The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (11 page)

The work, the travel, the wartime pressure—all of it bore down on him. In addition, Shockley was struggling to manage a few dozen men, some of whom in his opinion were not as bright or committed as he regarded himself. And here, perhaps for the first time, a clear sign of Shockley’s limitations emerged. Whatever his friend Jim Fisk found easy and natural—relaxing a roomful of scientists with some inspired slapstick, for instance, or giving men freedom to do their work as they chose—Shockley found difficult. He simply could not get the hang of managing people. Some fifty years later, Shockley’s biographer, Joel Shurkin, found among his private papers a sealed envelope from this period containing a note informing his wife that he had just attempted suicide. He had played Russian roulette with a revolver. “There was just one chance in six that the loaded chamber would be under the firing pin,” he wrote, before adding, with characteristic precision, that “there was some chance of a misfire even then.” He apologized to her that he hadn’t
found a better way of solving their domestic problems.
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Shockley never gave her the note and returned to his work on the war.

B
ELL
L
ABS VICE PRESIDENT
Oliver Buckley wrote a form letter in January 1944 to the Bell Labs staff members on leave with the military services. The war hadn’t yet turned decisively in the Allies’ favor—D-Day and the invasion of Europe were still six months away—but the news was increasingly encouraging. “We hear a lot these days about ‘post war planning,’ and hear of some others doing research and development for the post-war period,” Buckley wrote. “As far as we are concerned, that is pretty well out. We want to see this war won before we start working on what is to follow.”
³¹

It was not quite true. Nearly a year before, for instance, Mervin Kelly began writing a twenty-nine-page memorandum—“A First Record of Thoughts Concerning an Important Post-War Problem of the Bell Telephone Laboratories and Western Electric Company”—that was circulated to Buckley and a number of other executives at the Labs in May 1943. Kelly’s point was not to outline precisely what new products the company should make at the close of war. Rather, he felt compelled to outline his vision of how Bell Labs, once it regrouped, would fare within an electronics industry that was sure to grow exponentially after the war’s conclusion. “It is reasonable to expect that in the decade following the war there may well be changes of even greater total significance than those of the past thirty years,” Kelly wrote. Radar, he added, had already opened up vast new opportunities in the business of radio wave and microwave devices. Kelly also thought it likely that the telecommunications industry was destined to resemble, in its nature as well as its products, sister industries like radio and television. Before the war this had not been the case: Bell Labs researched and designed equipment for the highly specialized nature and problems of telephone service. But to Kelly, the era at hand would require different approaches. Deep within the long memo, he noted, “We have been a conservative and non-competitive
organization. We engineer for high quality service, with long life, low maintenance costs, [and a] high factor of reliability as basic elements in our philosophy of design and manufacture. But our basic technology is becoming increasingly similar to that of a high volume, annual model, highly competitive, young, vigorous and growing industry.”
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In other words, there would soon be a revolution in electronics. And as he saw it, Bell Labs would need to lead it rather than join it.

Kelly wanted his old team back—the team he had handpicked in the late 1930s. First, he pursued Bill Shockley. In January 1944 Shockley had left his position with the Navy for a job at the War Department. Now working with a group considering radar problems on B-29 bombers, he had maintained his frenetic schedule, beginning with a world tour of B-29 bases overseas, “going by way of England and Italy, and visiting American and British bombing establishments en route,” the
Bell Laboratories Record
noted. “After six weeks at the B-29 base in India, he proceeded via Australia to 21st Bomber Command headquarters in the Marianas, then across the Pacific to the United States, where he arrived in January 1945.” Not long after, Kelly invited Shockley to Bell Labs for a series of meetings. The two men discussed Shockley’s possible return to industrial research, and Shockley thereafter agreed to leave Washington and return to Kelly’s shop. At first he began working part-time, visiting the Labs frequently in the late winter and spring of 1945. The war was finally winding down—Germany surrendered to the Allied armies that May. It had been several years since Shockley had done any work in physics, and the meetings and discussions at Bell Labs reawakened in him an old interest in some of the technologies he had been pursuing—the solid-state amplifier, for instance—just before the war.
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He returned to full-time work at the Labs immediately after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kelly had told him he had a new project in mind.

I
n technology and business—and in men’s lives, too—the war cleaved the past from the future. Shockley, for instance, would not be returning to the Labs’ West Street offices in Manhattan. Kelly’s postwar plans for him, as well as for Bell Labs, depended on a move across the Hudson River. For the past five years, in between all of his wartime work, Kelly had devoted large blocks of time to orchestrating the construction of an immense complex of buildings in the wooded hills of New Jersey. Situated in a neighborhood called Murray Hill that was set within the quiet suburban towns of New Providence and Berkeley Heights, the new office was to be located about twenty-five miles from New York. “It was decided in the mid-thirties to initiate a gradual exodus from the city,” Kelly recalled some years later, explaining that the aging labs at West Street had been deemed “non-functional” by that point. A 225-acre tract in Murray Hill had already been acquired. In July 1930 Frank Jewett, the Labs president, had called a public meeting near the future location to announce the land acquisition and describe a plan to build a research facility.
¹
Those plans had been put on hold until the worst years of the Depression had passed, and in 1938 the idea of a grand suburban
laboratory was revived by Jewett, then–vice president Oliver Buckley, and research chief Kelly.

Some of their reasons were purely scientific. For years Bell Labs had been operating small satellite facilities at far-flung locations around New Jersey—near the shore in the towns of Holmdel and Deal, for instance, and in the forested hills near the North Jersey town of Whippany. Long-wave and shortwave radio researchers at those outposts needed distance from the interference of New York City (and from one another) to do proper research and measurements. Murray Hill was put in a similar context: A move to the suburbs would allow the physics, chemistry, and acoustics staff to conduct research in a location unaffected by the dirt, noise, vibrations, and general disturbances of New York City.

It was also true, however, that Bell Labs was growing at such a clip it had simply overrun its facilities. In a private memo to Jewett, Buckley noted that “these buildings at Murray Hill [would] secure relief from an unsatisfactory and hazardous housing situation in New York City.” A new laboratory, in other words, would allow for the ultimate consolidation of the organization’s research staff, which was now spread out in a number of rented buildings and even in the basement of 463 West Street. In his memo, Buckley could have added another reason for the move, but it would have been unnecessary: The new site was close to his home and Jewett’s. Buckley lived a few minutes away in the town of Maplewood; Jewett was in Short Hills, as were Kelly and Davisson. Shockley lived in nearby Madison as well. The executives were building a new laboratory in their own backyard.

With a price tag of about $4.1 million, the new building was not conceived as an ordinary laboratory.
²
By the late 1930s, Murray Hill had become a research and development project in itself, designed with meticulous care by Buckley and Kelly and a number of other engineers so that it would not only relieve Bell Labs’ congestion problems but would organize its scientists in an unusual configuration that could be expanded on a far grander scale in future years. Kelly, Buckley, and Jewett were of the mind that Bell Labs would soon become—or was already—the largest and most advanced research organization in the world. As they toured
industrial labs in the United States and Europe in the mid-1930s, seeking ideas for their own project, their opinions were reinforced. They wanted the new building to reflect the Labs’ lofty status and academic standing—“surroundings more suggestive of a university than a factory,” in Buckley’s words, but with a slight but significant difference. “No attempt has been made to achieve the character of a university campus with its separate buildings,” Buckley told Jewett. “On the contrary, all buildings have been connected so as to avoid fixed geographical delineation between departments and to encourage free interchange and close contact among them.”
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The physicists and chemists and mathematicians were not meant to avoid one another, in other words, and the research people were not meant to evade the development people.

By intention, everyone would be in one another’s way. Members of the technical staff would often have both laboratories and small offices—but these might be in different corridors, therefore making it necessary to walk between the two, and all but assuring a chance encounter or two with a colleague during the commute. By the same token, the long corridor for the wing that would house many of the physics researchers was intentionally made to be seven hundred feet in length. It was so long that to look down it from one end was to see the other end disappear at a vanishing point. Traveling its length without encountering a number of acquaintances, problems, diversions, and ideas would be almost impossible. Then again, that was the point. Walking down that impossibly long tiled corridor, a scientist on his way to lunch in the Murray Hill cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.

M
URRAY
H
ILL’S FIRST BUILDING
—Building 1, as it was eventually known—officially opened in 1942.
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Inside it was a model of sleek and flexible utility. Every office and every lab was divided into six-foot increments so that spaces could be expanded or shrunk depending on needs, thanks to a system of soundproofed steel partition walls that could be moved on short notice. Thus a research team with an eighteen-foot lab might, if space allowed, quickly expand their work into a twenty-four-foot lab.
Each six-foot space, in addition, was outfitted with pipes providing all the basic needs of an experimentalist: compressed air, distilled water, steam, gas, vacuum, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. And there was both DC and AC power. From the outside, the Murray Hill complex appeared vaguely H-shaped. Most of the actual laboratories were located in two long wings, each four stories high, which were built in parallel and were connected by another wing. Set back a thousand feet from the street, Building 1—finished in limestone and buff-colored brick and roofed with copper sheeting that in a few years’ time would acquire a green patina—was fronted by a vast apron of lawn. Buckley and Kelly wanted quiet, and quiet is what they got. The roads on all four sides of the complex were lightly traveled, and behind the building were hundreds of acres of protected forest set in a county reservation of rolling hills. In the mornings, before the nine hundred or so scientists and technical assistants arrived, the massive building set amid the greenery had a grand and rarefied hush. The Bell Labs executives had not only built a new lab; they had built a citadel.

As American industry made the transition to postwar work, scientists from around the country made a pilgrimage. “Its use in our military research activities during the war years demonstrated its great worth,” Kelly said with pride in the mid-1940s, as if it were another Bell Labs invention, which in fact he thought it was. “It has attracted so much attention that representatives of more than eighty industrial laboratories have visited it and have obtained detailed information from us about its special functional features,” he added. Many laboratories patterned after Murray Hill were now under construction in the United States; European research managers and architects had come to study the building, too. Meanwhile the location, and not just the building, had drawn the interest of other companies, leading a number of industrial labs to locate nearby. One newspaper dubbed the New Jersey suburbs “research row.”

Bell Labs was Kelly’s shop now—officially, that is. In 1944 Frank Jewett had elevated himself to Bell Labs chairman, a mostly honorary position, as the war and Washington politics consumed his attention. Buckley had meanwhile assumed the presidency, a rank that put him on
a busy circuit of speaking engagements around the country while also forcing him to tend to AT&T corporate obligations in New York City. Kelly became executive vice president, giving him complete control over day-to-day operations. One of his first acts was reorganizing the Murray Hill staff one day in July 1945. On that morning, several supervisors were demoted, while men younger and better versed in solid-state physics, such as Bill Shockley, were promoted. Dean Woolridge told the science historian Lillian Hoddeson that “there were rumors that Kelly was reorganizing for peacetime and everybody knew something was going to happen when he announced a big meeting.” Many, if not all, of the supervisors in the research department were called together in a large room with Kelly. “He sat up there at the head of the room and he read off ‘From now on thou shalt do this and thou shalt have this particular group and you’re going to move over here and do this kind of work and you’re going to do this.’” Kelly had worked out the new organizational structure in minute detail. The meeting took most of the day.