Joel Gertner Quotes

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.

You have to understand,” Joel Engel says of the entire effort, “we were all very young, we were unscarred by failure. So we always knew it was going to work.” Not all of the AT&T executives were as optimistic.