The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (24 page)

What made the Labs essential to the Nike program was an expertise in radar and communications. “Telephone technology has much in common with that of new weapons systems,” Kelly remarked as the Nike installations were being built.
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The new missiles, outfitted with several antennas, were guided by a complex control system, both in the air and on the ground, that involved radio detection and guidance and required, according to one assessment, approximately 1.5 million parts. Though nuclear arms and communications were often perceived as distinct phenomena—one was military, the other was civilian; one was deadly, the other benign—it was becoming increasingly difficult to separate the atomic age from the information age. Indeed, at the military’s request, Bell Labs and Western Electric also began designing and building a string of remote radar installations in the frozen wastes north of the Arctic Circle from Canada’s Baffin Island to Alaska’s northwestern coast; these installations, “the arctic eye that never sleeps” (as the
Bell Laboratories Record
put it), were meant to warn North America of a Soviet nuclear attack. Named the DEW—for Distant Early Warning—line and made possible by a string of nonmilitary discoveries years earlier at the Labs regarding microwave communications,
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the defensive systems were sister projects to the Labs’ military work that included BMEWS (Ballistic Missile Early Warning System) and White Alice, which connected radio sensors in Alaska to Air Force command headquarters in Colorado.

Sandia, Nike, DEW—“All that is part of our good citizenship and, I think, fully meets the obligation imposed by the unique place that we have in our society,” Kelly said.
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He wanted to limit the Labs’ military contracts so that they would not get in the way of its communications business, yet he harbored no apparent qualms about such endeavors. All were either strategically or financially important to the phone company; all were potentially useful in keeping at bay the antitrust regulators, who
still sought to break up the Bell System. The military work could easily be construed as part of the implicit pact between the phone company and the government that allowed it a monopoly.

To counter communist intransigence, Kelly remarked, would require a “two-front defense,” each as important as the other. Americans “are faced with maintaining a military strength adequate to deter the Russians from a general war, while at the same time maintaining a civilian economy that provides our people with an increasingly abundant life.” Both pursuits were to him necessary, and so he decided to split his lab, and his career, between the two.

O
n the civilian front at Bell Labs, there was still the business of semiconductors. Slowly, in the five years since the unveiling of Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley’s discoveries, Jack Morton, the transistor’s development chief, had shepherded the device through the Labs’ development process to the point that it had begun to infiltrate the mainstream economy. It had also moved outside of Ma Bell. The company’s executives—wary of the regulatory implications of hoarding the technology to itself, and also convinced that production costs of transistors would decrease much faster if the semiconductor industry was large and competitive—had licensed its patents to a number of other companies, including Raytheon, RCA, and GE. They were poised to join Western Electric in the transistor business. The year 1953,
Fortune
magazine proclaimed, would be “the year of the transistor,” when the “pea-sized time bomb,” fashioned from a sliver of purified germanium, finally went into volume production and thus began to erode the electronics industry’s dependence on the vacuum tube.
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The doubts that had dogged the invention after its unveiling had since vanished. The transistor, Francis Bello wrote in
Fortune
, in what seemed an uncanny echo of Mervin Kelly’s own thoughts, “will almost certainly stimulate greater changes in commerce and industry
than reaction motors, synthetic fibers, or even, perhaps, atomic energy.” The new devices were compact, reliable, and used so little power they could “lift information handling and computing machines—the nub of the second industrial revolution now upon us—to any imaginable degree of complexity.” “In the transistor and the new solid-state electronics,” Bello concluded, “man may hope to find a brain to match atomic energy’s muscle.”

In comparison to the vacuum tube, the transistor was still expensive. It had been helped along commercially during five years of incubation in large part by military contracts. For the armed forces, price was often less important than utility; the transistor’s size and low power requirements made it ideal for deployment on ships and planes (and in the Nike systems, too), where every ounce and every fraction of a watt—it used as little as one-hundred-thousandth of the power a vacuum tube required—made a difference.
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Within the consumer electronics industry, there seemed to be general accord that the transistor’s greatest value would be in computers and communications devices. But so far very few transistors had been integrated into the phone system, and those that had—to generate pulses for nationwide dialing in an office in Englewood, New Jersey, and to help route phone calls automatically in an office in Pittsburgh
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—were more like demonstration projects than actual technological overhauls. Long ago, the dream of an electronic switch had prompted Kelly’s initial push on semiconductors. As the
Fortune
story pointed out, a switching office with 65,000 electromechanical relays could do “slightly less than 1,000 switching operations a second.” Transistors—using a fraction of the power and lasting far longer—could potentially do a million.

So what was the Bell System waiting for? Kelly acknowledged that the phone company would capitalize on the transistor long after “other fields of application” such as the home entertainment industries.
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The recent Justice Department antitrust suit, which was now moving forward, was a stark reminder why: The phone company was a regulated monopoly and not a private company; it had no competitors pushing it to move forward faster. What’s more, it was obliged to balance costs
against service quality in the most cautious way possible. “Everything that we design must go through the judgment of lots of people as to its ability to replace the old,” Kelly told an audience of phone executives in October 1951. “It must do the job better, or cheaper, or both.”
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Any element within the system was designed (by Bell Labs) and built (by Western Electric) to last thirty or forty years. Junking a functional part before its time had to be economically justifiable. And if it wasn’t justifiable on economic grounds, it had to be justifiable on technological grounds.

The transistor could not be justified on technological grounds—at least not yet. The awesome intricacy of the phone system was not hospitable to sudden changes, even when they allowed for stark improvements. In time, Kelly remarked, the traffic and data needs of the system would require replacing tubes and switches with transistors.
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The Labs’ managers had already begun planning for new transistorized phones and an electronic switching station that, as it turned out, would take nearly twenty years to fully deploy. In the meantime, the system was working reliably and was giving customers a reasonably good product for their money. AT&T shareholders, who now numbered more than a million, making AT&T not only the world’s largest corporation but the most widely owned, also liked its steady profits and sizable dividends. On Wall Street, brokers called the dependable AT&T a “widows-and-orphans” stock; if you couldn’t rely on anyone else, you could rely on Ma Bell. The paradox, of course, was that a parent corporation so dull, so cautious, so predictable was also in custody of a lab so innovative. “Few companies are more conservative,”
Time
magazine said about AT&T, “none are more creative.”
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P
ERHAPS
, as Kelly realized, one need not rush the phone system’s evolution. But the business of communications was different than the science of communications, and in the science, Kelly’s employees could do whatever they liked to push ahead. By the mid-1950s, one of the essential questions facing researchers was whether the transistor of the future, and therefore the future of electronics, would be fashioned out of germanium
or silicon. All of the transistors so far had been made of germanium. But there were a number of reasons to favor silicon.
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Germanium is far rarer than silicon, which can be derived from sand. If the transistor industry were potentially as enormous as
Fortune
magazine envisioned, germanium’s scarcity (and its high price) could at some point limit the industry’s growth. More fundamentally, germanium had performance issues. For reasons owing to the behavior of its electrons, as germanium transistors got hotter, they became less reliable. In a very warm environment—150 degrees Fahrenheit and over—they were often useless.

In late 1952, a young chemist with a PhD from Princeton named Morris Tanenbaum joined the Bell Labs research department. As was typically the case with new recruits, Tanenbaum was encouraged by his supervisors to look around the Murray Hill complex—literally to drop in on neighboring laboratories for a few days—and see what kind of research interested him before he settled into a particular project. “The transistor was just a few years old then,” Tanenbaum recalls, “and there was still a lot of awful good work going on with germanium crystals. The question was: Are there better semiconductors than germanium?”
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Tanenbaum found this question intriguing. He began his search by obtaining a variety of materials—aluminum, gallium, indium, and so forth—in the purest states he could find. Usually they came from DuPont, and were sold as powders or in small chunks. He or his assistant would melt them into crystals. When Tanenbaum began his tests, he tried a rare element called tellurium; soon after, following some work he had heard about in the Siemens labs in Germany, he began working with a compound of indium and antimony. At that point, Shockley got involved.

“Bill said, ‘Look, germanium has a number of properties that really aren’t very good,’” Tanenbaum recalls, “‘so let’s really look at silicon.’” Several years before, Bardeen and Brattain and Brattain’s lab mate Gerald Pearson had tried to make silicon transistors but had been discouraged by the results. Shockley wanted to try again. “I was asked if I would like to work with him to do that,” Tanenbaum recalls. “I had heard about Shockley’s reputation,” he says, noting that it almost scared him away from the project. “Shockley had an ego substantially larger than a house—and he
deserved that. He was a very brilliant guy. But it turned out I never had any problems. Being a physicist with Shockley, well then, you had better be very, very good or you’re going to have a hell of a time.” But being a chemist, with knowledge outside of Shockley’s sphere of expertise, put Tanenbaum beyond the reach of his bullying.

Working with silicon, as Tanenbaum soon discovered, was far more frustrating than working with Shockley. Still, the rewards of success seemed obvious to most people in the solid-state area. “If anyone could actually build a silicon transistor,” Tanenbaum remarks, “then we knew it would even work in boiling water.” DuPont was already selling what it called “pure silicon” for semiconductor devices; according to the
Wall Street Journal,
the company was then charging $430 a pound.
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The product, which arrived at Bell Labs as a powder, was a useful starting point. But it was only a starting point. Silicon has an extraordinarily high melting point, about 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, and is easily tainted in the “melt” by all sorts of other unwelcome elements. The residue from the crucible that it has been melted in, for instance, can easily ruin its potential as an electronic device. Indeed, while it was true that the metallurgists at Bell Labs wanted their silicon to have small amounts of impurities, they only wanted certain
kinds
of impurities, so as to affect the conduction in useful ways. They wanted a few atoms of one specific type of element to transform the silicon into the negative n-type and a few atoms of another specific type of element to transform the silicon into the positive p-type. Then they wanted to join the two. The junction between the p-type and n-type was where the movements of electrons and holes resulted in transistor action.

Success, to a certain degree, came quickly. After several months of work, Tanenbaum, with the help of his lab technician, Ernie Buehler, “grew” a long crystal of silicon through a complex process that involved varying the rate at which the crystal was being “pulled” up from the molten silicon. By varying the rate, the men could alternate the amount of n-type and p-type impurities that were incorporated into the crystal. When they were done, this long crystal—about four and a half inches long and three-quarters of an inch wide—had dozens of tiny n-p-n sandwiches
all stacked up, giving it the appearance of a thin rod made up of tiny gray slices piled on top of one another. After slicing one of the n-p-n portions from the tiny stack, the men fashioned, in January 1954, the world’s first working silicon transistor. A few months later, Gordon Teal, a former Bell Labs metallurgist who had pioneered techniques for making germanium crystals before joining a tiny semiconductor company called Texas Instruments, unveiled his own silicon transistor. But neither of these developments were cause for celebration. One of the drawbacks of Buehler and Tanenbaum’s silicon transistor was their complicated fabrication method, which seemed unsuitable for mass production. To actually change the course of an entire industry, a silicon transistor would have to be reliable and easy to make.

For nearly a year afterward, Tanenbaum kept working with silicon. He was in Building 2 at Murray Hill, with Shockley’s research team; just down the hall was Jack Morton’s transistor development group. In Building 1, across a courtyard, Tanenbaum had a chemistry colleague named Cal Fuller. Like many of his fellow researchers at the Labs, Fuller had a background that should never have led him into a distinguished life in science. A slim and scholarly-looking man, the son of a bookkeeper who was raised in a poor family in Chicago, Fuller as a teenager had experimented diligently with his wireless radio and home chemistry set. He never imagined he would go to college. But then his high school physics teacher thought otherwise. She was Mabel Walbridge, “a very demanding teacher,” Fuller recalled, “a woman in her fifties or early sixties” who had taken courses earlier in her life from Robert Millikan. She knew that the University of Chicago offered exams to high school students in science and math. She also knew that for those who passed, the university “provided full tuition for the first year and, if you were among the top twenty-five students in your class at the university, for the following three years.” Walbridge demanded that Fuller pursue the scholarship. “She tutored me nights on her own time,” Fuller said, still astounded by the fact sixty years later, “so that when I took the exam I was prepared for almost every question.” Fuller went on to an undergraduate degree at Chicago and a PhD in chemistry. He put himself through graduate
school by working the four-o’clock-to-midnight shift at the
Chicago Tribune.
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