WHERE THE FUTURE CAME FROM

TELSTAR

By BOB METCALFE
The Idea Factory
By Jon Gertner
Penguin Press, 422 pages, $29.95
William Bradford Shockley was difficult, but brilliant. For a long time he led solid-state physics research at Bell Telephone Laboratories, and there, in 1947, he invented something very important. Shockley's colleagues pondered what to call it, voting among six possible names, including "semiconductor triode" and "iotatron." The winner came from shortening "transconductance varistor" to "transistor." (click below to read more)


For decades, the telephone system had relied on large, hot, complicated, unreliable, fragile and expensive glass vacuum tubes to amplify telephone signals. Shockley's transistor was a tiny, simple, durable and inexpensive solid sandwich. It would turn out to be the most important invention of the 20th century, the essential building block of the Information Age.
All of today's mobile telephones, desktop computers, laptops and server farms—and all the routers of the world-wide Internet—are chock-full of transistors, sometimes billions of them in a single microchip. They enable many modern wonders, including Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, the iPhone and The Wall Street Journal on your iPad.
But did the difficult Bill Shockley really invent the transistor? Or was it a collective achievement of AT&T's well-funded research branch, which had collected many of America's best scientific minds? Jon Gertner's compelling history of Bell Labs, "The Idea Factory," suggests that the transistor was invented not once by the brilliant Shockley, but three times by three other people at Bell Labs, with Shockley supervising, annoying, and taking undue credit.
First, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain demonstrated the "point-contact" transistor on Dec. 23, 1947. These two scientists worked in the research group that Shockley led, but they built their transistor with little help from him. Then Shockley broke with Bell Labs' collaboration norms by separately inventing a second, more reliable, "junction" transistor while he was holed up for several days in a hotel room. Bell Labs would have preferred that he perform his transistor magic in his office, with the door open. Finally, in 1954, Morris Tanenbaum, not Shockley, would invent the third, "silicon" transistor (the previous designs were germanium). The vast majority of today's transistors are connected in circuits on silicon wafers.
Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain would share the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics, but the increasingly estranged Shockley left Bell Labs. Fatefully, he decided to form a start-up near the place where his mother had home-schooled him, Palo Alto, Calif., laying the groundwork for what would become Silicon Valley.
The tale of Shockley's invention of the transistor (or not) holds many lessons about the nature of collaboration and innovation. It's just one of many great stories told in Mr. Gertner's book, which recounts Bell Labs during its heyday, between the 1920s and 1980s. The lab's scientists did pioneering work not only on the transistor but also, amazingly, on the laser; on solar cells; on satellite, cellular and optical communications; and on the modern management of innovation itself. "The Idea Factory" is a eulogy for the "most innovative scientific organization in the world," now a shadow of its former self, owned by Alcatel-Lucent. The book takes the form of a series of biographies of the men who started, shaped, inhabited and eventually left Bell Labs.
The American Telephone & Telegraph Co. evolved from various predecessor companies at the end of the 19th century. In its first few decades, AT&T was, as Mr. Gertner puts it, "close to a public menace—a ruthless, rapacious, grasping 'Bell Octopus.' " Attitudes toward the company changed after AT&T was converted in 1921 to a government-mandated "natural monopoly," exempted by Congress from antitrust laws. Thanks to "one of the great public relations campaigns in corporate history," AT&T came to be known "Ma Bell."
Ma Bell presented herself as the benevolent source of universal telephone service. She organized herself into three main branches. The AT&T operating companies delivered local and long-distance telephone service. Western Electric was AT&T's sole provider of equipment and thus one of America's largest manufacturing companies. And, after 1925, Bell Telephone Laboratories was the exclusive home of research and development for AT&T's other branches.
Bell Labs' founding president, Frank Jewett, made it the center of American technology. In the years following World War II, other presidents—including Mervin Kelly, Jim Fisk and William Baker—not only steered AT&T's research but were constantly consulted by presidents from Roosevelt to Reagan, becoming key advisers in the Cold War and space race. Telstar, the first satellite to transmit television and telephone, was developed by AT&T in the early 1960s.
Mr. Gertner, besides celebrating forgotten figures and seminal discoveries, wants us to re-evaluate our contemporary assumption that innovation can only be brought about by "small groups of nimble, profit-seeking entrepreneurs." Think big, the author urges. "To consider what occurred at Bell Labs, to glimpse the inner workings of its invisible and now vanished 'production lines,' is to consider the possibilities of what large human organizations might accomplish."
Mr. Gertner grew up in the glow of Bell Labs headquarters in Murray Hill, N.J., and certainly romanticizes the place. Like many before him, he exaggerates the numerator of Bell Labs while ignoring the denominator. With almost limitless support from its monopoly benefactor, Bell Labs grew to employ more than 25,000 people. So was Bell Labs cost-effective? You will not find the answer in Mr. Gertner's eulogy.
The author also makes the common mistake of confusing invention with innovation. Mr. Gertner credits Bell Labs with inventing the silicon solar cell in the 1950s. If only they had finished the job. Solar energy remains uneconomic today, more than half a century later—invented but not innovated. Likewise, Bell Labs in the 1960s poured its money and reputation into an early form of videoconferencing, PicturePhone, which flopped when deployed.
Mr. Gertner suggests that society would do well to re-create more Bell Labs. But trusting research to corporate monopolies is problematic in two ways. First, their money comes from overcharging customers by using monopoly power. (If you doubt that AT&T was overcharging, ask some old-timers how our mothers urged us to phone home after we arrived safely up at college—"Call, but hang up after letting the phone ring three times"; actually completing the call was too expensive.) Second, a corporate monopoly has little motivation to disrupt a market that it already dominates. AT&T had to be forced, starting in 1968, to let the nascent Internet connect to its telephone network; "Ma Bell" resisted every step of the way.
Nevertheless, Mr. Gertner's book offers fascinating evidence for those seeking to understand how a society should best invest its research resources. The author may ache for a return to the good old days when AT&T monopolized telecommunications and Bell Labs was ensconced on its plush New Jersey campus, but a different lesson from "The Idea Factory" might be to invest instead in research universities (of which the United States has at least 100).
William Shockley attended UCLA, Caltech and MIT. He was later affiliated with Columbia and Princeton. When the transistor was invented, Bell Labs was worried about work at Purdue that might beat it to the patent office. No doubt many technological advances were made at Bell Labs, but for those interested in innovation, the question is how its contributions compare with those of other institutions with which Bell Labs cooperated and competed. Did Bell Labs just use its financial resources to cherry-pick the best brains of MIT?
The best reason to invest in universities today is not that they are well managed. They are not, and keeping them competing with one another is our only hope of improving their management. The saving grace of research universities is that it is their business to graduate students, who have repeatedly proved to be effective vehicles for innovation, especially in their own start-ups.
Similarly, Bell Labs' greatest contribution may have been driving Shockley out. Shockley Semiconductor, his start-up, was a fiasco, but the man was good at recruiting talent, especially Gordon Moore from Caltech and Robert Noyce from MIT. Those two men would later found Fairchild Semiconductor, which over the years spun off Intel, National Semiconductor and Advanced Micro Devices. Those companies, in turn, spun off more start-ups, which grew to become Silicon Valley, the world's pre-eminent innovation machine, clustered around Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley.
Today we have many budding Silicon Valleys world-wide similarly forming around one or more research universities, our best "idea factories." Among Mr. Gertner's stories is one of a professor and his hearing research at Boston University. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and raised venture capital to start AT&T, and that gave us Bell Labs.
—Mr. Metcalfe teaches innovation at the University of Texas and is a recipient of the Alexander Graham Bell Medal and the National Medal of Technology.