Bell Labs Quotes

You get paid for the seven and a half hours a day you put in here,” Kelly often told new Bell Labs employees in his speech to them on their first day, “but you get your raises and promotions on what you do in the other sixteen and a half hours.

The first is that if you haven’t manufactured the new thing in substantial quantities, you have not innovated;

We have now successfully passed all our deadlines without meeting any of them.

Bell Labs showed how sustained innovation could occur when people with a variety of talents were brought together,

When part of this ecosystem was lacking, such as for John Atanasoff at Iowa State or Charles Babbage in the shed behind his London home, great concepts ended up being consigned to history’s basement. And when great teams lacked passionate visionaries, such as Penn after Mauchly and Eckert left, Princeton after von Neumann, or Bell Labs after Shockley, innovation slowly withered.

In the past, pure scientists took a snobbish view of business. They saw the pursuit of money as intellectually uninteresting, suited only to shopkeepers. And to do research for industry, even at the prestigious Bell or IBM labs, was only for those who couldn't get a university appointment. Thus the attitude of pure scientists was fundamentally critical toward the work of applied scientists, and to industry in general. Their long-standing antagonism kept university scientists free of contaminating industry ties, and whenever debate arose about technological matters, disinterested scientists were available to discuss the issues at the highest levels.

in any company’s greatest achievements one might, with the clarity of hindsight, locate the beginnings of its own demise.

My first stop on any time-travel expedition would be Bell Labs in December 1947.

In 1948, while working for Bell Telephone Laboratories, he published a paper in the Bell System Technical Journal entitled "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" that not only introduced the word bit in print but established a field of study today known as information theory. Information theory is concerned with transmitting digital information in the presence of noise (which usually prevents all the information from getting through) and how to compensate for that. In 1949, he wrote the first article about programming a computer to play chess, and in 1952 he designed a mechanical mouse controlled by relays that could learn its way around a maze. Shannon was also well known at Bell Labs for riding a unicycle and juggling simultaneously.

Here," I said, the morning after the lazy, stupid Derek incident, as I intercepted Camden on his way to his locker shortly before the first-period bell and dragged him into an empty physics lab. I handed him three problem sets with the words PECKER and BALLS written all over them in multicolored highlighters, plus pictures of stick-figure people having sex in different positions. "This is to force your douche-bag friends to copy over the stuff in their own handwriting before they hand it in. There's no way I'm letting us get caught just because our clients get lazy." I crossed my arms and stared at him, daring him to get mad. He didn't. He just looked at the papers, surprised, then looked at me. "That's actually a really good idea," he said, sounding impressed. "I know," I said. "And these pictures you drew are weirdly hot." "I don't disagree," I said. "By the way, I'm charging you for the highlighters I bought." I think he might've said "I love you" as I walked out of the classroom, but the hallway was noisy, so I couldn't be sure.

Rahul did not realise the fluttering of the pigeons that so often disturbed everyone in the lab, by darting in and out of the ventilators. He did not realise the long, loud bell that went off, signalling the end of the last lecture, nor did she! They were living in the same moment, the same time, the same feeling, the same thought. Everything had slowed down to that moment. It was as if everything had stopped and all that existed were two people bound to each other by a string of feelings, two young people finally realising what life really meant and what they were supposed to do – love as one!

There were two kinds of researchers at Bell Labs: those who are being paid for what they used to do, and those who are being paid for what they were going to do. Nobody was paid for what they were doing now.

Advances fed on one another, occurring almost simultaneously and spontaneously, at Harvard and MIT and Princeton and Bell Labs and an apartment in Berlin and even, most improbably but interestingly, in a basement in Ames, Iowa.

the inventors of the transistor at Bell Labs in New Jersey, moved out to Mountain View and, in 1956, started a company to build transistors using silicon rather than the more expensive germanium that was then commonly used. But

...give a great deal of attention to keeping his managers and his technical people as interchangeable as their talents allow. The barriers are sociological... To overcome this problem some laboratories, such as Bell Labs, abolish all job titles. Each professional employee is a "member of technical staff.

The key to innovation—at Bell Labs and in the digital age in general—was realizing that there was no conflict between nurturing individual geniuses and promoting collaborative teamwork. It was not either-or. Indeed, throughout the digital age, the two approaches went together. Creative geniuses (John Mauchly, William Shockley, Steve Jobs) generated innovative ideas. Practical engineers (Presper Eckert, Walter Brattain, Steve Wozniak) partnered closely with them to turn concepts into contraptions. And collaborative teams of technicians and entrepreneurs worked to turn the invention into a practical product. When part of this ecosystem was lacking, such as for John Atanasoff at Iowa State or Charles Babbage in the shed behind his London home, great concepts ended up being consigned to history’s basement. And when great teams lacked passionate visionaries, such as Penn after Mauchly and Eckert left, Princeton after von Neumann, or Bell Labs after Shockley, innovation slowly withered.

the second is that if you haven’t found a market to sell the product, you have not innovated.34

radar won the war, whereas the atomic bomb merely ended it.

But to an innovator, being early is not necessarily different from being wrong.

The men preferred to think they worked not in a laboratory but in what Kelly once called “an institute of creative technology.

The commercialization of molecular biology is the most stunning ethical event in the history of science, and it has happened with astonishing speed. For four hundred years since Galileo, science has always proceeded as a free and open inquiry into the workings of nature. Scientists have always ignored national boundaries, holding themselves above the transitory concerns of politics and even wars. Scientists have always rebelled against secrecy in research, and have even frowned on the idea of patenting their discoveries, seeing themselves as working to the benefit of all mankind. And for many generations, the discoveries of scientists did indeed have a peculiarly selfless quality... Suddenly it seemed as if everyone wanted to become rich. New companies were announced almost weekly, and scientists flocked to exploit genetic research... It is necessary to emphasize how significant this shift in attitude actually was. In the past, pure scientists took a snobbish view of business. They saw the pursuit of money as intellectually uninteresting, suited only to shopkeepers. And to do research for industry, even at the prestigious Bell or IBM labs, was only for those who couldn't get a university appointment. Thus the attitude of pure scientists was fundamentally critical toward the work of applied scientists, and to industry in general. Their long-standing antagonism kept university scientists free of contaminating industry ties, and whenever debate arose about technological matters, disinterested scientists were available to discuss the issues at the highest levels. But that is no longer true. There are very few molecular biologists and very few research institutions without commercial affiliations. The old days are gone. Genetic research continues, at a more furious pace than ever. But it is done in secret, and in haste, and for profit.

the future of communications will be defined by an industry yet to be created—not the kind of business that simply delivers or searches out information, but one that manages the tide of information so that it doesn’t drown us.

I knew chemistry would be worse, because I’d seen a big chart of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the chemistry lab, and all the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them.

Having outgrown its Manhattan headquarters, most of Bell Labs moved to two hundred rolling acres in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Mervin Kelly and his colleagues wanted their new home to feel like an academic campus, but without the segregation of various disciplines into different buildings. They knew that creativity came through chance encounters. “All buildings have been connected so as to avoid fixed geographical delineation between departments and to encourage free interchange and close contact among them,” an executive wrote.11 The corridors were extremely long, more than the length of two football fields, and designed to promote random meetings among people with different talents and specialties, a strategy that Steve Jobs replicated in designing Apple’s new headquarters seventy years later. Anyone walking around Bell Labs might be bombarded with random ideas, soaking them up like a solar cell. Claude Shannon, the eccentric information theorist, would sometimes ride a unicycle up and down the long red terrazzo corridors while juggling three balls and nodding at colleagues.III It was a wacky metaphor for the balls-in-the-air ferment in the halls.

Eyebrows were raised in 1994 when Peter Shor, working at Bell Labs, came up with a quantum algorithm that could break most modern encryption by using quantum computing algorithms. Today’s encryption is based on the difficulty of factoring large numbers. Even today, although there are no quantum computers that can implement Shor’s algorithm in full yet, there is worry that most of our encryption will be broken in a few years as more capable quantum computers come along. When this happens, there will be a rush to quantum-safe encryption algorithms (which cannot be broken quickly by either classic or quantum computers).

Word of how the flatworm turned … how the lab rat had risen up … how Pavlov’s dog rang Pavlov’s bell and took notes on it … oh, word of all this circulated quickly, too, and everyone, from Number 1 to Number 8, was quite delighted. There was no indication, however, then or later, that Dr. Gladys Loring was amused in the slightest.

Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it. What I couldn't stand was this shrinking everything into letters and numbers...I knew chemistry would be worse, because I'd seen a big chart of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the chemistry lab, and all of the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them.

April 26—I know I shouldn’t hang around the college when I’m through at the lab, but seeing the young men and women going back and forth carrying books and hearing them talk about all the things they’re learning in their classes excites me. I wish I could sit and talk with them over coffee in the Campus Bowl Luncheonette when they get together to argue about books and politics and ideas. It’s exciting to hear them talking about poetry and science and philosophy—about Shakespeare and Milton; Newton and Einstein and Freud; about Plato and Hegel and Kant, and all the other names that echo like great church bells in my mind. Sometimes I listen in on the conversations at the tables around me, and pretend I’m a college student, even though I’m a lot older than they are. I carry books around, and I’ve started to smoke a pipe. It’s silly, but since I belong at the lab I feel as if I’m a part of the university. I hate to go home to that lonely room.   April

The key to innovation-at Bell Labs and in the digital age in general-was realizing that there was no conflict between nurturing individual geniuses and promoting collaborative teamwork. It was not either-or. Indeed, throughout the digital age, the two approaches went together. Creative geniuses (John Mauchly, William Shockley, Steve Jobs) generated innovative ideas. Practical engineers (Presper Eckert, Walter Brattain, Steve Wozniak) partnered closely with them to turn concepts into contraptions. And collaborative teams of technicians and entrepreneurs worked to turn the invention into a practical product. When part of this ecosystem was lacking, such as for John Atanasoff at Iowa State or Charles Babbage in the shed behind his London home, great concepts ended up being consigned to history's basement. And when great teams lacked passionate visionaries, such as Penn after Mauchly and Eckert left, Princeton after von Neumann, or Bell Labs after Shockley, innovation slowly withered.

She had lived in eight different countries growing up and had visited dozens of others. To most people, this sounded cool, and in some ways, Ayers knows, it was cool, or parts of it were. But since humans are inclined to want what they don't have, she longed to live in America, preferably the solid, unchanging, undramatic Midwest, and attend a real high school, the kind shown in movies, complete with a football team, cheerleaders, pep rallies, chemistry labs, summer reading lists, hall passes, proms, detentions, assemblies, fund-raisers, lockers, Spanish clubs, marching bands, and the dismissal bell.

the device had the property of transresistance and should have a name similar to devices such as the thermistor and varistor, Pierce proposed transistor. Exclaimed Brattain, “That’s it!” The naming process still had to go through a formal poll of all the other engineers, but transistor easily won the election over five other options.35 On June 30, 1948, the press gathered in the auditorium of Bell Labs’ old building on West Street in Manhattan. The event featured Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain as a group, and it was moderated by the director of research, Ralph Bown, dressed in a somber suit and colorful bow tie. He emphasized that the invention sprang from a combination of collaborative teamwork and individual brilliance: “Scientific research is coming more and more to be recognized as a group or teamwork job. . . . What we have for you today represents a fine example of teamwork, of brilliant individual contributions, and of the value of basic research in an industrial framework.”36 That precisely described the mix that had become the formula for innovation in the digital age. The New York Times buried the story on page 46 as the last item in its “News of Radio” column, after a note about an upcoming broadcast of an organ concert. But Time made it the lead story of its science section, with the headline “Little Brain Cell.” Bell Labs enforced the rule that Shockley be in every publicity photo along with Bardeen and Brattain. The most famous one shows the three of them in Brattain’s lab. Just as it was about to be taken, Shockley sat down in Brattain’s chair, as if it were his desk and microscope, and became the focal point of the photo. Years later Bardeen would describe Brattain’s lingering dismay and his resentment of Shockley: “Boy, Walter hates this picture. . . . That’s Walter’s equipment and our experiment,

Bell resisted selling Texas Instruments a license. “This business is not for you,” the firm was told. “We don’t think you can do it.”38 In the spring of 1952, Haggerty was finally able to convince Bell Labs to let Texas Instruments buy a license to manufacture transistors. He also hired away Gordon Teal, a chemical researcher who worked on one of Bell Labs’ long corridors near the semiconductor team. Teal was an expert at manipulating germanium, but by the time he joined Texas Instruments he had shifted his interest to silicon, a more plentiful element that could perform better at high temperatures. By May 1954 he was able to fabricate a silicon transistor that used the n-p-n junction architecture developed by Shockley. Speaking at a conference that month, near the end of reading a thirty-one-page paper that almost put listeners to sleep, Teal shocked the audience by declaring, “Contrary to what my colleagues have told you about the bleak prospects for silicon transistors, I happen to have a few of them here in my pocket.” He proceeded to dunk a germanium transistor connected to a record player into a beaker of hot oil, causing it to die, and then did the same with one of his silicon transistors, during which Artie Shaw’s “Summit Ridge Drive” continued to blare undiminished. “Before the session ended,” Teal later said, “the astounded audience was scrambling for copies of the talk, which we just happened to bring along.”39 Innovation happens in stages. In the case of the transistor, first there was the invention, led by Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain. Next came the production, led by engineers such as Teal. Finally, and equally important, there were the entrepreneurs who figured out how to conjure up new markets. Teal’s plucky boss Pat Haggerty was a colorful case study of this third step in the innovation process.

Even though the Internet provided a tool for virtual and distant collaborations, another lesson of digital-age innovation is that, now as in the past, physical proximity is beneficial. There is something special, as evidenced at Bell Labs, about meetings in the flesh, which cannot be replicated digitally. The founders of Intel created a sprawling, team-oriented open workspace where employees from Noyce on down all rubbed against one another. It was a model that became common in Silicon Valley. Predictions that digital tools would allow workers to telecommute were never fully realized. One of Marissa Mayer’s first acts as CEO of Yahoo! was to discourage the practice of working from home, rightly pointing out that “people are more collaborative and innovative when they’re together.” When Steve Jobs designed a new headquarters for Pixar, he obsessed over ways to structure the atrium, and even where to locate the bathrooms, so that serendipitous personal encounters would occur. Among his last creations was the plan for Apple’s new signature headquarters, a circle with rings of open workspaces surrounding a central courtyard. Throughout history the best leadership has come from teams that combined people with complementary styles. That was the case with the founding of the United States. The leaders included an icon of rectitude, George Washington; brilliant thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison; men of vision and passion, including Samuel and John Adams; and a sage conciliator, Benjamin Franklin. Likewise, the founders of the ARPANET included visionaries such as Licklider, crisp decision-making engineers such as Larry Roberts, politically adroit people handlers such as Bob Taylor, and collaborative oarsmen such as Steve Crocker and Vint Cerf. Another key to fielding a great team is pairing visionaries, who can generate ideas, with operating managers, who can execute them. Visions without execution are hallucinations.31 Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore were both visionaries, which is why it was important that their first hire at Intel was Andy Grove, who knew how to impose crisp management procedures, force people to focus, and get things done. Visionaries who lack such teams around them often go down in history as merely footnotes.

Какие проблемы являются наиболее значимыми в твоей области деятельности? Ты работаешь над одной из них? Почему нет? Хэмминг работал в Bell Labs, когда начал задавать эти вопросы коллегам. По большому счету, каждому сотруднику Bell Labs следовало бы работать над важнейшими проблемами в своей области.

Shockley’s demonstration of the first junction transistors at a public unveiling at the West Street auditorium.

Do you think this has helped your career?

Well, it was my career,” Pierce replied.

I tried to get other people to do things,

I’m lazy,” Pierce once told an interviewer.

What is happening in “the last mile” (the access networks) caused by the end user’s behavior will have a big impact on the debate of data center sustainability. Research conducted by Bell Labs and the University of Melbourne (CEET 2013) show that by 2015 wireless cloud (Wi-Fi and cellular technology) will consume between 32 TWh (low scenario) and 43 TWh (high scenario) compared to only 9.2 TWh in 2012. An increase between 248% and 367%. The take-up of wireless devices is shown by the fact that global mobile data traffic overall is currently increasing at 78% per annum and mobile cloud traffic specifically is increasing at 95% per annum. Wireless cloud traffic is about 20% of mobile traffic and approximately 35% of data center traffic. The result of this is that wireless access network technologies account for 90% of total wireless cloud energy consumption. Data centers account for only about 9%. The energy consumption of wireless user devices is negligible.

Finding an aspect of modern life that doesn't incorporate some strand of Bell Labs’ DNA would be difficult

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.

Oh you are especially priceless, he said motioning to Haven and I, widening the expanse of his grin. First you two break into my office... Haven stiffened and we briefly made eye contact. And then all four of you break into my lab. Quite a nosey lot aren't you?

is a sequence of little-known research languages developed at Bell Labs, all inspired by the concept of communicating sequential processes (CSP) from Tony Hoare’s seminal 1978 paper on the foundations of concurrency. In CSP, a program is a parallel composition of processes that have no shared state; the processes communicate and synchronize using channels. But Hoare’s CSP was a formal language for describing the fundamental concepts of concurrency, not a programming language for writing executable programs.

One team member, who had formerly worked at AT&T’s Bell Labs, recalled only writing specifications for prototype products during his entire time with the company. Invariably after finishing the specs, the project was cancelled. Coming away empty handed so often made him feel sad. After

(I should note that when Tom Reingold was at Bell Labs, he not only called and congratulated the submitter of every 1,000th request, he took them to lunch and used it as an opportunity to ask them how they would like to see service improved.

The institute was a division of the Fraunhofer Society, a massive state-run research organization with dozens of campuses across the country—Germany’s answer to Bell Labs.

As mentioned earlier, after founding what became Bell Labs, Theodore Vail said that no group “can be either ignored or favored at the expense of the others without unbalancing the whole.” Vannevar Bush, during the Second World War, took every chance he could to emphasize his respect for the military, even as he spent nearly all his time with scientists like himself. Loving your loonshot and franchise groups equally, however, requires overcoming natural preferences. Artists tend to favor artists. Soldiers tend to favor soldiers.

These two Bell Lab scientists had discovered the afterglow from the Big Bang fireball explosion!

Bell Labs director Mervin Kelly guided the construction of a new home for the lab that would purposefully encourage interaction between its diverse mix of scientists and engineers. Kelly dismissed the standard university-style approach of housing different departments in different buildings, and instead connected the spaces into one contiguous structure joined by long hallways—some so long that when you stood at one end it would appear to converge to a vanishing point. As Bell Labs chronicler Jon Gertner notes about this design: “Traveling the hall’s length without encountering a number of acquaintances, problems, diversions and ideas was almost impossible. A physicist on his way to lunch in the cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.” This strategy, mixed with Kelly’s aggressive recruitment of some of the world’s best minds, yielded some of the most concentrated innovation in the history of modern civilization.

Over the next 50 years, Vail’s organization—eventually called the Bell Telephone Laboratories—produced the transistor, the solar cell, the CCD chip (used inside every digital camera), the first continuously operating laser, the Unix operating system, the C programming language, and eight Nobel Prizes. Vail created the most successful industrial research lab in history, and AT&T grew into the country’s largest business.

Vail similarly stayed out of the details of the technical program. Both Bush and Vail saw their jobs as managing the touch and the balance between loonshots and franchises—between scientists exploring the bizarre and soldiers assembling munitions; between the blue-sky research of Bell Labs and the daily grind of telephone operations. Rather than dive deep into one or the other, they focused on the transfer between the two.

In my years at Bell Labs, we worked in two-person offices. They were spacious, quiet, and the phones could be diverted. I shared my office with Wendl Thomis, who went on to build a small empire as an electronic toy maker. In those days, he was working on the Electronic Switching System fault dictionary. The dictionary scheme relied upon the notion of n-space proximity, a concept that was hairy enough to challenge even Wendl’s powers of concentration. One afternoon, I was bent over a program listing while Wendl was staring into space, his feet propped up on the desk. Our boss came in and asked, “Wendl! What are you doing?” Wendl said, “I’m thinking.” And the boss said, “Can’t you do that at home?

point.” “That matchbook Gertie found at the lab site seems to fit with this Benedict character,” I said. “You know what this means?” Ida Belle said. I flopped back in my chair. “That we have to go to the Swamp Bar and see if we catch this Benedict doing something suspicious.” I pointed a finger at them. “But I’m not dressing like a hooker again, and I’m definitely not doing a wet T-shirt contest.” “Oh!” Gertie sat upright. “I just remembered. At the festival yesterday, some of the usual Swamp

At the lab my professor suggested that, since it was such an amazing day, perhaps I could take the exam outside in the wetland wilderness reserve that surrounded the lab. The view of the swamp was stunning! Somehow it had never seemed beautiful to me before. She asked that I take my notebook and pencil out. “Please draw for me the complete development of the chick from fertilization to hatching. That is the only question.” I gasped, “But that is the entire course!” “Yes, I suppose it is, but make-up exams are supposed to be harder than the original, aren’t they?” I couldn’t imagine being able to regurgitate the entire course. As I sat there despondently, I closed my eyes and was flooded with grief. Then I noticed that my inner visual field was undulating like a blanket that was being shaken at one end. I began to see a movie of fertilization! When I opened my eyes a few minutes later, I realized that the movie could be run forward and back and was clear as a bell in my mind’s eye, even with my physical eyes open. Hesitantly, I drew the formation of the blastula, a hollow ball of cells that develops out of the zygote (fertilized egg). As I carefully drew frame after frame of my inner movie, it was her turn to gape! The tiny heart blossomed. The formation of the notochord, the neural groove, and the beginnings of the nervous system were flowing out of my enhanced imagery and onto the pages. A stupendous event—the animated wonder of embryonic growth and the differentiation of cells—continued at a rapid pace. I drew as quickly as I could. To my utter amazement, I was able to carefully and completely replicate the content of the entire course, drawing after drawing, like the frames of animation that I was seeing as a completed film! It took me about an hour and a quarter drawing as fast as I could to reproduce the twenty-one-day miracle of chick formation. Clearly impressed, my now suddenly lovely professor smiled and said, “Well, I suppose you deserve an A!” The sunlight twinkled on the water, the cattails waved in the gentle breeze, and the gentle wonder of life was everywhere. Reports:

Managers know that software development follows Parkinson's Law: Work will expand to fill the time allotted to it. If you are in the software business, perhaps you are familiar with a corollary to Parkinson called the Ninety-Ninety Rule, attributed to Tom Cargill of Bell Labs: "The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time." This self-deprecating rule says that when the engineers have written 90% of the code, they still don't know where they are! Management knows full well that the programmers won't hit their stated ship dates, regardless of what dates it specifies. The developers work best under pressure, and management uses the delivery date as the pressure-delivery vehicle.

Radios, vacuum tubes, transistors, televisions, solar cells, coaxial cables, laser beams, microprocessors, computers, cell phones, fiber optics—all these essential tools of modern life descend from ideas originally generated at Bell Labs.

What made Bell Labs fundamentally different had as much to do with antitrust law as the geniuses it attracted.

Drucker lists Vail’s four strategies:   1. An emphasis on constant service, back when this was an unusual way of thinking, 2. Working with regulators to create a framework of prices and coverage that served both public goals and made business sense,   3. Establishing Bell Labs as one of the top industrial labs in the world, in order to generate the “creative destruction” type of innovation despite monopoly status,   4. And ensuring AT&T was well-capitalized to keep expanding and growing via a brand new type and class of finance.

So assuming one could argue that Google is a monopoly and needs to enter into a consent decree, would the Bell Labs model work? If Google were required to license every patent it owns for a nominal fee to any American company that asks for it, it would have to license its search algorithms, Android patents, self-driving car patents, smart-thermostat patents, advertising-exchange patents, Google Maps patents, Google Now patents, virtual-reality patents, and thousands of others. What is clear from the Bell Labs model is that such a solution actually benefits innovation in general.

The theory of serendipitous creativity, in other words, seems well justified by the historical record. The transistor, we can argue with some confidence, probably required Bell Labs and its ability to put solid-state physicists, quantum theorists, and world-class experimentalists in one building where they could serendipitously encounter one another and learn from their varied expertise. This was an invention unlikely to come from a lone scientist thinking deeply in the academic equivalent of Carl Jung’s stone tower.

In 1958 AT&T, the owner of Bell Labs, was served with an antitrust court order that forbade it to ever enter the computer business and that forced it to license any non-telephone inventions to the whole world. This odd ruling turned Unix into a worldwide phenomenon, as it spread from one corner of the computer world to the other.

In a sense, Silicon Valley was born out of Shockley's betrayal of Bell Labs' ethics.

Bill Gates once said of the invention of the transistor, “My first stop on any time-travel expedition would be Bell Labs in December 1947.

Evaluation must be done in hindsight, after the work has been done, not for proposals for work to be done. That said, secondary factors must carry some weigh, because research results depend too much on historical contingency and luck. As articulated by Ralph Bown, vice president of research at Bell Labs from 1951 to 1955: 'A conviction on the part of employees that meritorious performance will be honestly appraised and adequately rewarded is a necessary ingredient of their loyalty. This appraisal, to be fair and convincing, must be based on the individual's performance and capabilities rather than wholly on the direct value of his results. A system which rewards only those lucky enough to strike an idea which pays off handsomely will not have the cooperative teamwork needed for vitality of the enterprise as a whole.

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.”32 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.

Morton would eventually think more deeply about the innovative process than any Bell Labs scientist, with the possible exception of Kelly. In his view, innovation was not a simple action but “a total process” of interrelated parts. “It is not just the discovery of new phenomena, nor the development of a new product or manufacturing technique, nor the creation of a new market,” he later wrote. “Rather, the process is all these things acting together in an integrated way toward a common industrial goal.

Eugene Gordon, points out that there were two corollaries to Morton’s view of innovation: The first is that if you haven’t manufactured the new thing in substantial quantities, you have not innovated; the second is that if you haven’t found a market to sell the product, you have not innovated.

Kelly would eventually tell people that Pfann’s idea—it was called “zone refining,” and was an ingenious adaptation of a technique metallurgists had used on other materials—ranked as one of the most important inventions of the past twenty-five years. Kelly didn’t tell people it resulted from a man sleeping on the job.

It might have been said in 1948 that you either grasped the immense importance of the transistor or you did not. Usually an understanding of the device took time, since there were no tangible products—no proof—to demonstrate how it might someday alter technology or culture.

As word spread, Shannon’s slender and highly mathematical paper, about twenty-five pages in all, would ultimately become known as the most influential master’s thesis in history.9 In time, it would influence the design of computers that were just coming into existence as well as those that wouldn’t be built for at least another generation.

Since childhood, he had been as interested in games as in mathematics; in some respects he still saw little difference between the two.

language, especially the English language, was filled with redundancy and predictability. Indeed, he later calculated that English was about 75 to 80 percent redundant. This had ramifications for cryptography: The less redundancy you have in a message, the harder it is to crack its code.

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!

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.

Shockley recalled later that his “first notebook entry on what might have been a working [solid-state amplifier] was as I recall late 1939.”19 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.

Double diffusion made possible, for the first time, the mass production of precise, high-performance transistors. The technique promised to be highly profitable for any organization that could master its technical intricacies. Shockley therefore quit Bell Labs and, with financial backing from Arnold Beckman, president of a prestigious maker of scientific instruments, started a company to produce double-diffusion transistors. The inventor recruited the best young minds he could find, including Noyce; Gordon Moore, a physical chemist from Johns Hopkins; and Jean Hoerni, a Swiss-born physicist whose strength was in theory. Already thinking about human intelligence, Shockley made each of his recruits take a battery of psychological tests. The results described Noyce as an introvert, a conclusion so ludicrous that it should have told Shockley something about the value of such tests. Early in 1956, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories opened for business in the sunny valley south of Palo Alto. It was the first electronics firm in what was to become Silicon Valley.

WE 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.

MURRAY HILL’S FIRST BUILDING—Building 1, as it was eventually known—officially opened in 1942.4 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.

Essentially Kelly was creating interdisciplinary groups—combining chemists, physicists, metallurgists, and engineers; combining theoreticians with experimentalists—to work on new electronic technologies. But putting young men like Shockley in a management position devastated some of the older Labs scientists. Addison White, a younger member of the technical staff who before the war had taken part in Shockley’s weekly study group, told Hoddeson he nevertheless considered it “a stroke of enormously good management on Kelly’s part.” He even thought it an act of managerial bravery to strip the titles from men Kelly had worked with for decades. “One of these men wept in my office after this happened,” White said. “I’m sure it was an essential part of what by this time had become a revolution.

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.

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.

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.

The term “innovation” dated back to sixteenth-century England. Originally it described the introduction into society of a novelty or new idea, usually relating to philosophy or religion. By the middle of the twentieth century, the words “innovate” and “innovation” were just beginning to be applied to technology and industry.

If an idea begat a discovery, and if a discovery begat an invention, then an innovation defined the lengthy and wholesale transformation of an idea into a technological product (or process) meant for widespread practical use.

perhaps most important, the supervisor was authorized to guide, not interfere with, the people he (or she) managed. “The management style was, and remained for many years, to use the lightest touch and absolutely never to compete with underlings,” recalls Phil Anderson, a physicist who joined Bell Labs soon after the transistor was developed. “This was the taboo that Shockley transgressed, and was never forgiven.

Shockley made the leap, literally. He jumped from his seat and proceeded to give a presentation to the group on his newest theories and design. “I felt I did not want to be left behind on this one,” he recalled. Many of the men were dumbstruck. The solid-state group that Shockley led had been built upon the principles of an open exchange of ideas, and Shockley had apparently ignored those principles. At the same time, it was hard not to be awed—the men were witnessing another breakthrough on the level of Bardeen and Brattain’s earlier work. Did it matter whether it was the product of Shockley’s brilliance and effort, or his cunning and bruised ego?

THE UNVEILING of the two most important technologies of the twentieth century—the atomic bomb and the transistor—occurred almost exactly three years apart.

Bell Labs engineers had become fond of the suffix “-istor”: Small devices known as varistors and thermistors had already become essential components in the phone system’s circuitry. “Transistor,” the memo noted, was “an abbreviated combination of the words ‘transconductance’ or ‘transfer,’ and ‘varistor.

For the next three weeks, Shockley kept up a furious pace. By late January he had come up with a theory, and a design, for a transistor that both looked and functioned differently than Bardeen and Brattain’s. Theirs had been described as the point-contact transistor; Shockley’s was to be known as the junction transistor. Rather than two metal points jammed into a sliver of semiconducting material, it was a solid block made from two pieces of n-type germanium and a nearly microscopic slice of p-type germanium in between. The metaphor of a sandwich wasn’t far off. Except the sandwich was about the size of a kernel of corn.

When Bell Labs first demonstrated the solar cell in the 1950s, it was deemed technically brilliant but financially impractical—at the time, it would have cost $1.5 million to power a house. By their nature, innovations may seem impossible at first—even the ones that wind up changing the world.

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 Wooldridge, 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.

Already in the Bell System there were about 73 million phone calls made each day—and the numbers kept climbing.6 In the earliest days of AT&T, company engineers realized the daunting implications of such growth: The larger the system became, the larger the challenges would be in managing its complexity and structural integrity. It was also likely that the larger the system became, the higher the cost might be to individual subscribers unless technologies became more efficient. To scientists like Jewett, Buckley, and Kelly, that the growth of the system produced an unceasing stream of operational problems meant it had an unceasing need for inventive solutions.

Bell Labs, for all its romantic forays into the mysteries of science, remained an integral part of the phone business. The Labs management made an effort to isolate its scientists from the gritty day-to-day political concerns of the business. But the managers themselves had to keep track of how the technology and politics and finances of their endeavor meshed together. Indeed, they could never forget it. As long as the business remained robust—and it was the primary job of people like Mervin Kelly to keep the business robust—so did the Labs.

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.

Spookier still, Bell's theorem has now been proven time after time after time. It took a few years to create lab equipment sensitive enough and accurate enough to make the necessary measurements, and they ultimately used photons rather than electrons for the experiments, but since the 1970s physicists have repeatedly confirmed the theory's predictions in the laboratory. Einstein and company was wrong; the Copenhagen gang was right. We create reality.

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.4 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.

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.