The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (23 page)

An institute of creative technology required a stable stream of dollars. “Never underestimate the importance of money,” the physicist Phil Anderson says—and it was true.
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Thanks to the local phone companies, AT&T, and Western Electric, Bell Labs had ample and dedicated funding. Plans could thus be made for the near term as well as for the far future—five, ten, and even twenty years away.

Perhaps most important, the institute of creative technology needed markets for its products. In the case of Bell Labs, there were markets for consumers (that is, telephone subscribers) as well as for manufacturing (with Western Electric). There was no precise explanation as to why this was such an effective goad, but even for researchers in pursuit of pure scientific understanding rather than new things, it was obvious that their work, if successful, would ultimately be used. Working in an environment of applied science, as one Bell Labs researcher noted years later, “doesn’t destroy a kernel of genius—it focuses the mind.”
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Finally, something else seemed important. “A new device or a new invention,” Kelly once remarked, “stimulates and frequently demands
other new devices and inventions for its proper use.”
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Just as the invention of the telephone had led to countless developments in switching and transmission, an invention like the transistor seemed to point to even more developments in switching, transmission, and computer systems. Or to put it another way, the solution to a technological problem invariably created other problems that needed solutions. So making something truly new seemed to ensure that you would be making something else truly new before too long. The only trouble was, this rule suggested that your competitors—that is, if you weren’t a regulated monopoly like the American Telephone and Telegraph company, and you actually had competitors—could do the same.

H
E HAD ALWAYS BEEN
in a rush, ever since his Missouri childhood, but in the late 1940s and early 1950s Kelly became even busier, a blur of a man. Robert Oppenheimer and several other scientists remarked that he seemed to be working himself to death, but that at least he didn’t look quite as exhausted as he did during the war.
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His days were long. “He would read at night until 12 o’clock,” Kelly’s wife would recall.
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But in the mornings, at 5 a.m., Kelly would rise and dress and make his way down the stairs of his big Dutch colonial house and out into the backyard toward the garden. His neighborhood in Short Hills, New Jersey, was a leafy maze of streets flanked by the homes of the wealthy and the very wealthy. Kelly’s house was among the more modest—six bedrooms instead of ten, his lot comprising a single landscaped acre as opposed to neighbors who had two or three.
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It was his backyard gardens—ornate, multitiered, shrieking with color—that might be called extravagant. They were a private indulgence. Each year Kelly supervised the arrangement of tens of thousands of tulip and daffodil bulbs, some of which he ordered from Holland—“1,000 bulbs every year just to keep it going,” his wife recalled—but most of which he would store during the winter in the corners of a basement room, secreted under piles of sand and sorted according to a complex color classification system of his own devising.
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For a hobby, it was almost absurd in its meticulousness.
Then again, this was Kelly. In the yard he would turn the dirt himself, impatiently, before the gardeners arrived, working methodically in the cool near-dark.

When he was finished, he would shower and eat breakfast and dress for work.
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The uniform was almost always the same: a pinstriped double-breasted suit, white shirt, and patterned tie; his dark hair, slightly gray now, combed straight back; his round-rimmed glasses softening the severity of his face and giving him a vaguely scholarly air. Kelly worked out of two offices, one at Murray Hill and one at the old West Street building in Manhattan. His rush began on the way to work. “He had one official driver for his car, a company car,” Brock McMillan, the Bell Labs mathematician, says. “And he would beat on this guy—‘drive faster, drive faster, get going, get going.’” When Kelly once hectored the driver so intently that he hit a car pulling out of the company lot, Kelly left the wreck without pause. He walked back to the office to get another car.

“You get paid for the seven and a half hours a day you put in here,” Kelly often told new Bell Labs employees in his speech to them on their first day, “but you get your raises and promotions on what you do in the other sixteen and a half hours.”
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He seemed to live by his own advice. In 1950, Kelly was still the executive vice president of the Labs, serving as Oliver Buckley’s deputy, but it had been arranged that Kelly would succeed Buckley upon his retirement in 1951.
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Buckley had Parkinson’s disease. The fact was not publicly known.
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Ostensibly, Buckley was in charge; in truth, Kelly was. And with his 1950 speech in London, Kelly began to move from manager to statesman, an emissary of industrial science who took every opportunity to consider, in speeches to academic audiences and professional groups all over the United States, how Bell Labs’ work fit into the future of American science. His pace was grueling, and the frenetic schedule sometimes resulted in fits of distemper. “Twice he submitted his resignation to the president of AT&T, stating that important work at Bell Laboratories was not being adequately funded,” a colleague would recall. “In each case, he got the funds.”
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The constant travel and constant meetings and constant speaking engagements—and almost certainly, too, his constant chain-smoking—sometimes resulted in bouts
of utter exhaustion, requiring him to take time off and convalesce near his tulip gardens.
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But within a week or two he would come roaring back.

By 1950, too, Kelly was involved in military and government affairs to such a degree that it required half of his working hours.
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He now served as a scientific consultant to the United States Air Force and as a frequent advisor on government science commissions; in turn, he enjoyed the same level of security clearance as the head of the CIA. This was in large part a consequence of Bell Labs’ work on radar and gun control during World War II, and on the Labs’ electronics breakthroughs in the years since: The success of the work had thrust Kelly, willingly, into a shadow society of wise men—people like Frank Jewett, or Vannevar Bush—whose scientific training and large social networks allowed them to move smoothly between the elite circles of industry, academia, military intelligence, and public policy. Truman advisor William Golden visited Kelly and Oliver Buckley in 1950 and early 1951 seeking advice on who might serve as a science advisor to President Truman because Kelly and Buckley were on a short list of the elite. (“While Mervin Kelly was courageous,” Golden pointed out later, reaffirming his belief that Kelly was his first choice, “Buckley was timorous.”)
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But Kelly wasn’t interested in the job, preferring instead to move into the presidency of the Labs after Buckley’s retirement. He directed Golden to friends of his in the scientific elites: Lee DuBridge (president of Caltech), James Conant (president of Harvard), James Killian (president of MIT), and Robert Oppenheimer, now at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, who had successfully managed the Manhattan Project.
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Why was an office in the White House so unappealing to Kelly? For one thing, he was already immensely influential at the highest military and policy levels. The tightening alignment between a handful of the largest American corporations and the armed forces—“the huge industrial and military machinery of defense,” as President Dwight D. Eisenhower would call it when he left office a decade later—had already become an enormous business for AT&T, which entrusted its Bell Laboratories and manufacturing divisions at Western Electric to design and manufacture a vast array of secret equipment for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Most
of the industrial work orders related to radar and communications equipment; these were considered vital for national defense.

These contracts earned AT&T more than revenue; they gave the company strong allies within the government that the company would need as the twentieth century reached its midpoint. In 1949, Thomas Clark, Harry Truman’s attorney general, filed a complaint against AT&T alleging that it and Western Electric, the phone company’s equipment manufacturing arm, had “unlawfully restrained and monopolized trade and commerce in the manufacture, distribution, sale and installation of telephone equipment.”
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In effect, the government sought to break the bond between Ma Bell and its factories—cleaving the companies in two and then again cleaving Western Electric into three separate businesses, so that AT&T could buy phone equipment more cheaply through a competitive bidding process. Clark’s belief, shared by many in the government, was that telephone costs were being inflated by the cozy arrangement between AT&T and Western. It may well have been true, but the data and accounting records were extremely difficult to penetrate. A countervailing belief, however, little noted at the time but discussed privately among military leaders and AT&T executives—and eventually with Attorney General Clark and President Truman—was that a company that the U.S. government depended upon to help build up its military during the cold war was arguably worth far more intact than apart.
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In a private letter, Leroy Wilson, the president of AT&T, pointed out the contradiction. “We are concerned by the fact that the anti-trust suit brought by the Department of Justice last January seeks to terminate the very same Western-Electric–Bell Laboratories–Bell System relationship which gives our organization [its] unique qualifications.” The Attorney General’s office, in other words, seemed to be fighting to break up AT&T at the same time the Department of Defense was moving to capitalize on its broad expertise. If that was in fact true, then Wilson—and Kelly, too—realized they had some leverage. They could make AT&T indispensable in the affairs of government. Kelly had long been willing to do anything necessary to preserve Bell Labs’ existing structure, size, and influence. If he had to work even harder to do so, he would.

T
HE
C
HIEF
, the passenger train that rumbled southwest from Chicago through Kansas City and on to the Pacific, brought Mervin Kelly and Jim Fisk to Albuquerque, New Mexico, on March 6, 1949. The trip had been Fisk’s idea.
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On leave from Bell Labs, the physicist Kelly had hired in 1939 and had put in charge of the radar magnetron work at Bell Labs was doing a stint as the research director for the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington. Earlier that year, Fisk had been informed that the University of California, which had been running the government’s Sandia Labs in New Mexico, wanted to stop managing the facility.
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Sandia was Los Alamos’ less glamorous sister. Whereas Los Alamos’ famous scientists were charged with researching and developing the nuclear components inside America’s missiles and bombs, Sandia’s fifteen hundred employees built all the non-nuclear components of those weapons. Sandia’s scientists and engineers tested new ballistic shapes and designed sophisticated fuses for detonation. They also trained the troops who would ultimately handle the weapons.

Managing Sandia required extraordinary expertise in research, development, and manufacturing. And some in the military felt the job was beyond the capabilities of any university. Fisk had proposed a solution to his superiors at the Atomic Energy Commission: If the University of California could no longer manage the lab, some other organization would have to take charge. Fisk suggested that Mervin Kelly would be an excellent person to assess Sandia and advise the commission about possible replacements for Cal. Kelly could visit the lab, gather information, and then make an informal report to the AEC about how to improve its operations and administration.

The commission readily accepted Fisk’s suggestion and Kelly traveled twice to Sandia that year. Hour after hour, he sat in meetings, eyes closed, as was his habit, listening to managers explain their work. When he made a lengthy report in early May 1949, Kelly unsurprisingly concluded that the AEC should place Sandia under the management of “an industrial contractor with experience, professional know-how, and a sense of public
responsibility.”
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By the middle of the month, the AEC had determined that Bell Labs and AT&T would be the best contractor for Sandia. “This operation, which is a vital segment of the atomic weapons program, is of extreme importance and urgency in the national defense, and should have the best possible technical direction,” President Truman wrote to AT&T president Leroy Wilson.
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He urged Wilson and Bell Labs president Oliver Buckley to take on the job (Kelly had apparently recused himself from the negotiations, owing to the fact that he had been hired as an impartial assessor). In early June, following a meeting at Wilson’s home with AEC chairman David Lilienthal, the two parties sealed the deal, on the condition that AT&T would not profit from the management of Sandia. In July, Lilienthal wrote Kelly an effusive note of thanks for his work. “It was a splendid job,” he noted, “and a real contribution to the atomic energy program.”
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Despite its distance from New Jersey, Sandia soon became a frequent stopover for Bell Labs managers moving up through the executive ranks—a place where they could be rotated in or out, like a pitcher on a minor league baseball team, depending on the needs of the parent organization. With its focus on the development of missiles and bombs, Sandia fit into the Labs’ expanding portfolio of military work. In the final days of World War II, for instance, the Army’s Ordnance Department, along with the Air Force, had selected the Labs “to determine the practicability of developing a ground based guided-missile system.” The results—a concerted effort of the Army, Air Force, Bell Labs, Western Electric, and the Douglas Aircraft Company—were code-named Nike, after the Greek goddess of victory, and put into operation in 1953. “Essentially a defensive weapon,” the
Bell Laboratories Record
explained, “the Nike system will provide defended areas with a far greater degree of anti-aircraft protection than was ever before possible with the more limited ranges and altitudes of conventional anti-aircraft guns.”
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Nike “systems,” essentially clusters of missiles poised for flight, were sited on the outskirts of major U.S. cities and near strategic locations, including Bell Labs’ Murray Hill offices. The first missiles were known as Nike-Ajax; each was twenty feet long and about a foot in diameter, with a serration
of sharp fins surrounding the white tube containing the propellant fuel and explosives. Ajax missiles were not nuclear. But the next iteration of larger Nike rockets—the Nike-Hercules, which in the late 1950s offered “increased lethality”—were. Later still came the even more sophisticated Nike-Zeus.