The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (41 page)

One of the keys to unlocking the mobile business was better technology. But another key was dangling on a chain in Washington, D.C., at the FCC. The radio frequency spectrum, as Bell Labs’ Bill Jakes once put it, is a natural resource. The FCC, as the custodian of this resource, is given the authority to decide how to “balance the sometimes conflicting needs of the different services required by society.”
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Should more of the spectrum be given to TV broadcasters? Or should it go to radio? What was clear to Bell Labs’ researchers after the war was that if regulators made more of the radio spectrum available, their mobile phone system’s capacity would increase dramatically, and car telephones would presumably become instantly more popular. Already there were enormous waiting lists in some cities for the devices. In 1947 AT&T began to petition the FCC for more spectrum in what was known as the ultra-high-frequency,
or UHF, range. These were frequencies just slightly higher than what was already available to mobile phone users. As part of the company’s petition, engineers presented a plan that was extracted from a long technical memo, completed in early December 1947, by a Bell Labs employee named Doug Ring, who was assisted by a colleague named Rae Young. The two men worked out of the small rural radio lab at Holmdel. Their memo happened to be written the same month that John Bardeen and Walter Brattain were perfecting their transistor at Murray Hill, thirty miles to the north, and that Claude Shannon was finishing up his paper on information theory.

No one would have put Ring and Young in such rarefied company. Their memorandum—“Mobile Telephony: Wide Area Coverage”—merely outlined how an “adequate mobile radio system should provide service to any equipped vehicle at any point in the whole country.” Nevertheless, it entertained an intriguing idea: Rather than continue with the idea of placing a single high-powered antenna in a city center, there might be an advantage in spreading a multitude of low-powered antennas over a wider area to service mobile phones. More strikingly, Ring and Rae suggested considering an area of mobile coverage not as big circles with an antenna in the center but as a honeycomb of small hexagons, perhaps with antennas on the corners. Each hexagon could represent a distinct region for mobile reception, perhaps a few miles in diameter. Each hexagon, moreover, could have its own range of frequencies.

This approach would allow for a very efficient use (and reuse) of the limited radio spectrum—that valuable natural resource. You could connect far more calls with many small coverage areas than a single large coverage area. If the FCC allowed a block of frequencies to be used for mobile radio channels, Bell Labs could cut that block into, say, five slices. It could then assign a different slice to each of five hexagons in the honeycomb. This would help minimize interference and increase capacity, since the hexagon next door to the first hexagon would have a different slice of frequencies—and when you drove from one hexagon to another your phone would automatically switch frequencies. The hexagon next to that would have still a different range—and your phone would switch
frequencies again. Eventually, once you got far enough away from the first hexagon, you could drive through another clump of five hexagons with the same frequencies as the first clump. That was feasible since the distance now precluded any interference. Once the pattern was repeated, it could be repeated again in the neighboring area of hexagons. And the pattern could effectively go on forever. The capacity for mobile calling would be far larger than what presently existed. Mobile radio didn’t have to be local. It could be national.
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Ring and Young hadn’t used the word “cellular” in their presentation. Nevertheless what they outlined—in the honeycomb of hexagons and repeating frequencies—was exactly that. Those hexagons were cells. After Ring’s memo was forwarded to the FCC it was filed away in New Jersey with the thousands of other technical memos that were churned out every year by Bell Labs scientists. It was not published in the prestigious
Bell System Technical Journal
. It was not published anywhere, in fact. And there is nothing to suggest it was considered a landmark of engineering. More likely it was thought to be merely helpful in the Bell System’s lobbying efforts for more radio spectrum. In June 1950, Oliver Buckley, the president of Bell Labs, testified before the FCC and alluded to the 1947 plan. “We are ready to proceed with the development as soon as we have assurance of frequency space,” Buckley told the commission. “I am convinced that the benefits to the public at large of having such an integrated mobile telephone system will be very great indeed.”
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The FCC had other ideas. In the late 1950s, the commissioners awarded a large block of radio frequencies to television broadcasters. The broadcasters were to create eighty new channels in the UHF range.
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Had it been given to cellular service instead, which requires less bandwidth than TV, the same block of spectrum could have created as many as eight hundred or a thousand new phone channels. (Each channel, in turn, could serve many mobile phone users.) It was a decision that maddened John Pierce, who was a fierce advocate for mobile radio and believed that wireless phones would someday be small and portable, like a transistor radio. Pierce’s notion seemed utopian to many radio engineers at Bell Labs. Most considered mobile phones as necessarily bulky and limited to cars, due to
the power required to transmit signals from the phone to a nearby antenna. Pierce, in any event, wryly observed that “the FCC has decided pretty clearly that what the American people want is mass communication rather than individual communication.” In choosing television over telephony, Pierce thought the FCC had picked a communications technology that suppresses individual expression rather than encouraging it.
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He resolved to keep trying. For the next few decades Pierce and a variety of other Bell executives lobbied to change the FCC’s decision. And in 1964 and 1965, several AT&T executives began meeting in New York to discuss reviving the company’s petition for mobile radio spectrum.
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“The consensus of the group,” an AT&T memo from that era explained, “was that a substantial market does exist.”
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Those business planners brought in several engineers from Bell Labs to consider how a national “high capacity” mobile system might be installed. The Bell Labs engineers imagined such a system might take ten years to plan, develop, and deploy.

Soon after, AT&T was quietly informed that the FCC might be willing to reconsider the mobile radio proposals. Apparently the commission was disappointed with the lackluster content and low popularity of UHF television. And so the mobile radio initiative fell, quietly and momentarily, into the lap of Chuck Elmendorf, John Pierce’s old Caltech friend and New York City roommate. Elmendorf was now an assistant vice president at AT&T, working out of a big office in the gilded headquarters at 195 Broadway. In March 1967 he composed a letter to a director at the Bell Labs office in Holmdel: At the FCC, Elmendorf wrote, “it appears that some conditions may have changed.” The commission was now “giving serious consideration” to mobile radio, which in turn meant that “the Bell System should be prepared with some concrete proposals.”
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The suggestion wasn’t subtle. The FCC was about to make a move, and Bell Labs should get ready.

A
few years before the phone company executives began to try building a national mobile telephone system, a mechanical engineer named Dick Frenkiel set out for his first day of work in Holmdel, New Jersey. It was July 1963. The isolated Holmdel radio labs that had stood on the site for decades—the vast green fields where children would throw boomerangs on weekends, the gracious woodframe building around which engineers would test radio transmissions—were gone. Those labs had been razed. In their stead, on the center of 460 acres of former farmland, Bell Labs had commissioned an enormous modern building to accommodate its growing ranks. The employees at Bell Labs now numbered around thirteen thousand. The new Holmdel lab housed about twenty-six hundred people, but it was eventually intended to hold about five thousand, which would make it even larger than Murray Hill. For obvious reasons, the building was soon nicknamed the Black Box. It was a steel-and-glass six-story structure, serious and austere, designed by the Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen.
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It was also a monument to architectural presumption. Saarinen, who died before his design was actually built, saw his creation as having the same kind of flexibility as Murray Hill—offices could easily be moved and partitioned, for instance—but
with a crucial difference. He placed the building’s long connecting hallways on its glassy perimeter, with the windowless offices and labs in the interior. “Gone completely are the old claustrophobic, dreary, prison-like corridors,” Saarinen remarked with pride. Thanks to the floor-to-ceiling windows, the members of the technical staff would be liberated by unobstructed views of the countryside rather than chance encounters in the hallways.
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On his first day, Dick Frenkiel turned into the long driveway and drove toward the new building, now barely a year old. “A wide, dark rectangle centered on flat, empty grassland,” he later wrote of his impressions. “It was still a half-mile distant as one entered the property and started down the long esplanade road. Size and space conspired to create a strange optical illusion, in which the road turned out to be much longer, and the building much larger, than one at first perceived.”
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The fields, he noticed, were brown that summer from a drought.

Frenkiel accepted a dollar bill on his first day in exchange for his future patent rights. It was the same ritual that new Bell Labs employees had enacted for decades. But by Frenkiel’s own account, he soon came to realize that he had joined an organization that differed from its myth. The Black Box represented one aspect of this evolution. More to the point, the thrust of the work at Bell Labs seemed to have shifted decisively to big projects involving hundreds of people. Frenkiel’s Bell Labs didn’t seem to have anything to do with heroic research on a new amplifier, done by a few men in a hushed lab. It was about large teams attacking knotty problems for years on end. Jim Fisk’s 1947 dinner party—the Bell Labs of Kelly and Pierce and Shockley, “an ancient place of grainy and fading photographs,” as Frenkiel later viewed it, “where giants of science produced their individual monuments and left behind their personal legends”—was a ghost story. Frenkiel heard about but never bumped into any of those legends. They seemed to have vanished along with Holmdel’s woodframe laboratory building.

In his first few years at Holmdel, Frenkiel floundered about. He was assigned to work on heavy-duty machines that produced prerecorded phone messages, such as ones that give callers the exact date and time.
In January 1966, however, his boss came to him with a different project. Apparently the rumors about mobile radio were getting around. As Frenkiel recalls, “He was saying that someone told Bell Labs that the FCC was willing to consider mobile again, because UHF television was a disappointment. It was not in the news, but he said, ‘Somebody whispered in our ear that we should start thinking about a proposal again.’ ”
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Among other things, Frenkiel was handed Doug Ring and Rae Young’s old 1947 memo.
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He was also teamed up with an engineer named Phil Porter and asked to write a report laying out some ideas for a mobile phone system. On January 17, 1966, Frenkiel and Porter met to talk about their ideas for the first time. Frenkiel scribbled some notes that day on a sheet of looseleaf paper. “A system could be developed to locate mobile at all times,” he noted. Also, there should be “hexagonal cellular array of areas.” Neither Frenkiel nor Porter knew precisely how this would be achieved. “It was just two of us,” Frenkiel says. “Nothing important.”

They spent most of 1966 working on the problem—or rather, the problems. The two men covered the walls of their offices with maps and climbed on ladders in various parts of the country to count hills. There were thousands of questions they would need to answer eventually. Many of these were extremely technical, regarding reception and transmission. They talked about signal strength and interference and channel width. They knew every cell would need to be served by what they called “base station” antennas. These antennas would (1) transmit and receive the signals from the mobile phones and (2) feed those signals, by cable, into a switching center that was connected to the nationwide Bell System. Still, several big conceptual problems stood out.

The first was,
How large should a hexagonal cell be?
Base station antennas would be expensive. How few could they install and still have a high-functioning system?

The second was,
How could you “split” a cell?
The system would almost certainly start with just a few users—meaning big cells. But as the number of users grew, those cells would subdivide to accommodate the traffic. And more, smaller cells would require more base stations. What was the best and cheapest way?

The third was,
How would you “hand off” a call from one cell to another?
It had never been done. But it would be the system’s essential characteristic. As a mobile telephone user moved around, how could you switch the call from one antenna to another—from cell to cell, in other words—without causing great distraction to the caller?

Frenkiel and Porter began working out some approximate answers to cell size and cell splitting and handoffs. “Those kinds of things were in our memo,” he recalls. “But the FCC hadn’t done anything by the end of that year so we went on to other work.” Their plan sat on the shelf, and they were drawn into a different Bell Labs project, paid for by the U.S. Department of Transportation, that involved putting pay phones on the Metroliner, a new express train that would run between Union Station in Washington, D.C., and Penn Station in New York City. Frenkiel and Porter’s presence made sense: This was a simplified application of the cellular idea. The Metroliner route was divided into cells of different frequencies. Markers were put on the tracks—coils, actually—that could be tripped by the train as it passed; these signaled that a call had to be handed off from one cell, and one frequency, to another. “It was not great technology,” Frenkiel recalls, “but it was the first cellular system.”