The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (8 page)

W
E USUALLY IMAGINE
that invention occurs in a flash, with a eureka moment that leads a lone inventor toward a startling epiphany. In truth, large leaps forward in technology rarely have a precise point of origin. At the start, forces that precede an invention merely begin to align, often imperceptibly, as a group of people and ideas converge, until over the course of months or years (or decades) they gain clarity and momentum and the help of additional ideas and actors. Luck seems to matter, and so does timing, for it tends to be the case that the right answers, the right people, the right place—perhaps all three—require a serendipitous encounter with the right problem. And then—sometimes—a leap. Only in retrospect do such leaps look obvious. When Niels Bohr—along with Einstein, the world’s greatest physicist—heard in 1938 that splitting a uranium atom could yield a tremendous burst of energy, he slapped his head and said, “Oh, what idiots we have all been!”
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A year earlier, Mervin Kelly assigned William Shockley to a training program for new employees that included time in the vacuum tube laboratory. One day, Kelly stopped by Shockley’s West Street office, possibly to visit with Davisson, with whom Shockley shared the office, and began to talk. Shockley later recalled:

In a system that required supreme durability and quality, there were, in other words, two crucial elements that had neither: switching relays and vacuum tubes. As we’ve seen, tubes were extremely delicate and difficult to make; they required a lot of electricity and gave off great heat. Switches—the mechanisms by which each customer’s call was passed along the system’s vast grid to the precise party he was calling—were prone to similar problems. They were delicate mechanical devices; they used relays that employed numerous metal contacts; they could easily stop working and would eventually wear out. They were also, because they clicked open and closed, far slower than an electronic switch, without moving parts, might be. Kelly had set an intriguing goal that lingered in Shockley’s mind as he finished his indoctrination program and turned back to studying the physical properties of solid materials on his own and with his study group. Kelly’s articulation of a solution—a product, in essence—was fairly straightforward, even if the methods for creating such a product remained obscure: Perhaps the Labs could fashion solid-state switches, or solid-state amplifiers, with no breakable parts that operated only by way of electric pulses, to replace the system’s proliferating relays and tubes. For the rest of his life Shockley considered Kelly’s lecture as the moment when a particular idea freed his ambition, and in many respects all modern technology, from its moorings.

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W
HEN HE WAS OLDER
, when he had become famous for his scientific achievements and infamous for his unscientific views on race, Bill Shockley would recount his past and point to what he called “irregularities.” There were, he would concede, certain irregularities about his childhood—that he was homeschooled until he was about eight, for instance, or that his parents moved so often and so arbitrarily that it was sometimes difficult to explain why he attended a particular school or lived in a particular place. Other irregularities he didn’t readily concede. As a toddler, Shockley—“Billy” to his parents, May and William—would experience tantrums that put him beyond the reach of consolation. As his father dutifully related in his diaries, his son’s emotional outbursts were often uncontrollable. Billy would slap at his parents, throw stones at other boys, bark like a dog. “Billy always gets angry because he is thwarted or denied something,” his father noted in May 1912, when his son was just two years old, in a prescient journal entry entitled “Billy’s rages.” A week later, he observed that “when he is good, he is very good indeed; and when he is bad he is horrid.”
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Shockley was an only child, and a solitary one. When he was three years old, May and William had settled in Palo Alto, California, to begin eking out a middle-class life in the same small city where May had been raised. Shockley’s father was a mining engineer with a thoughtful demeanor and substantial assets from earlier in his career, but in Palo Alto he was often short on both employment and money. His fitful work schedule left him home often enough to tutor his son in math and encourage his early curiosity about science. But Shockley would say that his largest influence was a neighbor named Pearley Ross, a professor at Stanford who worked with X-rays and whose young daughters were Shockley’s main companions. Ross taught Shockley the fundamentals of physics.

In his teens, Shockley’s family moved from Palo Alto to Los Angeles, where he attended high school before enrolling at Caltech. Slight in frame (at five foot eight) but in taut physical condition (he was devoted to calisthenics
and swimming), he cut a memorable figure as an undergraduate. His childhood rages had subsided, replaced by a geniality that hid a relentless competitive edge and an occasional and savage asperity. The science prodigy seemed to have a compulsive need to charm, to entertain, to challenge the dull conventionality of academia, often in a way that subtly merged humor and aggression. Shockley schooled himself in parlor tricks and amateur magic. Sometimes he would use it to entertain a crowd at parties; other times he would use it to interrupt a sober affair or gently humiliate a lecturer. Bouncing balls materialized from nowhere, flowerpots exploded, bouquets popped suddenly from his sleeve in place of a handshake—incidents that created a distraction from the seriousness of institutional life while turning attention back on Shockley.
How did he do
that?
It was no wonder he loved to construct intricate practical jokes as well. In one Caltech class, Shockley, with the help of some fellow students and a few faculty members, concocted a successful scheme to enroll an entirely fictitious student named, in one Caltech student’s recollection, Helvar Skaade. The target was the class professor, Fritz Zwicky, who was known for his casual attitude on matters of class attendance. “All these tests were open book exams typically,” Dean Woolridge, one of Kelly’s young recruits who also attended Caltech, would later recall. “You could use any books that you wanted to. The procedure was for the professor to come in and write down the questions on the board, and Zwicky always had five problems, and then he would leave the room and come back at the end of the hour.” Shockley arranged for one copy of the exam to be taken out of the classroom, solved expertly by himself and a team of graduates who had already taken the class, signed by Helvar Skaade, and then returned in time to be handed in. Skaade, the mysterious young genius, answered all the questions brilliantly except for the last one, to which he responded, “Hell, I’m too damn drunk to write anymore.” Skaade got an A-minus, the highest grade in the class.
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Shockley came east with an adventurous flourish that burnished his personal mythology. In the summer of 1932, he and an acquaintance, Fred Seitz, drove from California in Shockley’s 1929 DeSoto Roadster. Shockley was on his way to MIT, where he had decided to pursue a PhD.
Seitz was going to get his physics PhD at Princeton—the men agreed Shockley would drop him off there. For the trip, Shockley brought a loaded pistol that he kept in the glove compartment. They selected a southern route that took them through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Arkansas, and they barely survived the trip. They encountered nights of torrential rains that obliterated the desert highways; in Kentucky, they narrowly averted a deadly head-on collision when they encountered two trucks racing toward them around a mountain pass, taking up both lanes of a two-lane road. “By the grace of the Lord, I had just enough shoulder to squeeze by the oncoming truck with perhaps an inch to spare,” Seitz recalled. “To the best of my knowledge I have never been closer to instant death than in those few seconds.”
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A few days later, on a moonlit night, Shockley dropped his new friend off in New Jersey. Princeton’s campus struck him as extremely attractive. When he arrived at MIT the next day, a stiff wind was blowing factory fumes into his face and the campus buildings appeared more industrial than academic. He wondered if he’d made a mistake. But MIT nevertheless turned out to be a good experience for Shockley. It gave him a strong background in quantum mechanics and introduced him to two friends who would prove crucial to his later career: Jim Fisk, a classmate, and Philip Morse, a professor.

To know Shockley, even in his twenties and thirties, was to be confused by him. Was he likable? “In a way,” says one of his former colleagues, Phil Anderson. An infectious energy and a boundless enthusiasm for physics had a tendency to pull colleagues into his orbit and allow them to overlook, at least for a while, his marauding ego. He could be fantastically good company—warm, witty, entertaining. He loved sharing a drink or two and frequently invited friends for rock-climbing trips or vacations in upstate New York with his wife and young daughter. He had an extraordinary talent for instruction and could be surprisingly generous with his time. “I would go visit him in the evenings in his apartment in Manhattan,” Chuck Elmendorf, a Caltech graduate who joined Bell Labs in 1936, recalls. “And I would just sit there on the edge of his couch and he would just teach me physics every night. He was decent, wonderful, pleasant.” In a more formal work environment, moreover, being around
Shockley meant being dazzled. “He was the quickest mind I’ve ever known,” adds Anderson, a theoretical physicist who went on to win a Nobel Prize. Even at the Labs, a place where everyone was fast on their feet, Shockley was faster. “His intellectual power was such that when Shockley said something,” recalled his colleague Addison White, “I recognized it was right.”
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There was something in particular about the way he solved difficult problems, looking them over and coming up with a method—often an
irregular
method, solving them backward or from the inside out or by finding a trapdoor that was hidden to everyone else—to arrive at an answer in what seemed a few heartbeats. Mervin Kelly had sensed this gift right away when he had visited MIT and met with Shockley in 1936. Shockley would later say, “I can recall talking to Kelly and being impressed that he called up, used the telephone to call all the way down to New York City, to find out if he’d be authorized to make me an offer, because I had to decide right then and there.”
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In Kelly’s research department on West Street, Shockley found he could go mostly where his curiosity led him, which was often to solid-state physics. He likewise found that at the Labs the experimentalists and theoreticians were encouraged to work together, and that chemists and metallurgists were welcome to join in, too. The interactions could be casual, but the work was a serious matter. Every new member of the technical staff was given a stock of hardcover lab notebooks that were bound in cloth and leather and filled with two hundred lined pages. In most offices, recalls Walter Brown, an experimental physicist who worked under Shockley, there was a notebook table, “maybe twelve by eighteen inches, standing on a three-legged stand on the floor, painted black. It was intended to hold a notebook for recording details of experiments and their results [as well as] ideas and plans for the future. Results or ideas that one thought were potentially valuable were witnessed and signed by another engineer for documentation of the timing of the idea.” The scientists were not permitted to rip out pages. Nor were they encouraged to attach loose sheets of paper into the notebook. “No erasures,” says Brown. “Lines through mistakes—initialed by who drew the lines.”
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Also, the notebooks were issued with registered numbers that were matched to each scientist and were tracked by supervisors and Labs attorneys. There was to be no confusion about who did what. The notebooks were proof for gaining a patent.

At some point in late 1939, Shockley had settled on an idea for how to make an electronic amplifier—much like the old repeater tube that Harold Arnold had improved—but this time out of solid materials. The production of vacuum tubes had improved since the days when Kelly ran the tube shop, but the essential problems remained: They were still fragile, they still consumed much electricity and produced much heat. The first attempts at making a solid-state amplifier, as Shockley was trying to do, involved simply copying the architecture of vacuum tubes. Shockley recalled later that his “first notebook entry on what might have been a working [solid-state amplifier] was as I recall late 1939.”
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It was actually December 29, 1939. Shockley had concluded by then that a certain class of materials known as semiconductors—so named because they are neither good conductors of electricity (like copper) nor good insulators of electricity (like glass), but somewhere in between—might be an ideal solid replacement for tubes. Under certain circumstances semiconductors are also known to be good “rectifiers”; that is, they allow an electric current passing through them to move in only one direction. This property made them potentially useful in certain kinds of electronic circuits. Shockley believed there could be a way to get them to amplify a current as well. He intuited that one common semiconductor—copper oxide—was a good place to start.

As a physicist, Shockley was far better as a theoretician than an experimentalist. On the other hand, Walter Brattain, his colleague at West Street, was about as good an experimentalist as could be found at Bell Labs. With good reason, Brattain prided himself on being able to build anything. “He came to me one day and said that he thought that if we made a copper-oxide rectifier in just the right way, that maybe we could make an amplifier,” Brattain recalled. “And I listened to him. I had a good esprit de corps with him, and so after he explained, I laughed at him.” Brattain, it turned out, had already tried a variation on the idea with
another colleague. But when he saw how intent Shockley was on trying out his idea, Brattain went along, pledging that he would make a prototype to Shockley’s precise specifications. In the early winter months of 1940, Brattain built a couple of units to Shockley’s specifications. “It was tested and the result was nil,” he recalled. “I mean, there was no evidence of anything.”
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