The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (28 page)

Pierce wasn’t drawn to physics, though. At first he thought he might try chemistry, a science of unforgiving precision, which proved a misstep for a young man with a fascination for electronics and a hummingbird-like tendency to flutter from idea to idea. He was befuddled by his introductory chemistry lectures; even worse, his experiments—“I dropped things, spilled things,” he recalled—were disasters.
⁹
Aeronautical engineering seemed a sensible next step, especially for a young man who had built and flown gliders, and had even written a book on the subject, but he was soon bored with that subject, too, claiming later that his instructors made him draw pictures of rivets over and over again. That left electrical engineering, and here Pierce finally felt at home. He quickly demonstrated his expertise in electronics classes and was soon asked to help teach; a professor who had a side job as a legal witness even hired Pierce to dissect radio circuits for him in an effort to prove patent violations.
¹⁰
Years later, Pierce would avoid giving reporters, as well as readers of his own voluminous writings, the sense that he was calculating or unusually accomplished, sometimes offering the impression instead that his life at Caltech, and the successes that followed, were mostly serendipitous. Though he was eventually the subject of a long profile in the
New Yorker
, Pierce was inclined to describe his career as a procession of fortunate events rather than the product of his own restless intellect.
¹¹
He described himself, depending on the circumstances, as either lucky, lazy, stumbling, or shambling. And sometimes he purported to be all of those things at once.

No one made that mistake at Caltech. “Even then, everyone knew who John Pierce was,” Chuck Elmendorf, Pierce’s friend at Caltech, recalls.
In part it was Pierce’s eccentricity. But mainly it was his dazzling quickness of mind. As Elmendorf, an electrical engineer, recalls, “Everyone
knew
John Pierce was going to be a great man.”
¹²

E
LMENDORF ARRIVED
in New York City during a sweltering week in the summer of 1936. He had been hired to work at Bell Labs’ West Street building in Greenwich Village, and after finishing his master’s degree at Caltech in engineering, he had driven with a friend from California to Chicago. In Chicago he had hopped on a train to New York. “It was one of the hottest days in New York history,” he recalls, pegging the exact date of his arrival in Manhattan as July 9, 1936. “I went down to West Street and met with a guy named Ernie Waters. Ernie was the personnel manager, and he gave me 275 dollars.” The money, a substantial amount in a country just emerging from the Great Depression, was ostensibly meant to reimburse him for his first-class train ticket.

“Ernie, I didn’t travel first class on the train,” Elmendorf admitted.

Waters looked up at Elmendorf. “If we thought you’d have gone first class,” he replied, “then we wouldn’t have hired you.”

Waters suggested to Elmendorf that he go to the YMCA on 34th Street, where rooms cost fifty cents a night, and Elmendorf immediately took his advice. A few weeks later he moved up to a different YMCA, “a nicer one,” as he recalls, that was located around 56th Street. One day in August at his new digs, he bumped into John Pierce, who had also been hired in the Labs’ research department. The two men hadn’t seen each other in several months. After finishing his PhD at Caltech, Pierce had taken some time before his arrival in New York to travel alone, on a trip financed by his parents, through Europe. Mostly he had bicycled around England, but he had also taken a quick tour of the Continent. “I went to Paris, and to the north of Italy, to Viareggio,” he later recalled. “I went to Munich and went to the opera.” It was three years after Hitler’s ascension to power, but Pierce tended to be oblivious to things that didn’t hold his interest. He conceded later he was almost completely unaware of Europe’s
political crosscurrents, save for the fact that in one open-air café, after some Italians drank a toast to Roosevelt in honor of the American visitor, he returned the favor by toasting Mussolini. “That was the right answer, apparently,” he said later.
¹³
Often when Pierce didn’t know what to do, he made a good choice anyway.

Pierce and Elmendorf decided to move out of the Y and find a place together. As Elmendorf recalls, they rented a one-room apartment on the first floor of the London Terrace apartment complex at 23rd Street and 9th Avenue. The apartment had one Murphy bed. “As a PhD John was getting $33 a week,” Elmendorf recalls. “As a master’s they were paying me $29 a week. So he got the bed.” At the apartment, Elmendorf did the cooking and Pierce did the washing up. The two men were within walking distance of work—fifteen minutes south, at a brisk pace, was all it took.

At Bell Labs, the two men were not on an equal footing. Elmendorf was placed in what he calls “the salt mines,” a lowly department where he was tasked with designing equipment for the phone system, a terrible letdown for an engineer who aspired to research complex circuits. Years later, after a career in which he had worked his way up to a high executive position with AT&T, Elmendorf discovered that his first job was due partly to his friend Pierce, who when asked about his colleague from Caltech had informed the Bell Labs management—not with malice but in keeping with his habit of saying whatever might be on his mind—that Elmendorf “wasn’t that smart.”
¹⁴
In relation to Pierce, of course, few people were. Pierce himself was assigned to work in the research department on vacuum tubes, where he was given free rein to pursue any ideas he might have. He considered the experience equivalent to being cast adrift without a compass. “Too much freedom is horrible,” he would say in describing his first few months at the Labs. Indeed, he eventually came to believe that freedom in research was similar to food; it was necessary, but moderation was usually preferable to excess. It was almost certainly true, however, that Pierce’s freedom was a reflection of his supervisors’ belief in the recruit.

Soon after his arrival at the Labs, Pierce met Bill Shockley—“a new
employee who was making the rounds of various parts of the research department,” he recalled.
¹⁵
Shockley patiently explained the physics of vacuum tubes to Pierce, and the men quickly became friends. And soon afterward, Pierce began to find his way. He and Shockley worked together researching various devices and writing several papers during the late 1930s. But Pierce began to show a knack for inventing things on his own, too, putting together a variety of new types of highly complex and specialized vacuum devices—electron multipliers, they were called, and later reflex klystrons, which were useful for radar—that the Labs quickly patented.

Pierce always gravitated toward the smartest people in the building, just as he had gravitated toward his mother rather than his father. It was also true that the smartest people gravitated toward him. Surprisingly, he wasn’t especially intimidated by the likes of Shockley. And Pierce’s awkward manner and social peculiarities did not seem to preclude him from fitting in; on the contrary, he developed a wide circle of devoted admirers, charmed by his wit and his lively mind. Not long after he’d started at West Street, the young engineer was stopped in the hallway at Bell Labs by an unfamiliar manager—a man who seemed every bit as brusque as Pierce.

“What are you doing here?” the man asked him.

Pierce looked at him with suspicion. “Who are you?” he demanded in response.

“I’m Mervin Kelly,” the man said.

It was one of Pierce’s favorite stories, one that demonstrated both his obliviousness and his audacity. In time, Pierce would consider Mervin Kelly his great hero—one of two he had at Bell Labs. A close colleague of both men would later marvel that Kelly and Pierce didn’t obliterate each other with their matching energies and enthusiasms.
¹⁶
But in many ways their mutual admiration made sense. Those who worked for Pierce, just as those who worked for Kelly, were often frightened of him—frightened of the way he raked through their ideas, ruthlessly and without regard to their feelings, in an attempt to separate the good from the bad. “You took your life in your hands every time you went into his office,” recalls one
of his former employees. Pierce, like Kelly, was a man of action, a man of strong opinions, and above all things a pragmatist in regard to science and innovation. Pierce, like Kelly, ran up and down staircases. He needed to get where he was going as fast as possible.

Pierce’s other hero at Bell Labs was none of those things. He was a dreamer as well as an unrepentant futurist; and he was someone with no aspirations whatsoever to manage people or wield power. That would be Pierce’s good friend in the mathematics department, Claude Shannon.

A
N INSTIGATOR
is different from a genius, but just as uncommon. An instigator is different, too, from the most skillful manager, someone able to wrest excellence out of people who might otherwise fall short. Somewhere between Shannon (the genius) and Kelly (the manager), Pierce steered a course for himself at Bell Labs as an instigator.

“I tried to get other people to do things, I’m lazy,” Pierce once told an interviewer.

“Do you think this has helped your career?” the interviewer asked.

“Well, it was my career,” Pierce replied.
¹⁷

It was probably more accurate to say that Pierce had too many ideas to actually pursue on his own, and too many interests—airplanes, electronics, acoustics, telephony, psychology, philosophy, computers, music, language, writing, art—to focus on any single pursuit. Also, as he readily admitted, organization was not his strong suit. “John is not the typical inventor,” Pierce’s good friend Harald Friis, the director of the Labs’ microwave research lab in Holmdel, New Jersey, told the
New Yorker
writer Calvin Tomkins. “His mind goes off at too many different angles and sees too many different possibilities in everything. He is like a child in that, but a very mature child.”
¹⁸
Pierce’s real talent, according to Friis and Pierce himself, was in getting people interested in something that hadn’t really occurred to them before.

“You should do something on that,” Pierce would suggest to Shannon about some idea or another. “Should? What does should mean?” Shannon would reply. Then both men would laugh. It was Shannon’s way of
saying he was never going to follow Pierce’s suggestion, just as he never followed anyone’s.
¹⁹

But when most people heard Pierce float an idea, they didn’t laugh. According to Pierce, he had made certain suggestions that led to Jack Morton’s early work on something that came to be known as the Morton triode—a powerful vacuum device that would be essential for the vast national system of microwave relay towers. A few years later, Pierce had been the third collaborator, with Shannon and another member of the technical staff, Barney Oliver, who was destined to run Hewlett-Packard’s research laboratories, in the first definitive paper on pulse code modulation, or PCM, the new method for sending communications that would rely on pulses representing digital information rather than on electrical waves.

Around that same time, Walter Brattain had bumped into Pierce in the hallway at Murray Hill and invited him into his office. Brattain was looking for a name for the new device he and John Bardeen had built, and Pierce had a reputation around the Labs as a wordsmith. As usual, Pierce didn’t hesitate before tossing out a suggestion: How about calling it a transistor
?
²⁰
That his suggestion was eventually adopted after a vote was, Pierce would say, “my one claim to eternal fame.”
²¹

He seemed to have a knack for involving himself—or being right nearby—in situations that made historical ripples. Pierce was apparently the last person at Bell Labs that Bill Shockley spoke with—as recorded in a cryptic entry in Shockley’s diary, for noon on December 31, 1947—before he began working around the clock on his idea for the junction transistor.
²²
Pierce had suggested that his friend Arthur C. Clarke compose a history of overseas communication,
²³
and he demonstrated for Clarke, during a visit to Murray Hill, a computer rendition, created by a group of scientists working in acoustics at Bell Labs, of “A Bicycle Built for Two.” This rendition eventually found its way into the film
2001: A Space Odyssey
.
²⁴
Pierce had also been the supervisor who came by when the mathematicians were playing their guessing game on the blackboard, “Convergence in Webster,” and scratched out the infamous sentence,
You Are All Fired.
²⁵

Essentially, Pierce’s job was coming up with ideas for the next generation
of communications technology. He was vain about his intelligence, but not so vain as to consider his own ideas automatically superior to those of his colleagues. In looking for what was interesting and doable, he could be an able scavenger. One day in 1943, while Pierce was working on vacuum devices for the military—like everyone else at the Labs, he had been engaged in engineering work for World War II—he read a British report on new developments in the field. Something caught his eye. A man working at Oxford, an Austrian immigrant named Rudi Kompfner, had created a new vacuum tube that seemed decidedly different from anything Pierce had seen before. It was called the traveling wave tube, and was sometimes abbreviated as TWT. Although Pierce later liked to say that the device was simple, the mechanism within was quite complex: The tube was pencil-thin and around a foot long, with an interior consisting of a long wire wound in a helix pattern that resembled a stretched screen-door spring.
²⁶
A communications signal—a traveling wave—was sent along the curling spring of wire; meanwhile a focused beam of electrons was sent through the center of the spring. The two interacted, and the result was a considerable transfer of energy from the beam of electrons to the spiraling signal wave. In plain terms, the merits of the device were twofold: (1) a spectacular amplification of the signal; and (2) a remarkable capacity, or
bandwidth
, meaning it could amplify a vast number of signals at one time. Sitting in his Bell Labs office in the West Village—the office with a five-drawer file cabinet that he had labeled “bottom drawer,” “next-to bottom drawer,” “middle drawer,” “next-to top drawer,” and “top drawer”
²⁷
—Pierce saw in the report something potentially invaluable to the phone system. “It was interesting because it seemed to have great prospects, but it had all sorts of problems,” he remarked. Such problems were at once theoretical—how did the traveling wave tube work?—and developmental—could Bell Labs make the device reliable enough for the system?