The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (6 page)

K
ELLY’S PROMOTION
, in the mid-1930s, coincided with a slight easing in the Great Depression. Phone subscriptions picked up, and so did telephone company revenues. At that point, Kelly successfully argued for extra funding to hire a group of scientists for his research department. He had his pick of almost anyone. For one thing, the Labs’ reputation had been burnished over the past few years by the work of Kelly’s old office mate, Davy Davisson. He had won fame in his profession—and in 1937, the Nobel Prize—for his experiments in what was called electron diffraction. (In an experiment, Davisson had bombarded a piece of crystalline nickel with electrons, and the results demonstrated a theory first put forward by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger that electrons moved in a wave pattern.) For Kelly’s new hires, however, a good salary likely mattered more than Davisson’s notoriety. Kelly had funding at a time when almost no one else did. The country’s universities had drastically pared their budgets and teaching positions were almost impossible to come by. And even where research or teaching positions
could be found, colleges were offering only a fraction—a half or, at best, two-thirds—of the Labs’ starting salary of $3,000 a year. “I had already figured that $2,600 was practically putting me up in the state of a rajah,” said one of the recruits, Dean Woolridge, a student under Millikan (who had now moved from the University of Chicago to Caltech). “$3,000 was just fantastic.”
¹³

It was curious, in a way, who they were, these men coming to Bell Labs in New York. Most had been trained at first-rate graduate schools like MIT and Chicago and Caltech; they had been flagged by physics or chemistry or engineering professors at these places and their names had been quietly passed along to Kelly or someone else at the Labs. But most had been raised in fly-speck towns, intersections of nowhere and nowhere, places with names like Chickasa (in Woolridge’s case) or Quaker Neck or Petoskey, towns like the one Kelly had come from, rural and premodern like Gallatin, towns where their fathers had been fruit growers or merchants or small-time lawyers. Almost all of them had found a way out—a high school teacher, oftentimes, who noticed something about them, a startling knack for mathematics, for example, or an insatiable curiosity about electricity, and had tried to nurture this talent with extra assignments or after-school tutoring, all in the hope (never explained to the young men but realized by them all, gratefully, many years later) that the students could be pushed toward a local university and away from the desolation of a life behind a plow or a cash register.

The young Bell Labs recruits had other things in common. Almost all had grown up with a peculiar desire to know more about the stars or the telephone lines or (most often) the radio, and especially their makeshift home wireless sets. Almost all of them had put one together themselves, and in turn had discovered how sound could be pulled from the air.

Kelly had personally hired two young PhDs from MIT, William Shockley and Jim Fisk, both of whom would have vast impacts on the Labs’ future. Others came from Caltech, such as Woolridge and an engineer named John Pierce. A chemist named William Baker was hired
from Princeton. Pierce and Baker would also have tremendous influence over Bell Labs’ destiny. Another Caltech graduate was a physicist named Charles Townes, who’d been raised on a farm near Greenville, South Carolina. To grow up that way, he would later explain, made you “pay attention to the natural world, to work with machinery, and to know how to solve practical problems and fix things innovatively, with what is on hand.” In Townes’s view, those “farms and small towns are good training grounds for experimental physics.”
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This was not necessarily an isolated opinion; a young experimental physicist who had come to the Labs a few years before Townes felt the same way. Walter Brattain grew up in rural Washington State, in Walla Walla. He had spent an entire year before college herding cattle in the mountains near his home, sleeping alone for months on end in a tent with a rifle. (When he left Washington for graduate school in Minnesota, he hopped a freight train to get there.)
¹⁵
In regard to his skills as a physicist, Brattain would later say it was important “that my maternal grandfather was [a] flour miller by trade, that my paternal great grandfather, Andrew McCalley, was also a flour miller by trade, and [that] I spent a considerable [part] of my youth—a lot of years of high school and while I was at college—in a flour mill run by my father.” Brattain could take apart a car engine easily and put it back together with equal ease.
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A certain fearlessness about life characterized the recruits. Charles Townes had been given $100 by Bell Labs to make the trip from California by rail, a sum he figured could go much further if he improvised. He took a Greyhound bus from Los Angeles to Tucson, and once there he bought a ticket for a cheap train to Mexico City. Before leaving on his trip he’d bought an accordion from a German student, “a rather ardent Nazi follower who spent a fair amount of time telling us all what a vital job Hitler was doing.” And so Townes sat on the Mexico City train in third class in the summer of 1939, “on slatted wood benches that were none too comfortable, and played a Nazi’s accordion and sang songs with Mexican fruit pickers on their way home from the fields in the United States.” He felt nervous about eating the local food at the stops—mostly he was afraid of dysentery—and for two days he lived on bottled beer.
From Mexico City he traveled to the Guatemala border, but could go no farther when he discovered a bridge was closed. So instead he went up to Acapulco, not yet a tourist destination, and rented a hut on the beach for fifty cents a night, where he spent the days swimming in the warm tropical waters. Then another cheap train to Texas. Then a bus to see his family in South Carolina. And then finally another bus to get to New York City. “The $100 from Bell Labs,” he recalled, “just about exactly covered the trip’s total cost.”
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During their first few days in New York, the new “members of the technical staff”—MTSs, as they were called—learned their way around West Street. They were summoned to listen to speeches by Labs vice president Buckley, delivered from detailed note cards, and research chief Kelly, delivered from memory with his eyes closed, as was his habit, welcoming them to Bell Labs. But mostly they met with their supervisors—in Townes’s case, Harvey Fletcher; in Bill Shockley’s case, Clinton Davisson—to try and hash out what kind of work they would be doing. At one point during the first few days the freshmen were asked to sell the rights to their future patents, whatever these might be; their research, wherever it took them, was to benefit Bell Labs and phone subscribers. None of the young men refused. And in exchange for their signatures, each was given a crisp one-dollar bill.

T
he physicists that Kelly hired toward the end of the Great Depression—Shockley, Fisk, Woolridge, Townes, and all the rest—already knew how easily ideas could move from one side of the earth to the other. Usually the ideas came inside an envelope, printed in a formidable journal—
Annalen der Physik
from Germany, for instance, or
Physical Review
from New York—transported by the mail trains to New England, the Midwest, or the West Coast, where the package would be eagerly received by young physicists at places like Harvard, Chicago, or Caltech. The ideas also came to willing readers, in clear and eloquent English, via a publication named the
Bell System Technical Journal
, where a physicist named Karl Darrow, another former student of Millikan’s, had a gift for summarizing what he called “contemporary advances” in science, such as the newest model of the structure of the atom. Darrow had trembling hands. This left him unsuited to experimentation. Before Harold Arnold died, however, he had recognized in Darrow a useful skill for disseminating information. “I was thinking that I ought to look for a place in the academic world,” Darrow recalled, when Arnold “told me I might remain and do what I pleased.”
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The catch was that Darrow shouldn’t expect his Bell Labs salary to rise as high as that of the engineers working
more directly on phone company business—a fair enough trade-off to Darrow. From then on his job involved traveling to Europe in the summers and effectively serving as an intermediary between scientific ideas there and in the United States. More often than not, his writings addressed the behavior of matter and energy at the tiny, molecular—that is,
quantum
—level. Quantum mechanics, as it was beginning to be called, was a science of deep surprises, where theory had largely outpaced the proof of experimentation. Some years later the physicist Richard Feynman would elegantly explain that “it was discovered that things on a small scale behave
nothing like
things on a large scale.” In the quantum world, for instance, you could no longer say that a particle has a certain location or speed. Nor was it possible, Feynman would point out, “to predict
exactly
what will happen in any circumstance.” To describe the actions of electrons or nuclei at the center of atoms, in other words, was not only exceedingly difficult. One also had to forsake the sturdy and established laws of Newtonian physics for an airy realm of imagination.
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Increasingly, during the late 1920s and early 1930s, ideas arrived in the flesh, too. Some years Karl Darrow would visit California to lecture; some years students in various locations would learn from a physics professor named John Van Vleck, who was permitted to ride the nation’s passenger trains free of charge because he had helped work out the national rail schedules with exacting precision. It also was the case that a scholar from abroad (a 1931 world tour by the German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, for instance) would bring the new ideas to the students at Caltech or the University of Michigan. Indeed, the Bell Labs experimentalist Walter Brattain, the physicist son of a flour miller, was taking a summer course at Michigan when he heard Sommerfeld talk about atomic structure. Brattain dutifully took notes and brought the ideas back to New York. At West Street, he gave an informal lecture series to his Bell Labs colleagues.

Every month, as it happened, seemed to bring a new study on physics, chemistry, or metallurgy that was worth spreading around—on the atomic structure of crystals, on ultra-high-frequency radio waves, on films that cover the surface of metals, and so forth. One place to learn
about these ideas was the upper floor of the Bell Labs West Street offices, where a large auditorium served as a place for Bell Labs functions and a forum for new ideas. In the 1920s, a one-hour colloquium was set up at 5 p.m. on Mondays so that outside scholars like Robert Millikan and Enrico Fermi or inside scholars like Davisson, Darrow, and Shockley—though only twenty-seven years old at the time—could lecture members of the Bell Labs technical staff on recent scientific developments. (Albert Einstein came to West Street in 1935, but was evidently more interested in touring the microphone shop with Harvey Fletcher than giving a talk.)
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Another place to learn about the new ideas was the local universities. The Great Depression, as it happened, was a boon for scientific knowledge. Bell Labs had been forced to reduce its employees’ hours, but some of the young staffers, now with extra time on their hands, had signed up for academic courses at Columbia University in uptown Manhattan. Usually the recruits enrolled in a class taught on the Columbia campus by a professor named Isidor Isaac (I. I.) Rabi, who was destined for a Nobel Prize.

And there was, finally, another place on West Street where new ideas could now spread. Attendance was allowed by invitation only. Some of the Labs’ newest arrivals after the Depression had decided to further educate themselves through study groups where they would make their way through scientific textbooks, one chapter a week, and take turns lecturing one another on the newest advances in theoretical and experimental physics. One study group in particular, informally led by William Shockley at the West Street labs, and often joined by Brattain, Fisk, Townes, and Woolridge, among others, met on Thursday afternoons. The men were interested in a particular branch of physics that would later take on the name “solid-state physics.” It explored the properties of solids (their magnetism and conductivity, for instance) in terms of what happens on their surfaces as well as deep in their atomic structure. And the men were especially interested in the motions of electrons as they travel through the crystalline lattice of metals. “What had happened, I think, is that these young Ph.D.’s were introducing what is essentially an academic concept into this industrial laboratory,” one member of the group,
Addison White, would tell the physics historian Lillian Hoddeson some years later. “The seminar, for example, was privileged in that we started at let’s say a quarter of five, when quitting time was five.” The men had tea and cookies served to them from the cafeteria—“all part of the university tradition,” White remarked, “but unconventional in the industrial laboratory of that day.” The material was a challenge for everyone in the group except Shockley, who could have done the work in his sleep, Woolridge would recall. Out of habit, the men addressed one another by their last names. According to Brattain, it was always
Shockley
and
Woolridge
—never Bill and Dean, and never Dr. Shockley and Dr. Woolridge.

As the study group wound down for the evening, the men would often make their way over to Brattain’s Greenwich Village apartment for a drink. By then it was 8 or 9 p.m.—time for dinner at a restaurant in the Village and then bed. Shockley lived nearby in an apartment on West 17th Street. “I don’t think we had the idea then that some of the sort of things that later have become so central in the technology—that they were around the corner,” he would recall. “There’s no telling how far off they were.”
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By outward appearances, the study group was merely comprised of telephone men who were intent on learning new ideas. They weren’t yet famous enough to set their own hours. They were expected to be back at West Street the next morning at 8:45 sharp, each wearing a crisp white shirt, jacket, and tie.