a machine to solve, by trial and error, a problem, and remember the solution.” His fondest dream, he explained, was to now try and build a machine that actually thinks, learns, and communicates with humans.

He added, “I am currently trying to design a machine that will be able to repair itself.”
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B
Y THE EARLY 1950S
, Shannon’s admirers from around the world began to seek him out. They wrote to the oracle at Bell Labs to ask about computers or chess or information theory, and then tried to tease out what he was thinking and why he was thinking it. Requests also came through official channels: In London in 1950, during one of his periodic swings through Europe, Mervin Kelly wrote to Ralph Bown at Murray Hill to say that a British contingent at the Imperial College of Science and Engineering was insisting on hosting Shannon for a visit. “They hope to build a Communication Theory Conference around Shannon,” Kelly said. “His work has made a great impression here.”
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The following year, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Walter Bedell Smith, contacted Kelly for help with cryptography. “We urgently need the assistance of Dr. Claude E. Shannon of your Company who, we are informed on the best authority, is the most eminently qualified scientist in the particular field concerned.”
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Still, most of the letters to Shannon came from academics or chess enthusiasts or weekend tinkerers, schoolchildren or hobbyists wanting to know more about Theseus. On occasion Shannon would answer the letters; more often than not, he would let them languish in piles and folders in his office. He would frequently receive letters from some of the most notable scientists in the world. And these, too, would languish. David Slepian recalls that the letters would eventually get herded into a folder he had labeled “Letters I’ve procrastinated in answering for too long.” On rare occasions when Shannon did reply to someone whose original query he had pushed aside, he would begin,
I am sorry to be so slow in returning this, but….
It seemed lost on Shannon that the scientist who had declared that any message could be sent through any noisy channel with almost perfect fidelity was now himself a proven exception. Transmissions could reach Claude Shannon. But then they would fail to go any farther.

Information theory, in the meantime, was getting ready for the masses. In 1953, one of the premier science journalists of the era, Francis Bello of
Fortune
magazine, profiled Shannon along with Norbert Wiener, an MIT mathematician who was putting forward theories on the command and control of machines, a discipline closely related to Shannon’s work on information. Wiener called his work
cybernetics
. “Within the last five years a new theory has appeared that seems to bear some of the same hallmarks of greatness,” Bello wrote. “The new theory, still almost unknown to the general public, goes under either of two names: communication theory or information theory. Whether or not it will ultimately rank with the enduring great is a question now being resolved in a score of major laboratories here and abroad.”
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Bello didn’t say whether Shannon was working toward any kind of resolution, and in fact he wasn’t. At the Labs, Shannon had continued to work on various aspects of information theory—on coding, for instance—but he was increasingly drawn to computing. Often his ideas were incorporated into the machines he was building—machines that were constructed for research, for amusement, or for both. Just as he had challenged people to think of information as a word bereft of meaning, he seemed to be challenging people to see whether the things he was building had any deeper significance. Game-playing machines “may seem at first an entertaining pastime rather than a serious scientific study,” he said at the time; he noted that there was “a serious side and significant purpose to such work, and at least four or five universities and research laboratories have instituted projects along this line.”
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Shannon didn’t say, however, whether the things he was building on occasion—one was a large desk calculator, known as THROBAC, that did calculations only in roman numerals
¹³
—had any deeper purpose apart from curiosity or wit. Often they were merely responses to somewhat mundane questions:
Could it be built? How would you build it?
Shannon’s self-proclaimed “ultimate machine,” for instance, seemed a jesting commentary on the subject of the meaning of his tinkerings. It was a wooden box with a single switch. A user hit the switch to turn it on, the box top opened and a mechanical hand reached
out and turned the switch off, then the hand retreated into the box and the top closed.

In his speeches in the 1950s, Shannon seemed to make the point that he was not necessarily interested in automated machines per se. He was interested in how machines interact with other machines (as in the telephone switching system) and how they interact with human operators (as in a chess machine). In the latter instance, there was a psychological aspect that seemed curious to him: “We hope that research in the design of game playing machines will lead to insights in the manner of operation of the human brain.”
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To his colleagues at Bell Labs, who had firsthand experience of Shannon’s electronic endeavors, this rang true. Shannon’s games and machines from those years weren’t only about engaging opponents in matches where a computer was pitted against man. Sometimes they were about engaging opponents in games that depended not only on outwitting them but in subtly deceiving them. (Or making fun of them: One game of Shannon’s had a computer make sarcastic comments after each move.) Many of these were games in which the unsuspecting player would invariably lose—and thus Shannon, as the games’ creator, would win.

His friend David Slepian recalls one of Shannon’s electronic games that was peculiar on two accounts.
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First, the computer was programmed to take an absurd and arbitrary amount of time to calculate its next move, all to give its human opponent a false impression of formidable strategizing. Second, the design of the game board was done so artfully, and with such mathematical precision, that the opponent didn’t realize it was created so that the computer would have extra squares on which to move its pieces. “The person playing it from the other side couldn’t notice that one side, from one direction, was smaller,” Slepian says. Slepian played Shannon’s computer several times. He couldn’t win. No one could. And obviously that was interesting as well as pleasing to Shannon. “My characterization of his smartness is that he would have been the world’s best con man if he had taken a turn in that direction,” Slepian says.

In the early 1950s, one of the few people at the Labs whom Shannon
would actually seek out at lunchtime was David Hagelbarger, a self-described “tall, skinny kid” from Ohio who went to the University of Michigan and got a PhD under Robert Millikan at Caltech. Hagelbarger always wore a bow tie, in part because he liked to work in the Labs’ machine shop: So dressed, he wouldn’t have to worry, while working a lathe or drill press, about the safety hazard of a dangling cravat. His mechanical skills were in part what drew Shannon to him. “He would just come around about lunchtime,” Hagelbarger recalls. “He didn’t make a formal appointment.” Usually the two would talk about ideas, both serious and frivolous, some of which Hagelbarger would build for the two of them in the shop. Around 1954, Hagelbarger on his own built a machine with electromechanical relays that would guess whether a human player had chosen heads or tails on a coin. By taking into account a human player’s tendency to fall into various patterns of guessing, the machine could beat a player about 53 percent of the time, a success rate that Bob Lucky, a Bell Labs executive, later noted, “by chance alone would happen with probability less than one in 10 billion” over the course of about 10,000 trials.
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Shannon was fascinated by his friend’s machine, so he built his own—a simplified version with a smaller memory but greater calculating speed. “After considerable discussion concerning which of these two machines would win over the other we decided to put the matter to an experimental test,” Shannon recalled. The men built a third “umpire machine” to pass information between the two competing machines and keep score. Shannon recalled, “The three machines were plugged together and allowed to run for a few hours to the accompaniment of small side bets and large cheering.”

For Shannon, it was an ideal experiment, with an almost optimal range of psychological and technological combinations. Here were machines working with (and against) machines; here were men working with (and against) machines. And here were men working with (and against) each other. Even with the perspective of a half century, it is hard to say whether, or how much, the contest meant to the evolution of computing. But it certainly meant something to Shannon. His machine won, by an “outguessing” ratio of about 55 to 45. The victory thrilled him.

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N
OT ALL MACHINES HAD TO BE ELECTRONIC
or built with complicated relay circuits to earn Shannon’s devotion. By his own admission, he appreciated movement the way an aesthete appreciates beauty.

One year, Betty gave him a unicycle as a gift. Shannon quickly began riding; then he began building his own unicycles, challenging himself to see how small he could make one that could still be ridden. One evening after dinner at home in Morristown, Claude began spontaneously to juggle three balls, and his efforts soon won him some encouragement from the young kids in the apartment complex. There was no reason, as far as Shannon could see, why he shouldn’t pursue his two new interests, unicycling and juggling, at Bell Labs, too. Nor was there any reason not to pursue them
simultaneously
. When he was in the office, Shannon would take a break from work to ride his unicycle up and down the long hallways, usually at night when the building wasn’t so busy. He would nod to passersby, unless he was juggling as he rode. Then he would be lost in concentration. When he got a pogo stick, he would go up and down the hall on that, too.

Here, then, was a picture of Claude Shannon, circa 1955: a man—slender, agile, handsome, abstracted—who rarely showed up on time for work; who often played chess or fiddled with amusing machines all day; who frequently went down the halls juggling or pogoing; and who didn’t seem to care, really, what anyone thought of him or of his pursuits. He did what was interesting. He was categorized, still, as a scientist. But it seemed obvious that he had the temperament and sensibility of an artist.

I
N 1956
, Shannon was invited to spend a semester at MIT as a visiting professor. Almost immediately, he and Betty felt rejuvenated by the intellectual life of Cambridge—the plays, concerts, lectures, bookstores, libraries, and the like. “There is an active structure of university life that tends to overcome monotony and boredom,” Shannon explained. “The
new classes, the vacations, the various academic exercises add considerable variety to the life here.”
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Years before, Betty says, she had lamented the Labs’ move to the New Jersey suburbs from Manhattan: “At West Street when we went to lunch we went to the Village or a bookstore. At Murray Hill, we would go to the cafeteria and then get right back to work.” Cambridge reminded her more of the old days.

Not long after he arrived at MIT, the school offered Shannon a permanent job. Bell Labs made a counteroffer, and Shannon wrestled with this painful dilemma. In October, he wrote his supervisor at the Labs, Hendrik Bode, to say, “I have finally decided to have a go at academic life.” Like a mathematician balancing out a complex equation, he drew for Bode a dichotomy between life at Bell Labs and life in Cambridge. “With regard to personnel, I feel Bell Labs is at least equal in caliber to the general level in academic circles. In some of their specialties Bell Labs is certainly stronger.” But the intellectual range of the university—and the long summer vacations—appealed to him more. “It always seemed to me that the freedom I took [at the Labs] was something of a special favor,” he told Bode. At MIT, it seemed to him, freedom “in hours of work” would be less unusual.

At around this point in his career, Shannon was beginning to publish less. Perhaps it would have been impossible to keep up the extraordinary run he’d had in the 1940s; perhaps, too, a torrent of ideas still rushed through his mind but he was less interested, as he later conceded, in writing any of them down. “We’ve got boxes full of unfinished papers,” Betty would remark to visitors.
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Many years later Shannon would leave behind these half-written papers along with scraps of ideas and mathematical scribbles that were titled “good problems”—but with no indication as to whether he had ever found it worth his time to discover good answers.
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Family life, by the time he left Bell Labs for MIT, was in any event often taking precedence over work. He and Betty had three children. After the visiting professorship at MIT, Shannon decided to take a one-year fellowship in California, at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, before returning to Massachusetts for the next
phase of his career. Rather than flying, he bought a Volkswagen microbus and drove the family out west.
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