The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (47 page)

He never did. And in truth Shannon had no compelling reason to publish anything anymore. His legacy was secure. And his reputation was not harmed by his reclusive tendencies.
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On the contrary, his legend only appeared to grow. Each year seemed to bring a new honorary degree or prize that he and Betty collected by traveling the world. In one famous instance in 1985, Shannon showed up, unannounced, at an international conference on information theory in Brighton, England. He blended into the crowd—just another kindly, polite, slender, white-haired gentleman. He’d been absent from academic meetings for so long that apparently no one recognized him. Then a rumor spread that Shannon was there. As one of the attendees later told
Scientific American
, “it was as if Newton had showed up at a physics conference.”
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Later, when Shannon was asked to speak, he grew anxious, believing he had little of value to say, and took several balls out of his pocket. And then he juggled for the crowd. Afterward, the attendees, some of the leading mathematicians and engineers in the world, lined up to get his autograph.

It may have been the case that Shannon, like Shockley, deserved a Nobel Prize. But the Nobel is not awarded for mathematics or engineering. In the mid-1980s, however, an award was established in Japan known as the Kyoto Prize that was meant for outstanding contributions in the field of mathematics. Shannon was voted the first recipient. “I don’t know how history is taught here in Japan,” he told the audience when he traveled there in 1985 to give an acceptance speech, “but in the United States in my college days, most of the time was spent on the study of political leaders and wars—Caesars, Napoleons, and Hitlers. I think this is totally wrong. The important people and events of history are the thinkers and innovators, the Darwins, Newtons, Beethovens whose work continues to grow in influence in a positive fashion.” Shannon also conveyed little doubt that machines would soon outpace humans in some respects. Forty years before, he had been one of the first to pursue a computerized chess program; now, in the 1986 Kyoto speech, he noted that chess programs had become so sophisticated that they could beat chess masters. He believed they would soon beat grandmasters. And after that he believed they would win a prize by dethroning a world champion. “If I were a betting man,” he said, “I would bet that this prize will be won before the year 2001.”

The joke, perhaps, was that Shannon wasn’t much of a betting man. He made wagers when logic assured him he could win. Or he built games tilted in his favor. He won the chess bet in 1997, when Deep Blue, an IBM chess computer, beat the Russian grandmaster Garry Kasparov. The result, however, gave Shannon little satisfaction. At that point he was living in a Massachusetts nursing home, his mind lost to Alzheimer’s. It had begun, some of his friends recall, in the late 1980s, when there had been lapses when he tried to answer questions. At first, small things were forgotten. Then it became larger things, to the point where efforts to recall events left him skidding through broad and frightening blank patches in his memory. His handwriting became shaky. He forgot about some of his Bell Labs work. He would get lost coming home from the store. Eventually he lost the ability to place names and faces.

It took Betty Shannon years after her husband’s death, in 2001, to
clear out their Massachusetts house. There were so many awards and robes from honorary graduations, and so many books and papers, many of which Shannon had forgotten or decided never to publish. And there were, finally, so many machine parts and tools, probably tens of thousands of dollars’ worth. Betty donated some of the games and juggling toys he had built to the MIT Museum, which in a 2007 exhibit dubbed them
Claude Shannon’s Ingenious Machines
. His juggling clowns were included, along with games and machines such as THROBAC, the useless but amusing hand-built computer that could calculate in Roman numerals. Theseus, a remnant from the Bell Labs days—the mouse-machine built by Shannon, mostly late at night, which could navigate any maze—was one of the featured museum pieces, too.

J
OHN
P
IERCE OUTLIVED
C
LAUDE
S
HANNON
by one year. At the very end of their lives, the two men were too ill to communicate. As Shannon suffered from Alzheimer’s, Pierce suffered from Parkinson’s. Long before either had become sick, however, they enjoyed a final hurrah.

In the spring of 1978 the men spent a semester together in England. The idea had been Rudi Kompfner’s, Pierce’s friend and collaborator on the traveling wave tube and the Echo satellite, who had retired from the Labs and was teaching at All Souls College in Oxford. He had arranged for Shannon, Pierce, and Barney Oliver (the former Bell Labs researcher who had gone on to run Hewlett-Packard’s research labs) to come to Oxford as visiting fellows for a college term. The three men had something in common: Thirty years before, they had collaborated on a paper about pulse code modulation that had proven prescient. The men had put forward the notion that digital pulses, rather than waves, were certain to be the future of information transmission. At Oxford, they were to have only one obligation: to lecture about any aspect of their research work they deemed important. “To get something out of Claude may be the problem,” Kompfner admitted in a note to Pierce. “Could you help?”
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Pierce, too, worried that this could ruin the plan. When Shannon didn’t want to do something, Pierce knew, Shannon didn’t do it. “I don’t know
how to tackle Claude effectively,” Pierce confessed to Kompfner. “Maybe Barney and I could
interview
him about information theory, the stock market, and other matters?”
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As it turned out, the triumphant reunion of the soothsayers of the information age became infused with melancholy. It’s unclear what, if anything, Shannon contributed while in England, with the exception of some notes he made for a mirrored contraption allowing American drivers to adjust more easily to the English custom of driving on the left side of the road. Pierce, for his part, delivered a lecture in memory of his friend Kompfner, who had died of a heart attack a few months before the reunion took place.

Pierce went back home to Caltech. For six years he had been doing research and advising graduate students, but he was finding the adjustment difficult. At Bell Labs he had spent his days doing whatever suited him. The brunt of his management work there had consisted of dropping in, unannounced, on colleagues in their labs to ask how work was progressing. But at Caltech he had to give lectures at a prearranged time and then had to spend hours explaining complex ideas to grad students. At Bell Labs, as he recalled it, the same conversation with his colleagues would usually take minutes. (Whether his colleagues actually understood his explanations, or whether he simply walked away before he could field their questions, was a matter for debate.) “I didn’t adapt well to Cal Tech,” he later admitted. “Not that there was anything wrong. For years and years I’d had it too easy. There were very few times when it mattered where I was. I had very few obligations to be at a particular place at a particular time to do a particular thing at Bell Labs.” Pierce obviously seemed to favor the Bell Labs arrangement. As he saw it, the work at the Labs was vital; it was required to improve the network. “People cared about everything,” he said of colleagues there. On the contrary, he noted, in the university “no one can tell a professor what to do, on the one hand. But in any deep sense, nobody cares what he’s doing, either.”
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Pierce may have complained about academia merely because he complained about a lot of things. He was caviling and argumentative by
nature. It nevertheless remained the case that the good fortune he enjoyed throughout his life lasted long after his Bell Labs retirement. His advice to his students in California was that the key to a good life was to be lucky
and
smart. To be sure, he considered himself both. His complaints to the contrary, he often enjoyed working with students, and he did serious research during his spare time. He and his wife lived in Pasadena, in a home with a serene Japanese rock garden and a small bubbling waterfall. He had a vast home library where he could spend entire days reading. And like Shannon, Pierce now had the pleasure of collecting a trove of honorary degrees and prizes from around the world. Meanwhile, he maintained a large network of friends, some of whom continued to offer him work. When Pierce retired from Caltech in 1979, for instance, he spent a few years working as a technology advisor at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. And a few years later, at an age when most of his friends had retired or died, he decided to devote the rest of his life to music. Stanford offered him a visiting professorship in its Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. The school went by the abbreviation CCRMA, but it appealed to Pierce that it was commonly pronounced as “karma.” And so in 1983 Pierce moved north, from Pasadena to Palo Alto, to start anew.

By his own admission, John Pierce could not carry a tune. And there was no way of avoiding the truth: He was not a good piano player. His limitations, though, had never diminished his interest in music or his conviction that it was possible to innovate within the art. In the 1950s, for instance, Pierce and Shannon—a devoted clarinetist, oboist, and jazz fan—made several attempts at Bell Labs to merge their interest in music and information. “John and Claude tried to figure out the information rate of music as well as sound,” recalls Max Mathews, who worked on digital transmission and acoustics at Bell Labs. Neither was successful in these efforts, Mathews says, “and neither were they successful in creating programs to compose interesting music.” But Mathews recalls that one evening in 1957, at a classical music concert that Pierce and Mathews attended, “Pierce said, ‘You get sound out of a computer now, you get
numbers out of sound, if you write a different program, maybe you can get computers to make music.’ He said, ‘Take a little time from your computer work and try that.’ ” Mathews went on to become one of the pioneers of computer-generated music. He and Pierce and Baker justified the research to AT&T management by explaining, truthfully, that it would yield insights into computer-synthesized speech, which was considered useful for the phone system.

By the time Pierce arrived at Stanford, computer-generated music had become a thriving field. There were now electronic tools to create and manipulate almost any sound. At Stanford, he became particularly interested in what he called “psychoacoustics.” This was the relation, as Pierce described it, “between the acoustic stimulus and what we perceive internally—how it strikes us, what we can distinguish.”
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More enduringly, Pierce helped invent a scale, known as the Bohlen-Pierce scale, that was not built upon a standard octave but a different arrangement of thirteen ascending tones. It was a characteristically complex endeavor, and his efforts to explain it were laced with technical jargon about the scale’s frequency ratios.
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A composer and friend of Pierce’s described its musical effect more directly, in words that almost seemed to describe Pierce himself. Pierce’s scale, the friend said, has “ear-catching dissonances [and] warm and pure consonances.” But music tends to resist easy description. The experience of listening to compositions written in the scale—easily done through an Internet search—can be Pierce-like, too: quirky, ethereal, intriguing. You are certain you’re not listening to anything you’ve heard before.

On Pierce’s eightieth birthday, a friend at Northwestern University decided to honor him with a concert. Several pieces of music were commissioned for the event. One of these, “I Know of No Geometry,” was based on the Pierce scale; another was named “Echo,” in honor of Pierce’s satellite experiment.
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Pierce traveled to Illinois for the ceremony. “My life,” he said in a speech at the concert, “has been full of surprises.” He dutifully recalled his work on satellites, digital communications, and telephone switching. “Ideas and plans are essential to innovation,” he remarked, “but the time has to be right.” He wondered if that moment
had arrived for computer music. He also wondered if the composers and innovators gathered at his party were taking advantage of that fact. “While I am amazed at the wonderful sounds that have been generated and used musically,” Pierce told his friends, “I am somewhat disappointed that the variety of sounds used effectively has been narrow compared with the range of natural sounds—bird sounds, the sly sounds of creatures hidden from sight, ferocious sounds, sea sounds, stormy gales, waves, the creaking of spars, and, too, the sounds of brooks, and the soughing of winds and rustling of branches. In part, such sounds have been organized into music. But somehow, I had dreamed of more.” Apparently, he was still trying to instigate something.

B
ILL
B
AKER
, like Mervin Kelly, had spent his entire working life at Bell Laboratories. He had risen from a lowly member of the technical staff to president. What should he do afterward? The answer was that he wouldn’t leave. After Baker’s term as president ended around 1980, the Labs’ management agreed to provide him with a driver and an office and a secretary, and life went on much as before. The part of his workday that involved managing research projects and telecommunications was now over; in Ian Ross and John Mayo, the two men who followed Baker as president, the Labs had a succession of able and independent-minded executives. But Baker was still involved with a dizzying number of committees and corporate boards. Through the 1980s, moreover, he still had his work in Washington to occupy him. Some of his advice was given to presidents and intelligence agencies informally; most was solicited through his work on various government committees, some of which still met in secret. Even into the early 1990s, as Baker neared his eightieth birthday, his office at Murray Hill boasted a direct line to the White House and a highly secure STU-III phone to the Pentagon. As his secretary was instructed, if Baker happened to be out of the office and either phone rang, “do not answer it.”