The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (67 page)

FAINT AND DISTANT SIGNALS:
T
OP
: The large horn antenna atop Crawford Hill—located a few miles from the Black Box in Holmdel—that was built for the Echo satellite experiment and later served to collect data that proved the existence of the Big Bang. A
BOVE AND AT RIGHT
: Two teams that pioneered lightwave communications. In 1961, Donald Herriot, Ali Javan, and William Bennett work on the first gas laser; around the same time, Arthur Schawlow—a coinventor of the laser theory—works with C. G. B. Garrett on a solid-state laser technology.

THE BOSS:
Mervin Kelly, around the time of his 1958 retirement from Bell Labs. “He is most certainly an empire builder,” a White House advisor wrote in a private memo just after World War II, when Kelly turned down the offer of becoming the U.S. president’s first science advisor. To John Pierce, Kelly was “an almost supernatural force.”
Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center

A GREAT MISTAKE:
The Picturephone model that debuted at the 1964 World’s Fair. At the fair, a survey conducted by AT&T indicated that a majority of those who tried the device perceived a need for Picturephones in their business. A near majority said they perceived a need for Picturephones in their home. The rollout of the device proved disastrous.

Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center

THE CHEMIST:
Bill Baker, in his beloved research labs. His mystique, perhaps even more than his intelligence, separated Baker from his colleagues. His work in Washington and on military affairs was shrouded by secrecy. “Nobody knows what I do,” he would sometimes lament to friends and family.
Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center

WITHOUT WIRES:
A page from Doug Ring’s landmark 1947 memo outlining the ideas behind a nationwide mobile phone system; by the early 1970s, the Bell System mobile phone plan—as described in the company’s explanatory literature —had assumed the more sophisticated design of today’s cellular telephone and wireless data infrastructure.

Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center

THE INFORMATIONIST:
Claude Shannon, at home in Massachusetts in 1962. “I think that this present century in a sense will see a great upsurge and development of this whole information business,” Shannon had remarked two years before. The future, he predicted, would depend on “the business of collecting information and the business of transmitting it from one point to another.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos