The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (7 page)

I
N LATER YEARS
it would sometimes be construed, thanks in part to AT&T’s vast publicity apparatus, that scientists came to the Labs in the 1930s and 1940s for the good of science. But that was an incidental dividend of their work. Mervin Kelly hired the best researchers he could find for the good of the system. The new recruits were no longer asked to climb telephone poles and operate switchboards. But all were given long seminars in their first few weeks on how the Bell System worked. Oliver Buckley, the Labs vice president, told his new employees, “Our job, essentially, is to devise and develop facilities which will enable two human beings anywhere in the world to talk to each other as clearly as if
they were face to face and to do this economically as well as efficiently.”
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It was reminiscent of Theodore Vail’s dictum of “one policy, one system, universal service.” But it likewise suggested that the task at hand was immense. Already in the Bell System there were about 73 million phone calls made each day—and the numbers kept climbing.
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In the earliest days of AT&T, company engineers realized the daunting implications of such growth: The larger the system became, the larger the challenges would be in managing its complexity and structural integrity. It was also likely that the larger the system became, the higher the cost might be to individual subscribers unless technologies became more efficient. To scientists like Jewett, Buckley, and Kelly, that the growth of the system produced an unceasing stream of operational problems meant it had an unceasing need for inventive solutions. But the engineers weren’t merely trying to improve the system functionally; their agreements with state and federal governments obliged them to improve it economically, too. Every employee on West Street was therefore encouraged to take a similar perspective on the future: Phone service not only had to get better and bigger. It had to get cheaper.

Not everyone took Ma Bell’s corporate adages at face value. By the late 1930s, in fact, AT&T was in the midst of a federal investigation that focused closely on whether it was overpaying for phone equipment from Western Electric, and thus overcharging phone users as a result. Some of the findings that came out of the multiyear inquiry—summarized in a scathing portrait of the company, written by a federal lawyer named N. R. Danielian, entitled
A.T.&T.: The Story of Industrial Conquest
—portrayed the Bell System as a monstrous entity focused less on public service than on maintaining its stock price and rate of expansion. Danielian painted an ugly picture of how Ma Bell executives had used propaganda—books, periodicals, short films—to enhance their corporate image during the 1920s. In his view, moreover, AT&T’s size and dominating nature raised the question of whether it was actually an “industrial dictatorship” obscured by a scrim of civic-mindedness. “The [Bell] System,” Danielian pointed out, “constitutes the largest aggregation of capital that has ever been controlled by a single private company at any time
in the history of business. It is larger than the Pennsylvania Railroad Company and United States Steel Corporation put together. Its gross revenues of more than one billion dollars a year are surpassed by the incomes of few governments of the world. The System comprises over 200 vassal corporations. Through some 140 companies it controls between 80 and 90 percent of local telephone service and 98 percent of the long-distance telephone wires of the United States.” The Bell System owned the wires involved in certain aspects of radio transmission, Danielian added, and had become involved in a host of other pursuits, such as equipment for motion pictures. Its needs for raw materials added up to “hundreds of millions of dollars” annually; its deposits in banks involved “almost a third of the active banks in the United States”; its investors numbered nearly a million. It was also, not incidentally, the largest employer in the United States.
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Kelly would maintain—sometimes under oath, in front of a state or federal utility commission—that Bell Labs’ purpose was to give AT&T and its regional operating companies “the best and most complete telephone service at the lowest possible cost.” He could talk for long stretches—easily for thirty minutes at a time, and with deep conviction—about the virtues of the Bell System and the scientific research it paid for at his laboratory. The difficulty was to reconcile his views with Danielian’s. Perhaps the only way to do so was to accept that there was no reconciliation. The truths about the Bell System, and in turn Bell Labs, were not so much mutually exclusive as simultaneous. The overseers of the phone company, those top-hatted executives at AT&T, were mercenary and aggressive and as arrogant as any captains of industry. But the phone service offered to subscribers was reliable and of high quality and not terribly expensive. That was a point even Danielian conceded. AT&T’s aggressive strategy to patent its inventions, meanwhile, made it difficult for individuals and smaller companies to compete; it was also a tool for generating profits. But Danielian likewise acknowledged that the discoveries at Bell Labs had been essential to the progress of society at large. “They have not only made things better, but have created new
services and industries,” he wrote of the scientists and engineers. “They have also made significant contributions to pure science. For these, no one would wish to deny just praise.”

The larger point in all of this was that Bell Labs, for all its romantic forays into the mysteries of science, remained an integral part of the phone business. The Labs management made an effort to isolate its scientists from the gritty day-to-day political concerns of the business. But the managers themselves had to keep track of how the technology and politics and finances of their endeavor meshed together. Indeed, they could never forget it. As long as the business remained robust—and it was the primary job of people like Mervin Kelly to keep the business robust—so did the Labs.

I
N THE FIRST DECADE
of the twentieth century, the transcontinental phone line had been one example of how the challenges of expanding the phone system led to inventions like the repeater tube. But it was only one example. Following the rapid development of the telephone business in the early twentieth century, everything that eventually came to be associated with telephone use had been assembled from scratch. The scientists and engineers at Bell Labs inhabited what one researcher there would aptly describe, much later, as “a problem-rich environment.”
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There were no telephone ringers at the very start; callers would get the attention of those they were calling by yelling loudly (often, “ahoy!”) into the receiver until someone on the other end noticed. There were no hang-up hooks, no pay phones, no phone booths, no operator headsets. The batteries that powered the phones worked poorly. Proper cables didn’t exist, and neither did switchboards, dials, or buttons. Dial tones and busy signals had to be invented. Lines strung between poles often didn’t work, or worked poorly; lines that were put underground, a necessity in urban centers, had even more perplexing transmission problems. Once telephone engineers realized they could also broadcast messages via radio waves, they encountered a host of other problems (such as atmospheric
interference) they had never before contemplated. But slowly they solved these problems, and the result was something that soon came to be known, simply and plainly, as the system.

The system’s problems and needs were so vast that it was hard to know where to begin explaining them. The system required that teams of chemists spend their entire lives trying to invent new, cheaper sheathing so that phone cables would not be permeated by rain and ice; the system required that other teams of chemists spend their lives working to improve the insulation that lay between the sheathing and the phone wires themselves. Engineers schooled in electronics, meanwhile, studied echoes, delays, distortion, feedback, and a host of other problems in the hope of inventing strategies, or new circuits, to somehow circumvent them. Measurement devices that could assess things like loudness, signal strength, and channel capacity didn’t exist, so they, too, had to be created—for it was impossible to study and improve something unless it could be measured. Likewise, the system had to keep track of the millions of daily calls within it, which in turn required a vast, novel infrastructure for billing. The system had to account for it all.

“There is always a larger volume of work that is worth doing than can be done currently,” Kelly said, which was a way of acknowledging that work on the system, by definition, could have no end. It simply kept expanding at too great a clip; its problems meanwhile kept proliferating. For one person to call another required the interrelated functioning of tens of thousands of mechanical and electronic elements, all of them designed and developed by Bell Labs, and all of them manufactured by Western Electric. What’s more, almost every part of the system was designed and built to stay in service for forty years. That entailed a litany of durability tests at the West Street plant on even the most trifling of system components. Labs engineers invented a “dropping machine” to simulate “the violence of impact” of a receiver dropped into its cradle tens of thousands of times. They fashioned a “woodpecker machine,” meant to resemble “that industrious bird in action,” to test the scratch-resistant qualities of varnishes and finishes. They fabricated what they called an “artificial mouth,” resembling a freestanding microphone, to test the
aural sensitivity of handsets; they created a machine with a simulated finger to mimic the demands of button-pushing and dialing. And it wasn’t enough to merely measure the durability of a telephone dial; other teams of engineers had to calibrate and measure, to a level approaching perfection, the precise
speed
at which the dial rotated.

Some men at West Street specialized in experimenting on springs for switchboard keys, others in improving the metal within the springs. AT&T linemen bet with their lives on the integrity of the leather harnesses that kept them tethered at great heights—so Labs technicians established strength and standards for the two-inch leather belts (limiting “the content of Epsom salts, glucose, free acid, ash and total water-soluble materials”) and improving the metal rivets and parts. Millions of soldered joints held the system together—so Labs engineers had to spend years investigating which fluxes and compounds were best for reinforcing anything from seams on sheet metal to lead joints to copper wires to brass casings. AT&T lines carried transmissions from the Teletype, a machine that could send and translate written messages over long distances—so Labs engineers likewise found it necessary to invent a better teletypewriter oiler, a small square oil can, named the 512A tool. And the Labs engineers were not necessarily content with designing any oil can; this one had to be built with a complex inner mechanism for dispensing up to (but no more than) fifteen drops of lubricant. The 512A was an example of how, if good problems led to good inventions, then good inventions likewise would lead to other related inventions, and that nothing was too small or incidental to be excepted from improvement. Indeed, the system demanded so much improvement, so much in the way of new products, so much insurance of durability, that new methods had to be created to guarantee there was improvement and durability amid all the novelty. And to ensure that the products manufactured by Western Electric were of the proper specifications and quality, a Bell Labs mathematician named Walter Shewhart invented a statistical management technique for manufacturing that was soon known, more colloquially, as “quality control.” His insights not only guided the manufacture of items within the Bell System for the next few decades, but in time
were applied to improve industrial processes and products around the world.
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The system demanded that a small branch of the Labs was established in western New Jersey, in the country village of Chester. The men there were to study the outdoors deterioration of telephone equipment. Lodgepole pine trees from five western states had been determined by Labs engineers to be the most useful for poles, and so telephone men in Chester buried the pine phone poles ten feet deep and spent decades studying their degradation. At the same time, they mixed a witches’ brew of stains and fungicides, applied them to the buried poles, and graded their effectiveness. They found it necessary, too, to investigate the behavior of gophers, squirrels, and termites, which gnawed through wood and cables and were fingered as the cause of hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses every year. (One strategy the men discovered could rebuff the pesky gopher: steel tape on cables.) The cables seemed to require a variety of other types of study, too. A Bell Labs engineer named Donald Quarles, who was in charge of the Chester plant, wrote a long treatise entitled “Motion of Telephone Wires in the Wind.” His men made rigorous, multiyear tests on the proper spans (how far should the poles be spaced apart?), proper lashing (how tight should the wires be tied together?), proper vertical spacing between horizontal strings of wires (company practice suggested twelve inches, but engineers discovered eight inches could be enough to prevent abrasion). Many of the system’s most important cables, meanwhile, were not strung through the air but ran underground. For burying wire, the men in Chester had to develop new processes involving special tractors they invented and splicing techniques. Other Labs engineers focused on undersea cables, which required not only special materials and techniques but special ships, outfitted with enormous spools of cable in their massive holds, that could lay the cable smoothly on the sea bottom.

The system demanded that the Labs men go anywhere necessary to test or acquire proper materials. A sturdy telephone cable that carried hundreds of calls at the same time would do so at different frequencies,
much as daylight carries within it different colors of the spectrum. “In order to get the economies resulting from putting a bundle of dozens or hundreds of telephone conversations in one conductor,” Kelly explained, “you have got to have very intricate and complex equipment at the ends of those circuits to combine all of these different telephone conversations in the one single bundle and then at the other end to unscramble them so that each conversation shall go where you want it to go.”
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The scrambling and unscrambling was done at either end with electronic filters, which separated channels, just as a prism can divide light. The essential components of these filters were quartz plates cut from quartz crystals. The men at the Labs had discovered that the best quartz for this purpose came from Brazil—“the only place in the world that has the quality of crystals of sufficient size to do this work,” Kelly said. And so the Bell Labs managers set up an extraordinary supply chain so they could get the perfect quartz, so they could make the perfect quartz filters, so they could try to perfect the system that, by its very nature, could never be perfected.