The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (3 page)

L
ONG BEFORE
Mervin Kelly came to Millikan’s lab in 1915, a chain reaction began that would ultimately shape his own career and Bell Labs’ singular trajectory. To understand how that chain of events started, it’s helpful to pause for a moment on the image of the young physicist in the lab, counting oil drops late into the night, and go back in time a few years, to 1902. That year, Robert Millikan was married. What was significant about Millikan’s wedding was not the ceremony itself. Rather, it was his best man: a slight, balding, cigar-smoking physicist named Frank Baldwin Jewett.

At Chicago, Jewett was pursuing a PhD when he met Millikan, a new
faculty member who was nine years older. The two men lived in the same boardinghouse. Unlike Millikan, Jewett had grown up in the lap of privilege. He was the son of a railroad and electric utility executive, and his family had originally owned large tracts of land that became part of Pasadena and Greater Los Angeles. And yet Jewett wasn’t exactly a snob; he was agile-minded and glib; he could talk with and befriend almost anyone. He was especially adept at earning the trust of older men. When he graduated from Chicago, Jewett considered returning west to join the ranks of California industrialists, like his father. But first he decided to teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology instead. Midway through his year as a physics instructor, he had a chance meeting with one of the engineers at American Telephone & Telegraph, who was quickly charmed and impressed by him. When Jewett was offered a job with the company in 1904, he accepted. His pay was $1,600 a year, or about $38,000 in today’s dollars.

Contrary to its gentle image of later years, created largely through one of the great public relations machines in corporate history, Ma Bell in its first few decades was close to a public menace—a ruthless, rapacious, grasping “Bell Octopus,” as its enemies would describe it to the press. “The Bell Company has had a monopoly more profitable and more controlling—and more generally hated—than any ever given by any patent,” one phone company lawyer admitted.
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Jewett came into the business nearly thirty years after Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone; by that point approximately two million subscribers around the country, mostly in the Northeast, were using AT&T’s phones and services. And yet the company was struggling. Bell’s patents on the telephone had expired in the 1890s, and in the years after the expiration a host of independent phone companies had entered the business and begun signing up subscribers in numbers rivaling AT&T. By then the company’s competitive practices—its unrelenting aggression, its flagrant disregard for ethical boundaries—had already won it a host of enemies. Almost from the day the Bell System was created, when Alexander Graham Bell became engaged in a multiyear litigation with an inventor named Elisha Gray over who actually deserved the patent to the telephone,
the Bell company was known to be ferociously litigious.
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In its later battles with independent phone companies, however, it would often move beyond battles in the courtroom and resort to sabotaging competitors’ phone lines and stealthily taking over their equipment suppliers.

All the while, the company maintained a policy of “noncompliance” with other service providers. This meant that AT&T often refused to carry phone calls from the competition over its intercity long-distance lines. In some metro areas, the practice led to absurd redundancies: Residents or businesses sometimes needed two or even three telephones so they could speak with acquaintances who used different service providers.
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In the meantime, AT&T did little to inspire loyalty in its customers. Their phone service was riddled with interruptions, poor sound quality, unreliable connections, and the frequent distractions of “crosstalk,” the term engineers used to describe the intrusion of one signal (or one conversation) into another. In rural areas, phone subscribers had to make do with “party lines” that connected a dozen, or several dozen, households to the local operator but could only allow one conversation at a time. Subscribers were not supposed to listen in on their neighbors’ conversations. Often they did anyway.

AT&T’s savior was Theodore Vail, who became its president in 1907, just a few years after Millikan’s friend Frank Jewett joined the company.
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In appearance, Vail seemed almost a caricature of a Gilded Age executive: Rotund and jowly, with a white walrus mustache, round spectacles, and a sweep of silver hair, he carried forth a magisterial confidence. But he had in fact begun his career as a lowly telegraph operator. Thoughtfulness was his primary asset; he could see almost any side of an argument. Also, he could both disarm and outfox his detractors. As Vail began overseeing Bell operations, he saw that the costs of competition were making the phone business far less profitable than it had been—so much so, in fact, that Vail issued a frank corporate report in his first year admitting that the company had amassed an “abnormal indebtedness.” If AT&T were to survive, it had to come up with a more effective strategy against its competition while bolstering its public image. One of Vail’s first moves
was to temper its aggression in the courts and reconsider its strategy in the field. He fired twelve thousand employees and consolidated the engineering departments (spread out in Chicago and Boston) in the New York office where Frank Jewett then worked.
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Meanwhile, Vail saw the value of working with smaller phone companies rather than trying to crush them. He decided it was in the long-term interests of AT&T to buy independent phone companies whenever possible. And when it seemed likely a few years later that the government was concerned about this strategy, Vail agreed to stop buying up companies without government permission. He likewise agreed that AT&T would simply charge independent phone companies a fee for carrying long-distance calls.

Vail didn’t do any of this out of altruism. He saw that a possible route to monopoly—or at least a near monopoly, which was what AT&T had always been striving for—could be achieved not through a show of muscle but through an acquiescence to political supervision. Yet his primary argument was an idea. He argued that telephone service had become “necessary to existence.”
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Moreover, he insisted that the public would be best served by a technologically unified and compatible system—and that it made sense for a single company to be in charge of it. Vail understood that government, or at least many politicians, would argue that phone subscribers must have protections against a monopoly; his company’s expenditures, prices, and profits would thus have to be set by federal and local authorities.
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As a former political official who years before had modernized the U.S. Post Office to great acclaim, Vail was not hostile toward government. Still, he believed that in return for regulation Ma Bell deserved to find the path cleared for reasonable profits and industry dominance.

In Vail’s view, another key to AT&T’s revival was defining it as a technological leader with legions of engineers working unceasingly to improve the system. As the business historian Louis Galambos would later point out, as Vail’s strategy evolved, the company’s executives began to imagine how their company might adapt its technology not only for the near term but for a future far, far away: “Eventually it came to be
assumed within the Bell System that there would never be a time when technological innovation would no longer be needed.” The Vail strategy, in short, would measure the company’s progress “in decades instead of years.”
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Vail also saw it as necessary to merge the idea of technological leadership with a broad civic vision. His publicity department had come up with a slogan that was meant to rally its public image, but Vail himself soon adopted it as the company’s core philosophical principle as well.
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It was simple enough: “One policy, one system, universal service.” That this was a kind of wishful thinking seemed not to matter. For one thing, there were many systems: The regional phone companies, especially in rural areas, provided service for millions of Americans. For another, the closest a customer could get to telephoning long distance was a call between New York and Chicago. AT&T did not have a universal reach. It didn’t even have a national reach.

AT&T’s
ENGINEERS HAD BEEN VEXED
by distance from the very beginning. The telephone essentially converted the human voice into an electrical signal; in turn-of-the-century phones this was done by allowing sound waves produced by a voice to vibrate a taut diaphragm—usually a disc made of thin aluminum—that was backed by another thin metal disc. A mild electric current ran between the two discs, which were separated by a chamber filled with the tiny carbon granules Edison had invented. As sound waves from a voice vibrated the top diaphragm, waves of varying pressure moved through the granules below it. The varying pressure would in turn vary the resistance to the electric current running between the metal discs. In the process sound waves would be converted to electric waves. On a simple journey, the electrified voice signal would then travel through a wire, to a switchboard, to another cable, to another switchboard, and finally to a receiver and a distant eardrum. But a telephone voice signal was weak—much weaker and more delicate than a telegraph’s simple dot-dash signal. Even worse, the delicate signal would grow thinner—or “attenuate,” to use the phone company’s preferred term—after even a few miles.

In the telephone’s first few decades, AT&T’s engineers had found that different methods could move a phone call farther and farther. Copper wire worked better than iron wire, and stiff, “hard-drawn” copper wire seemed to work even better. Best of all was extremely thick-gauge hard-drawn copper wire. The engineers likewise discovered that an invention known as “loading coils” inserted on the wires could extend the signal tremendously. Finally, there were “repeaters.” These were mechanical amplifiers that took the sound of a weakening voice and made it louder so the call could travel many miles farther. But you could only install a few repeaters on a line before the advantages of boosting a call’s volume were undone by distortion and the attenuation of the signals. And that left the engineers at a final disconnect. The tricks of their trade might allow them to conquer a distance of about 1,700 miles, roughly from New York to Denver. A great impasse lay beyond.

In 1909, Frank Jewett, now one of the phone company’s senior managers, traveled to San Francisco with his boss, John J. Carty, AT&T’s chief engineer. They found parts of the city still in ruins. As Jewett recalled, “The wreckage of the [1906] earthquake and fire was still only partially cleared away and but the beginnings made on the vast rebuilding operations.”
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The men were there to determine how to repair the local phone system, but they also began discussing the possibility of providing transcontinental phone service—New York to San Francisco—in time for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1914. Theodore Vail, who met Jewett and Carty there, was in favor of making a commitment, since it represented a clear step toward universal service. Carty and Jewett were more circumspect. Together they spent long days and nights debating the problem, usually continuing their discussions far past midnight. The men could see there were enormous, but surmountable, engineering challenges; they would, for instance, need a cable that could be effectively strung across the mountains and desert and survive the weather and stress. But there were also profound challenges of science. “The crux of the problem,” Jewett wrote in describing his conversations with Carty, “was a satisfactory telephone repeater or amplifier”:

Carty and Jewett eventually told Vail they would do it—and the task soon came to be Jewett’s personal responsibility. That was risky on a number of counts. Jewett’s talents were as a manager and social sophisticate; he was quick to apprehend technical problems but not necessarily equipped to solve them. On the other hand, he knew someone who could help.

Jewett returned to the University of Chicago in the fall of 1910 to visit his old friend Millikan, and he started the conversation without small talk. Jewett began, “Mr. John J. Carty, my chief, and the other higher-ups in the Bell System, have decided that by 1914, when the San Francisco Fair is to be held, we must be in position, if possible, to telephone from New York to San Francisco.” To get through to San Francisco by the present methods was out of the question, he explained, but he wondered if perhaps Millikan’s work—he pointed to some complex research on electrons—suggested that a different method might be possible. Then Jewett asked his friend for help. “Let us have one or two, or even three, of the best of the young men who are taking their doctorates with you and are intimately familiar with your field. Let us take them into our laboratory in New York and assign to them the sole task of developing a telephone repeater.”
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Here was a new approach to solving an industrial problem, an approach that looked not to engineers but to scientists. The first person offered this opportunity was Millikan’s lab assistant from the oil-drop experiment, Harvey Fletcher, who declined. Fletcher wanted to return home to Salt Lake City to teach at Brigham Young University. The next person was Harold Arnold, a savvy experimentalist who said yes, and who quickly joined the New York engineering group under Jewett.

Within two years Arnold came up with several possible solutions to the repeater problem, but he mainly went to work on improving an amplifier known as the audion that had been brought to AT&T in 1912 by an independent, Yale-trained inventor named Lee De Forest. The early audion was vaguely magical. It resembled a small incandescent light bulb, yet instead of a hot wire filament strung between two supporting wires it had three elements—a metal filament that would get hot and emit electrons (called a cathode); a metal plate that would stay cool and attract electrons (called an anode); and between them a wire mesh, or “grid.” A small electrical current, or signal, that was applied to the audion’s grid could be greatly amplified by another electrical current that was traveling from the hot cathode to the cool anode. Arnold found, through trial and error, the best materials, as well as a superior way to evacuate the air inside the audion tube. (He suspected correctly that a high vacuum would greatly improve the audion’s efficiency.) Once Arnold had refined the audion, he, Jewett, and Millikan convened in Philadelphia to test it against other potential repeater ideas. The men listened in on phone conversations that were passed through the various repeaters, and they found the audion clearly superior. Soon to be known as the vacuum tube, it and its descendants would revolutionize twentieth-century communications.