The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (60 page)

9
John deButts, letter to John Pierce, March 31, 1975. DeButts had seen an article that Pierce wrote in the
Money Manager
. Pierce Collection, Huntington Library.

10 Mervin J. Kelly, memo, “A First Record of Thoughts Concerning an Important Post War Problem of the Bell Telephone Laboratories and Western Electric Company,” May 1, 1943. AT&T archives.

11
Bell Labs News
, “Special Report: An Interview with W. O. Baker,” May 1973.

12 Rudi Kompfner, letter to Mr. J. R. Pierce, April 13, 1970. AT&T archives.

13 I. Hayashi and Mort Panish developed the first breakthrough room-temperature semiconductor laser at Bell Labs. A Russian team made a simultaneous discovery. Shortly thereafter, in 1971, Herwig Kogelnik and C. V. Shank invented the first distributed feedback laser.

14 Morton B. Panish, “Heterostructure Injection Lasers,”
Bell Laboratories Record
, November 1971.

15 Along with the new lasers, a group of Bell Labs scientists also discovered that they could make light-emitting diodes into a satisfactory source for light-pulse communications. These were tiny semiconductor sandwiches, too, but were slightly different than lasers (the light was not as bright, for instance). The upside was that the diodes promised to last longer. The LEDs, too, could be modulated—that is, impressed with a communications signal. They blinked at rates of up to 100 million times per second.

16 Bernard C. DeLoach Jr., “On the Way: Lasers for Telecommunications,”
Bell Laboratories Record
, April 1975. The ends of the crystal laser were polished to a mirrorlike finish so that some of the energy emitted from the laser could be sent back to stimulate even more radiated light.

17 Rudi Kompfner, handwritten note on memo from Dean Gillette, October 20, 1971. AT&T archives.

18 A good overview of the process for making fiber during that era is given in the
Bell System Technical Journal,
July–August 1978.

19 Eugene O’Neill, ed.,
A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System: Transmission Technology (1925–1975)
(AT&T Bell Laboratories, 1985), p. 665.

20 Ira Jacobs, “Lightwaves System Development: Looking Back and Ahead,”
Optics & Photonics News
, February 1995.

21 John R. Pierce, letter to Dr. W. O. Baker, November 23, 1976. Pierce Collection, Huntington Library.

22 O’Neill,
A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System: Transmission Technology (1925–1975)
, p. 401. In 1929, “commercial service to ships on the high seas was inaugurated … the first ship equipped was the
SS Leviathan
, the largest ship in the world at the time, and the first shore stations were at Ocean Gate and Forked River, New Jersey.”

23 W. R. Young, “Advanced Mobile Phone Service: Introduction, Background, and Objectives,”
Bell System Technical Journal
, January 1979.

24 D. A. (Donald) Quarles, “Organization of Mobile Radio Development,” memo to M. J. Kelly, April 16, 1945. AT&T archives.

25 William C. Jakes, ed.,
Microwave Mobile Communications
(New York: IEEE Press, 1993).

26 D. H. Ring, “Mobile Telephony—Wide Area Coverage—Case 20564,” December 11, 1947. Though W. R. Young is not credited as an author of the nine-page memo, he is credited in the text: “As pointed out by W. R. Young in his report … the best general arrangement of frequency assignments for the minimum interference and with a minimum number of frequencies is a hexagonal layout in which each station is surrounded by six equidistant adjacent stations.” AT&T archives.

27 “Hearing Before Federal Communications Commission on Opening of UHF Band to Television, Docket No. 8976: Statement of Dr. O. E. Buckley, President of Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc.” The statement is undated, but a companion letter to Buckley, written by John Gepson (October 26, 1950), summarized the FCC proceedings: “Hearings on the Bell Laboratories petition … commenced on June 5, 1950, and continued for five days thereafter. … The witnesses were Dr. Buckley, Mr. Gilman, Mr. Hanselman and Mr. Ryan.” AT&T archives.

28 Richard H. Frenkiel, “Creating Cellular: A History of the AMPS Project (1971–1983),”
IEEE Communications Magazine,
September 2010.

29 “An interview of Dr. J. R. Pierce by Mr. Lincoln Barnett for the American Telephone & Telegraph Company,” February 13, 1963. AT&T archives. Pierce said, “And people—sometimes I think of science as really bringing the one thing—suppressing the individual—those two things—it suppresses him through television, but it frees him through the telephone, if you wish.”

30 Also in 1964, the Bell System began offering “Improved Mobile Telephone Service,” or IMTS. The improvements over the existing system were technical—you could dial a number directly, for instance. But the system’s capacity was still limited.

31 “High Capacity Mobile Telephone System: Summary,” unsigned memo, September 14, 1965, 9 pages. AT&T archives.

32 C. H. Elmendorf, letter to Mr. D. Gillette, March 13, 1967. AT&T archives.

1
H. J. Wallis, “The Holmdel Laboratories,”
Bell Laboratories Record
, April 1961. Saarinen designed Holmdel between 1957 and 1959. He died before it was completed. The building was intended to have reflective glass, which was not yet available when it opened. It was meanwhile covered in gray glass.

2
Ibid. As Saarinen put it, “Emerging from concentration in laboratory or office, the individual will come upon the sweeping, uninterrupted views of gently rolling hills and formal planting and of the winter-garden interior court. At such moments of relaxation, walking down the periphery corridor, he can feel refreshed by the encounter with these views and really appreciate them.”
Bell Laboratories Record
, April 1961.

3 Richard H. Frenkiel,
Cellular Dreams and Cordless Nightmares: Life at Bell Laboratories in Interesting Times
, 2009. Downloaded from
http://www.winlab.rutgers.edu/~frenkiel/dreams
.

4
Richard Frenkiel, author interview.

5
Frenkiel was also given an important 1960 Bell Labs paper on cellular service by W. D. (Deming) Lewis, H. J. Schulte, and W. A. Cornell.

6
Joel Engel, author interview.

7
“Notes on Cellular Mobile Telephone Service,” AT&T internal memo (unsigned), November 27, 1979, distributed to F. H. Blecher, R. H. Frenkiel, J. L. Troe, and J. T. Walker. “We have spent approximately 100 million dollars developing and demonstrating the feasibility of cellular technology capable of nationwide application in serving the public need.” In 2010 dollars, the cost would therefore have been about $300 million. What’s more, the actual costs of developing cellular were undoubtedly higher, since service was not approved until several years later. AT&T archives.

8
As Frenkiel notes in his book
Cellular Dreams and Cordless Nightmares
, the ESS used “stored program control.” In essence it functioned like a computer. Unlike the crossbar switches of earlier generations, it did not have “fixed” logic. It could be programmed for a variety of functions.

9
Jakes focused, in part, on studying what’s known as “diversity.” It involves what happens to transmission and reception when multiple antennas are spaced closely together.

10 William C. Jakes, ed.,
Microwave Mobile Communications
(New York: IEEE Press, 1993), p. 11.

11 “Nike Zeus,”
Bell Laboratories Record
, March 1963. The
Record
puts the size of the horseshoe-shaped island at 819 acres, “up to one-half of a mile wide and about 2½ miles long. It has a tropical marine climate which is fairly constant most of the year, since it is only about 8 degrees above the equator. Annual rainfall averages 102 inches; both the relative humidity and temperature average a steady 82.”

12 Gerry DiPiazza, author interview.

13 DiPiazza worked on something known as “discriminatory radar.” The technology was meant to identify an enemy warhead amid an obscuring cloud of tiny foil decoys.

14 Within a few years, Motorola would propose a competing system and would develop the first portable, handheld cell phone. The Motorola handset, developed by Martin Cooper, is a good example of how technological leaps are often perceived reductively. The handset invention demonstrated that cellular receivers could be portable and handheld, as many people at Bell Labs—John Pierce especially—had long imagined. But without the development of the cellular system, Cooper’s important advances would have had little impact.

15 These were not transmission “trunks” connecting intercity routes, nor were they transmission “loops” connecting subscribers to local switching offices. Rather, they were something of a hybrid: “metropolitan trunks,” for what Ira Jacobs calls “backbone routing.”

16 In Atlanta, Bell Labs would also, by agreement, test Corning’s fiber.

17 Ira Jacobs, author interview.

18 W. O. Baker, letter to Dr. John Pierce, January 24, 1977. Pierce Collection, Huntington Library.

19 In addition to a demonstration of the cellular
market
, the FCC also wanted a deeper demonstration of cellular
technology
. For this, Bell Labs had set up a working cellular system in Newark, New Jersey. There were no customers, but there was a working cellular system, again being run by Gerry DiPiazza, who drove around in a retrofitted trailer home to sharpen his understanding of urban noise and cellular signals. “Most of the research was done in the middle of the night,” DiPiazza says, “because the traffic was so bad in the urban center.” Sometimes DiPiazza would find himself in
a rough neighborhood at 2 a.m. with a street gang banging on his car. The Newark system was especially helpful in exploring how to create statistical rules—based on environment and topography, for instance—for start-up cellular systems. At the same time, DiPiazza and his colleagues sought to work out mathematical algorithms so that computer software could decide when, and how, to switch a signal from one cell to another.

20
Decision to Divest: Major Documents in U.S. v. AT&T, 1974–1984,
edited by Christopher H. Sterling, Jill F. Kasle, and Katherine T. Glakas (Washington, DC: Communications Press, 1986), pp. 1–15.

21 “Behind AT&T’s Change at the Top,”
Business Week
, November 6, 1978.

22 Judge Harold Greene, “Address, Consumer Federation of America,” February 17, 1984. AT&T archives.

23 In my discussion of vertical and horizontal integration, I am indebted to
The Fall of the Bell System: A Study in Prices and Politics
, by Peter Temin with Louis Galambos (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

24 Ibid., p. 252.

25 “Bell Labs at Fifty,”
Bell Telephone Magazine
, January–February 1975, p. 14.

26 Andrew Pollack, “Two Settlements May Widen the Pressures on Competition,”
New York Times
, January 9, 1982.

27 Christopher Byron, “Stalking New Markets,”
Time
, January 25, 1982.

28 “Bell Labs: Imagination Inc.,”
Time
, January 25, 1982.

29 Judge Harold Greene, “Address, Consumer Federation of America,” February 17, 1984.

30 Peter F. Drucker, “Beyond the Bell Breakup,”
Public Interest
, Fall 1984.

1
M. J. Kelly, letter to William O. Baker, February 9, 1959. Baker Collection, Princeton University.

2
Kelly’s résumé, updated in December 1965, lists his posts as a director at Prudential Insurance and as a director at the optical company Bausch & Lomb (1959–63) and vacuum tube maker Tung-Sol Electric (1959–64).

3
Interview of Katherine Kelly by Lillian Hoddeson, July 2, 1976, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD;
www.aip.org/history/ohilist
.

4
John Pierce, oral history conducted by Andy Goldstein, IEEE History Center, New Brunswick, NJ, August 19–21, 1992.

5
William Baker, letter to John Pierce, January 29, 1973. Pierce Collection, Huntington Library.

6
James Fisk, letter to John Pierce, February 1, 1973. Pierce Collection, Huntington Library.

7
A. O. Beckman, letter to Dr. William Shockley, September 3, 1955. In addition to the $30,000 per annum (about $237,000 in 2009 dollars) the letter also stated that “Beckman agrees to grant to Shockley an option to purchase 4000 shares of Beckman stock under its existing restricted stock option plan.” Shockley Collection, Stanford University.

8
“John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, William Shockley, interviewed at the Sheraton-Park Hotel in Washington, D.C.,” conducted by John L. Gregory, April 24, 1972. AT&T archives.

9
Moore’s law describes how the number of transistors on computer chips doubles every two years or so. See
http://www.intel.com/technology/mooreslaw
.

10 Gordon Moore, “Solid-State Physicist,”
Time
, March 29, 1999.

11 “Is Quality of U.S. Population Declining? Interview with a Nobel Prize–Winning Scientist,”
U.S. News & World Report
, November 22, 1965.

12 John L. Moll, “William Bradford Shockley: 1910–1989,” National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoirs, 1995.

13 Shockley’s sensitivity had apparently been evident from a very young age, back when his father had recorded in his journal that “Billy always gets angry because he is thwarted or denied something.” Shockley Collection, Stanford University.

14 Victor Cohn,
New York Post
, April 25, 1968, p. 79.

15 William Shockley, “Proposed Research to Reduce Racial Aspects of the Environment-Hereditary Uncertainty,” April 24, 1968. Shockley Collection, Stanford University.

16 W. Shockley, memo to F. D. Leamer and J. A. Morton, “Reduction of Consulting Time for Bell Telephone Laboratories,” April 26, 1968. Shockley Collection, Stanford University.

17 Rae Goodell,
The Visible Scientists
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1977), p. 192.