The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (33 page)

Among other things, he had long been pushing at Bell Labs for more research into mobile phones. If the Federal Communications Commission would grant Bell Labs and AT&T permission to operate such phones in a large frequency range, Pierce believed the business would explode in popularity. (Without a broad range of frequencies, however, there wasn’t
much logic in moving forward with new technologies, since a mobile system’s capacity, and thus its potential pool of customers, would be small.) Was there any way of “prying mobile allocations out of the FCC?” he wrote in a 1957 memo. At the time, Pierce was actually thinking ahead by a decade or two, and wondering where Bell Labs should be with mobile phone research by that point.
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He perceived that the transistor might create entirely new possibilities for mobile communications.

As it happened, it took almost a decade until the Labs could move forward with mobile technology. Project Echo, the huge balloon that defined Pierce’s career, stayed aloft for nearly eight years, disappearing somewhere off the western coast of South America on the evening of May 23, 1968.
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At that point Bill Jakes, Echo’s project engineer, was still working at Holmdel under Pierce. One day, around the time of Echo’s demise, Jakes looked up to see his boss come into his office. “Jakes, why don’t you do something about mobile communications?”
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Pierce asked. And then, before waiting for an answer, Pierce walked out.

A
year after John Pierce celebrated the success of his Echo satellite balloon, and just around the time that work on Telstar was going full bore, Pierce and a Bell Labs colleague named Edward David sat down to compose a memo. It was the summer of 1961, and the two men were making an effort to compile a list of ideas for a Bell System exhibit at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. AT&T executives had already established a planning group and were soliciting advice from some of the company’s farthest-thinking scientists. They hoped that the planning team could instill upon the fair’s visitors a sense of the phone system’s complexity along with a glimpse of how communications might evolve in the coming years. That was precisely where Pierce came in.

For corporations, world’s fairs are public relations opportunities. But the fair was not an exercise in cynicism. It was a legitimate chance to display some of the ideas in the company’s technological pipeline, a pipeline usually clogged with more inventions and ideas than the business side of the phone company could ever hope to implement.
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Pierce was thinking about the New York fair around the same time that a modest display of Bell Labs innovations was being demonstrated at Seattle’s Century 21 Exposition, which was being marked by the construction of a
huge “space needle” on the city’s fairgrounds. At the Seattle fair visitors could ride a monorail to a Bell exhibit intimating a future of startling convenience: phones with speedy touch-tone buttons (which would soon replace dials), direct long-distance calling (which would soon replace operators), and rapid electronic switching (which would soon be powered by transistors). A visitor could also try something called a portable “pager,” a big, blocky device that could alert doctors and other busy professionals when they received urgent calls.
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New York’s fair would dwarf Seattle’s. The crowds were expected to be immense—probably somewhere around 50 or 60 million people in total. Pierce and David’s 1961 memo recommended a number of exhibits: “personal hand-carried telephones,” “business letters in machine-readable form, transmitted by wire,” “information retrieval from a distant computer-automated library,” and “satellite and space communications.” By the time the fair opened in April 1964, though, the Bell System exhibits, housed in a huge white cantilevered building nicknamed the “floating wing,” described a more conservative future than the one Pierce and David had envisioned. The exhibit was primarily explanatory. Visitors could get a sense of how quality control worked at Western Electric factories, or how researchers at Bell Labs grew pure crystals necessary for transistors. They could experience push-button “dialing,” or they could consider how Telstar and satellite communications functioned. Perhaps the only surprise was an open demonstration—available to anyone who visited the floating wing—of what Pierce and David had in their memo termed “visiphone.” By 1964, these devices, created by the engineers at Bell Labs over the course of a decade, had a trademarked name. They were known as Picturephones, and they seemed the very essence of the future.

At the fair, a visitor who wanted to try a Picturephone would enter one of seven booths and sit before what was called a “picture unit.” The device was a long oval tube, measuring about one foot wide and seven inches high and about a foot in depth. Set within the oval face was a small camera and a rectangular video screen, measuring four and three-eighths inches by five and three-quarter inches. The picture unit was cabled to a touch-tone telephone handset with a line of buttons to control the
screen. If you wanted to make a Picturephone call at the fair—or more precisely, if you wanted to talk with the Picturephone users at other booths—you simply pressed a button marked “V” for video; after that you could either talk through the handset or through a speakerphone on the picture unit.

Without question, the Picturephones were diverting. In several obvious respects, the device was less a radical innovation than an elegant melding of the established technologies of television and telephone. But it wasn’t entirely clear whether the Picturephone actually solved a problem. Some Bell Labs engineers worried about this. As far back as the mid-1950s, John Pierce was exchanging memos with colleagues wondering about the utility of the new device: “The need for acceptability of such a service,” Pierce wrote of the Picturephone, “has not been adequately evaluated, and the [phones] themselves were not at the point at which they could be put into commercial use.”
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To be sure, the Picturephone technology had come a long way since then. By 1964, the video image was crisper than what Pierce had critiqued in the late 1950s; also, the entire device—which was to say millions of the devices—now seemed to have the potential to be integrated over the next few decades into the evolving telephone switching and transmission network. There were some concerns as to whether the phone network could handle the additional traffic. There were also concerns as to whether the nation was ready. But the response of visitors to the New York fair—usually a line of people were waiting to try the Picturephones—suggested a substantial degree of public curiosity, and perhaps even enthusiasm.

AT&T executives had in fact decided to use the fair as an opportunity to quietly commission a market research study. That the fairgoers who visited the Bell System pavilion might not represent a cross section of society was recognized as a shortcoming of the survey results. Nevertheless, researchers asked seven hundred users of the Picturephone for their reaction to its design and technology; they also asked whether they might want to use the Picturephone in the future. The overall reaction, summarized in a confidential report, was termed “generally favorable.”
Users complained about the buttons and the size of the picture unit; a few found it difficult to stay on camera. But a majority said they perceived a need for Picturephones in their business, and a near majority said they perceived a need for Picturephones in their home.

Would they pay for it? Here, the results were less clear. For a price of between $40 and $60 a month, for instance, only 12 percent of the couples interviewed said they would want a Picturephone in their homes. Business customers, however, seemed more amenable. Even if the cost were substantially higher—$60 to $80 a month—29 percent said they would be interested in having the device at their place of business.

When the AT&T market researchers asked Picturephone users whether it was important to see the person they were speaking to during a conversation, a vast majority said it was either “very important” or “important.” To phone company executives, this must have been deeply encouraging. Apparently the market researchers never asked users their opinion about whether it was important, or even pleasurable, that the person they were speaking with could see them, too.
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B
Y 1964
, there were about 75 million telephones in the United States, meaning that Bell Labs had now created the means for about 2,500,000,000,000,000 possible interconnections between subscribers.
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In light of this, the Labs’ primary innovation of 1964, for all the attention the Picturephone received, was actually something nobody who used a telephone would see or even understand. It was known as ESS No. 1, a new electronic switching station, opened in a small modern building in the village of Succasunna, New Jersey.
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The design for the switching station had taken two thousand “man-years” of work to create and used tens of thousands of transistors. Its complexity dwarfed that of other previous Bell Labs undertakings such as the transatlantic undersea cable. ESS, as Fred Kappel, the chairman of AT&T, pointed out at its opening in Succasunna, “was the largest single research and development project in Bell System history.”
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The costs were acknowledged by AT&T to be “more than” $100 million, which likely suggested they were much more.
Still, its expense was projected to drop dramatically as the ESS technology was deployed all over the country. By the year 2000, Bell executives maintained, all communications switching would be done through electronic means like that in Succasunna, and it would be “better and cheaper”—that golden combination—than the current system.

Why move in this direction? What kind of future did the men envision? One of the more intriguing attributes of the Bell System was that an apparent simplicity—just pick up the phone and dial—hid its increasingly fiendish interior complexity. What also seemed true, and even then looked to be a governing principle of the new information age, was that the more complex the system became in terms of capabilities, speed, and versatility, the simpler and sleeker it appeared. ESS was a case in point. Switching had always been immensely complex, both as a concept and an actual technology. Making untold connections between millions of subscribers, automatically routing a call from one central switching office to another, finding alternate routes (or alternate routes to the alternate routes) if the most direct path for a call was too busy—this was why those who understood the vast interlocking parts of the Bell System called it, as Pierce and Shannon often did, the largest and most complex machine ever built. A visit to a switching office in any city verified this observation. There, one could see the vast banks of crossbar switches—metal matrices, taller than a man, where calls came in and were routed out. To stand before the rectangular crossbars was to hear their constant clicking; to look behind them was to see the ropes of copper wiring, the logic of a programmed machine that encompassed bundles of thousands upon thousands of color-coded copper wires that snaked through and around the machinery so as to connect all to all. The “switching art,” as it was known at Bell Labs, was suitably captured by a specialized technical jargon describing relays, registers, translators, markers, and so forth and a bevy of convoluted, mind-twisting flow charts. Those who had mastered the switching art were members of a technological priesthood.

ESS, which was meant to replace crossbars, looked simple on the outside—panels of glowing lights and data banks smaller than the crossbar matrices—but it was in fact far more sophisticated. In the moment
during which a phone subscriber picked up the receiver and began dialing a friend—the moment during which the caller would receive a dial tone and begin pressing digits—the ESS followed thousands of separate, sequential instructions, a nearly instantaneous interplay of the system’s logic and memory circuits, all carried out in microseconds. Bell engineers were asked by Bell management—ever wary of the federal government’s order to stay out of the computer business—to describe the ESS only as “computer-like.” (The internal memo warned, “Do not call ESS a computer,” instead suggesting that ESS be described as “a large digital information processor.”)
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Of course, the great advance of ESS was that it
was
a computer, a highly sophisticated and programmable machine (unlike the crossbar) that could figure out phone connections in a few millionths of a second and could handle more traffic than any previous switching system. It could provide services that hadn’t previously been available. And it could help integrate the Picturephone into the existing system.

Like the microwave towers that had recently been introduced to the long-distance transmission system—the ones that were a cheaper alternative to cables between cities—electronic switching was, from a user’s point of view, an incremental improvement. If you weren’t a phone engineer, it was hard to understand the excitement. After all, everyone could already talk with everyone else. Thus the phone company pushed various selling points. “A housewife will be able to turn on her oven while away from home by using her telephone … an office worker’s call to a line that is busy will be completed automatically when the line is free,” a
New York Times
article noted in a story about touch-tone phones and the new electronic switches.
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And the ESS enabled other options, such as call waiting or conference calling, that seemed promising, too. The
New York Times
noted that ESS allowed for the possibility that “a couple out for an evening of bridge will be able to have their calls switched automatically to their host’s home.”