How Bell Labs invented the technology of the future

They made sure that that that scientists had their office and their lab in different places so they would sort of have to go travel amongst other people. They created these long hallways so people would bump into each other. They created a kind of um regular lecture series so people would all congregate and hear the newest ideas. So creating this kind of intellectual atmosphere, intellectual format was very important to him. Um he came to believe you didn't there wasn't one right way to innovate. Hi everyone, thanks for coming tonight. My name is Steve Guerrero and I am the director of education here at the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation in Waltham, Massachusetts. You are sitting at the place where the industrial revolution scaled in America. Francis Katel Mills, the Waltham Lel system of mass manufacturing, it all started right here. Well, not actually right here, a little bit closer to the river. Uh we are sitting in what was a 1911 power plant uh run by the Boston Manufacturing Company. Our museum tells the story of 200 years of American industry and innovation and the industrial workers that built our modern economy. Upstairs above me we have another exhibit to the Waltham watch factory. Walam watch was the first to do precision machining at factory scale. It's not an accident that uh robotics firms and high-tech electronics firms are along 128. They are all descendants of companies like Waltham Watch. John Girtner, he is a longtime journalist uh in the science and tech space. He has written for the New York Times magazine for a long time. And uh he's here because I found him through his book um The Idea Factory, Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. What better place to talk about that than the Museum of Industry and Innovation. That's enough from me and I would love to have up Jonathan. We'll have questions and answers at the end. Uh, John. Uh, thanks everybody. Can everybody hear me? Okay, this is good. Okay. I I'm not sure I can compete with the invention of rum, but I will uh I will do my best. Um, thank you Steve and it's really nice to be here and I I you know, if you haven't I I hadn't been here before, so I got a chance to sort of walk around a little bit and um what a cool cool space. cool stuff. I I feel like I'm a chronicler of of 20th century mid 20th century American technology. So all of this is so new to me and so interesting and and you know the anticedants of of how we got to where we got I think are are right here in these rooms which is really cool. So um in a moment I'm going to talk about the the phone company and its com it's it's its uh fundamental component for me which was Bell Labs the R&D lab. Um, you know, one thing that I think is is is kind of apppropo is that, you know, behind this talk, I think, and I've been mentioning this lately when I talk to audiences is that, you know, a big part of our lives involves the phone company in ways, I think, that go beyond just the engineers who designed the switching systems and the PhDs and and people who came up with breakthrough technologies that I'll talk about in a second. Um, you know, it's it's also, you know, this this occurred to me when I went to a a museum exhibit in New Jersey, um, last year that kind of chronicled how many people worked for the phone system. And it really just struck me, you know, the tens of thousands, really the hundreds of thousands of people who were working as linemen, who were working in Western Electric factories, who were working in um, you know, and I get emails from these people all the time still. and you know their livelihoods depended on the innovations that in many ways came out of Bell Labs um which I think it's really you know how how in New Jersey and Massachusetts how parents and grandparents afforded houses and paid for college and groceries um which I think my larger point being that I talk a lot about technology and innovation but I think really the the the larger idea is what technology and innovation can do and um what they can do not just to make our lives is g- whiz and futuristic but what they can really do in terms of economic impacts which I think as we can see in some stories I'll tell today the um economic impact of what came out of Bell Labs is is huge um immense almost immeasurable so um you know an important point I think um and I think it it also resonates in some ways with some of these discussions that are going on with artificial intelligence today which is sort of the flip side of what's happening here we have a company that built innovations that created uh thousands if out millions of jobs and what will AI do and it's a it's a really important discussion. Um so this probably should lead us to a question. There are some younger people here who probably didn't grow up with a a landline maybe. Um so you know what was this company and what made it so influential? Um I think those of us who remember it know but but let's go back to the beginning. Um if we go back before the telephone, we'd have to go back to the telegraph. And the telegraph was a was a a sort of great innovation of the 1800s. It allowed for for communications over long distances. Um it allowed us to send messages around the country. Once they worked out the kinks of undersea cables, they could send it all around the world. Um but the telegraph had limitations. Uh it didn't allow for personal persontoperson exchanges or of course voices. It didn't allow for emotion. It didn't allow for a rich a richer exchange of information. So the telephone, the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graanbell, what it did was it, you know, transformed the the the sound waves coming from our our vocal cords into electrical waves. Later on, we turn that digitally into ones and zeros. But this really um altered the way we communicate, altered the way I think in a sense that that that humans could connect um in a very especially over long distances. And the company in the United States that capitalized on this great invention was American Telephone and Telegraph. Um, for those of you who who aren't aware of its anticedants, um, AT&T was a very different company than the AT&T of today. And AT&T was effectively granted a kind of monopoly by the United States government in the early 1900s. Um, its patent had been given to Alexander Graanbell. Um but its CEO Theodore Vale was a kind of visionary who understood how to consolidate different parts of this kind of naent communications empire into one large company and the monopoly paid huge dividends. AT&T was effectively in control of all the telephone communications in the United States and by 1925 AT&T was the larger largest company in the world. Uh it was the largest company in the world by revenue. It was the largest company in the world by number of employees and it was the largest company in the world by stock valuation. Um, and it wasn't really just one company. AT&T was a kind of umbrella that covered many different companies. Um, it owned either all or part of many of the lo all of the local operating companies in the United States. Um, New Jersey Bell, New York Telephone, um, Pacific Bell, Southwestern Bell. What was Massachusetts? Was it Thank you. Um, and that was the connection with the consumer and or the subscriber because you didn't really buy your phone in those days. Of course, you just kind of subscribe to it and the phone company let you use it. Um, and of course, it also um to tap into the long distance lines. It had a division, a hu huge division called AT&T long lines, and you would go through your local operator and tap into the long distance system, and that's how your call would get um sent to San Francisco or later to London or farther a field. Um it also controlled one a company that was the what standalone would have been one of the largest companies in the world which was western electric its manufacturing arm. In later years AT&T would have been described as having both um vertical integration and horizontal integration. horizontal because it covered uh the United States in its various business empires, but vertical because it controlled all the production, all the all the processes by which any part of the phone company um came to existence, whether it was telephone lines, telephone poles, uh operator headsets, vast switching centers, the smallest component to the largest was built at Western Electric. So um one thing about the company in the early 1920s was that engineers and scientists were spread about in different divisions. AT&T had its own engineering staff um as did Western Electric. And the people managing the phone company decided that it would be good to consolidate its scientific and engineering staff into one entity, a new R&D lab. And in January, January 1st, actually, 1925, Bell Laborator, Bell Telephone Laboratories opened for business in downtown Manhattan. And Bell Labs, as it came to be called, was this really taking the idea of an R&D lab to a sort of newer, larger scale. The idea of an R&D lab had been um it wasn't a new thing. Um the German pharmaceutical companies had R&D labs in the late 1800s. Um, General Electric's uh, R&D lab actually predated Bell Labs by a few years, but Bell Labs was different in a couple ways. One was its size, its scale, um, thousands, I think 5,000s to 6,000 people at the start of it. Um, it was solving near-term problems. Better cables, um, faster connections, better fidelity, um, better phones, better better even better telephone poles. They would kind of experiment in these empty lots in New Jersey to try and figure out what fungicides were better for telephone poles. And they would do these 20-year experiments to get the best telephone poles. But it also created a core of researchers and they went they began going around the country hiring young physicists and chemists and engineers to create a research department. And this was something different because these were people who were going to actually think about the future of communications. If Bellabs was a monopoly tasked with really the communications infrastructure or building this new communications infrastructure of the country, um these engineers and scientists in the research department were going to focus on the longer term thinking of knowledge production and some of them were mathematicians. Um but I think what was what was you had a lab that was essentially tasked as I said with inventing the future of communications and that itself was rather new. So let's just take a a quick look. I'm going to tell a few stories and and and and in a second but um for those of you who don't know Bell Labs very well um the quick list um the hit list the greatest hits of Bell Labs is is is rather incredible. what came out of the R&D center really just in the first 50 years 40 years of its existence. Um there were a huge number of practical improvements and um these are not really in my book. They might have be like a a kind of new casing for wire or some kind of new steel cable or an incremental improvement to a a switching um apparatus something like that. But those were fundamental to improve incrementally improve constantly improve the phone system. This was a regulated utility. They had to constantly go to hearings to sort of prove that their investments and their investments in R&D were actually paying off for the consumer. And the mantra at least amongst Bell Labs visionaries or leaders was that they had to keep making the system better or cheaper or better and cheaper and that became a kind of shortorthhand for the sort of innovative focus of the lab. Now also at Bell Labs beginning I would say in the 1930s late 1930s there were these big innovations these novel technologies that made the lab famous forever um and change the course I'd say of human history. It was um you know scholars of innovation sometimes call these discontinuous innovations or disruptive innovations. they might take the path of technology to a very different level all of a sudden either because it's hit some kind of roadblock with incrementally improving something or somebody comes up with a genius idea and you know at Bell Labs these included the transistor um the silicon solar cell um communication satellites uh the las the theory of the laser came out of Bell Labs and some of the earliest lasers came out of Bell Labs the Unix operating system um C++ uh computer language um and other things that other also won Nobel prizes like the charge couple devices which was wonderful for high resolution digital imaging. So there were also ideas, people like Claude Shannon who was a mathematician in the department who was coming up with a way to sort of use digital information to send messages or an idea or blueprint for how digital messages could go from one place to another in the future without errors and that kind of thing. Or radio astronomy actually was was discovered, I guess you could say, rather than invented at Bell Labs by a scientist named Carl Jansky. Um, some of these had no real practical payoff to the phone system. Um, but they came out of there and they were bestowed, I guess you could say, as part of the monopoly, the the the uh the the windfall or the the the the um the the the inheritance, I guess, of Bell Labs came to the rest of us that way. So, you know, I think this kind of question, well, why does innovation matter sort of, you know, comes through with with some of these breakthroughs. Um, they're different a lot of these than a new iteration of like an iPhone. Um and you know ultimately I think they drove the impact of AT&T and its parent company um and on the world economy. So um you know why did this happen at Bell Labs? Actually somebody just before said like I hope you can explain why it was Bell Labs and I I I think I can. So let's say you're working at the phone company and you're working at Bell Laboratories in the R&D lab. Um you're working in lower Manhattan. Your job is to help create a flawless system that serves hundreds of millions of callers per day, but you have to plan on how have it constantly increase in capacity in the future. So, you know, how do you do it? You have to keep making it better. You have to make it better in quality. You have to make it cheaper in prices. These company mantras and um the first thing is that there were, you know, all these brilliant people working in the phone company and they had millions of interesting ideas. But at Bell Labs in particular, at the R&D lab, you know, there were tons of ideas and they stopped I I not stopped being interested in ideas, but they were very focused on good problems. And the phone company had no kind of end to good problems. They were building a kind of new infrastructure that had never really existed before. Not just in the United States to get phone calls across the country or to every subscriber, to connect everyone to everyone else, but also to get them under the oceans, to get them to Europe. And again with a system that was growing and growing. So you had to kind of creep keep increasing capacity and keep um lowering or at least maintaining prices. And that's a very difficult balance. And it fell to these scientists and engineers. So with these two I think there's there's two stories I'm going to tell that that kind of illustrate like how they came to identify a really good problem and how they solved it and what the impacts of it were. Um, if we go back to to Bell Lab's kind of early days, this guy Mvin Kelly, this was taken late in his life when he was the president of Bell Labs. But Mvin Kelly joined AT&T as a young man, I think in 1916, 1915. Um, he was a physicist trained in the Midwest um, at the University of Chicago. But, um, he came to work for AT&T and he joined Bell Labs, was recruited into Bell Labs when it was established in 1925. And in 1925, Mvin Kelly was the foreman, he was in charge, the manager of something I think we would c call today craft manufacturing. Um, he was overseeing a group of people, a group of skilled technicians about 75 and all, working, I think, pretty much in a room almost like this, not the high ceilings, but a a large room in lower Manhattan. And they were making this. They were making the 101D. Um, it's about the size of an regular incandescent bulb. And this was known in the phone company as a repeater tube. And it was a vacuum tube. It had a complex inner architecture. It was more complex than an incandescent bulb. But Mvin Kelly saw these as the great innovation of his era. Um what they did was they allowed for long distances, long-distance communications to really flourish and exist. And the reason for the phone company in that era was that phone signals were weak and over long distances they would attenuate. So you needed to feed them through a repeater station every 100 or 150 miles. And in the repeater station there would be a a set of repeater tubes, these 101Ds, and they would amplify the phone call, hopefully preserving as much of its its um quality as possible, and then it would get moved down across the field. This was what allowed for uh a call to go from New York to San Francisco. Eventually, it allowed for calls to go to New York to London. They put the variation of these tubes deep in the undersea cable. If you've ever seen pictures of it, the undersea cable would swell out like a snake that had just swallowed something where the repeater was and then come back in. Um, and they had to be very longived and because if they were under sea, you couldn't actually service them. But even on on land, the idea for Kelly making these things was make them better, make them cheaper, make them last longer. Um, Kelly was really good at what he did. Um, but he actually saw these as a flawed technology even as he saw them as a key to the phone system. Um, he thought they were they were big. They used enormous amounts of electricity. They had to be on all the time. Um, they were very hard to make. Um, even as he got better and better making them. And he wondered if there was something that could be more efficient, smaller in size, longer lived that could actually work better in the phone system. there was nothing in the technology in the pipeline technology pipeline at the time at Bell Labs. And this idea that Kelly had that there should be something kind of I guess you could say fizzled except in his head. Um and Kelly went on to other jobs. He moved up the ranks at Bell Labs. Uh he became the head of research in the 1930s. As I said, he eventually became the president. But um by the mid1 1930s he had money to hire researchers and scientists some of the best in the country during an era when not a lot of people had money. I mean this was the depths of the great depression. Universities weren't really hiring physicists and engineers and chemists. Um, Bell Labs uh provided Kelly with some money to snap up some of the best people he could and he would go around the country interviewing different people um and try and get them to come over to Bell Labs and work for the phone company. Now, one of the people um that that Kelly hired was William Shockley here at MIT. Um brilliant physicist and hired him in the mid 1930s. And by 1937, Shockley is working at Bell Labs. And the story begins with in 1937 MVN Kelly goes down the hall at Bell Labs um in Manhattan to go visit a friend of his. He's his best friend at Bell Labs is this guy Clinton Davidson. He's a physicist. He actually won the Nobel Prize in physics. Um he's a quiet man. He's not a manager. He's just a kind of he he was the guy you would go to if you had a question nobody else could answer. And for whatever reason, Davidson is not in his office that day. But Shockley, who's sharing an office provisionally with Davidson, is there and he knew Kelly because Kelly had hired him. And Shockley will remember this day for the rest of his life because Dr. Kelly gives him a talk about getting two essential components out of the phone system. He talks about tubes and wonders if there's some kind of way Shockley or his staff on and research can work on some kind of amplifier that would be more efficient, that would be better for the phone system. And the other thing he talks about is getting all the switches out of the system. Um, if amplifiers were crucial to longdistance systems, these vast switching centers in really every town and city in the country were the essential component of connecting everyone with everyone else. In fact, Bell Labs sometimes thought of its work in terms of transmission and in terms of switching. And switching kind of depended on these small electromagnetic switches that clicked open and clicked closed. And Kelly saw them as slow, expensive, breakable. Um, there were millions and millions of them in the phone system. And looking ahead, he actually wondered if based on the growth of the phone system and communications, if the switching centers could even connect everyone to everyone else into a future that he saw. um he didn't have an answer of how to do this but shockly and in the air at Bell Labs um it was it was thought that you could maybe make some progress on these ideas by looking at a new kind of material they were working at Bell Labs um called semiconductors and we know silicon we know germanmanium some of us um Shockley started working on copper oxide and um for those here who know you know engineering um he was working on like these breadboards trying to feed signals through uh copper oxide um devices to see if he could get an amplifi amplification effect. And um Shockley um one of Shockley's problems, Shockley had a lot of problems for those who know his his his biography. One of Shockley's problems is he was a brilliant um theoretician, but he was a terrible experimentalist. So he brought other experimentalists in to help him and they tried and tried and didn't really get anywhere. And the reason he stopped was not that he quit and thought it was impossible. The reason he stopped was because the World War II came along. And for World War II, it brought a lot of people at Bell Labs into the war work. Almost everybody in fact, especially especially some of the best engineers. Shockley actually went down to Washington and began to work on operations on how you drop bombs on submarines to get the optimum effect on the enemy. Um, other people went to work on tank-totank communications or on battlefield communications. But one of the most crucial things that Bellabs did was it helped with the radar work which was also done here at MIT at the RAD lab and the other half was done by Bell Labs in Manhattan. And um the radars the early radar work depended on semiconductors also these semiconducting crystals um that they were using silicon crystals and germanmanium crystals and Kelly was played an in important part um as managing this kind of war work for Bell Labs. By the mid1940s, as the war is winding down, um Kelly can foresee the end of the war, believes that there's this incredible future for electronics and that Bell Labs can play a part, perhaps the most crucial part in this. And he starts making plans and writing memos for what Bell Labs should do in its post-war work. And one thing he decides, well, two things he decides is that one, they should really look deeper into the nature of semiconducting materials. he saw what they could use them for in radar. Um he thought they would have some very good use in the phone company. The second thing is that he saw how teams worked during the war. Um it it sounds kind of silly, but he understood based on the war work, especially the radar work, that you don't want like-minded people sitting in a room trying to solve a very difficult problem. You wanted to get engineers and physicists and chemists and circuitry experts and material scientists. Again sounds obvious in today but he came to believe very su soon after the war that actually new knowledge comes out of the complimentary nature of teams but sometimes also the friction between them and how they look at problems differently. So immediately after the war in 1945, he asks Shockley, Kelly asks Shockley to set up a team to work on the nature of semiconductors. And this also is is a a big moment for Bell Labs. It moves out of Manhattan. It moves to the New Jersey suburbs to a kind of campus uh where near where I grew up actually. And um I I used to wonder when I was doing the research for the book why they moved to New Jersey. And you know, there's lots of memos saying that New York had these vibrations from the subway and it was hard to do acoustical research, but really the executives all live nearby. So I think they just they bought this plot of land and they had a really good commute to to Velas. But it was it was a beautiful place and this idea of a campus for for um for R&D was really, you know, in its heyday back then. The semiconductor group became known as the solid state group. Uh Shockley was one of the heads of it. Um there were about a dozen people in all and they started working on trying to understand silicon and germanmanium better. Um what usually happens with innovation and what happened to this group is that they failed. So really all through 1945 you can read memos and journal entries. They all had their lab notebooks and they were getting nowhere with experiment after experiment. And 1946 was pretty much the same thing. In fact, um uh one of them, one of the people on the team while um said just felt like we were just groping in the dark. But in 1947, they started making headway and really at the very end of the year um Walter Bratton and John Bardin, two physicists on the group in the group came up with this and um I has anyone ever seen the actual list? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. A couple people. It's very small. As you can see, it's about a quarter the size of a penny. Um the transistor is is under that arrow head. It's a slightly impure slice of germanmanium. Um there are two wires going down each side of that arrow head and they are piercing just the surface of that germanmanium slab. And what Bardin and Bratton found when they demonstrated it um at the end of December actually almost on Christmas Eve on December 23rd 1947 was you could run a signal through this Germanmanium. It didn't have the name of a transistor at the point that came from a contest a few months later, but you could amplify a signal very effectively. I think it was 13 times, sometimes 16 times. Um, so they seem to have found a new amplifier. And they also found that you could switch it on and off instantly. So maybe this was a new switch as well or something for that. So there's this great question I think that did they know what they had found? And I think the answer is kind of. First, they understood that, you know, the the power requirements for this thing were tiny. I mean, this was like a millionth of a watt compared to the the hundred or hundreds of watts that would require be required for vacuum tubes. Um, they understood there were no moving parts. It wasn't going to really wear out conceivably. Um, and they could see right away that it was a replacement for the vacuum tube. Maybe it could be a replacement for some kind of switch. Um, and they could see it hearkened in an era of miniaturaturization. They could not see that you could fit a billion or five on a chip. They could not see this age of computing. But Kelly could see this new age of miniaturaturization that would come out. Um, what happened right after the invention of the transistor was was actually kind of nothing. Um, it it actually was really hard to build these like if it was a humid day or if a door slammed nearby or some general was coming for a presentation and they were fussing over it and it wasn't working. Uh, it was very stressful for them and they had to really figure out how do you make these and then how do you make them in great quantity and that actually took really years to figure out. Um it wasn't until the early 1950s that they had started putting them into hearing aids which were the first application and the military started using them because they used so little power and they were so tiny that they had great value in applications in planes and ships and submarines especially. But um in terms of their kind of general application um an invent an innovation as I I think I talked about in the book is something that has impact and scale. It's different than this. This is an invention. And to get it to impact and scale, they had to build a factory in Allentown to get into those transistor radios in the late 1950s when it really kind of hit the world hard that this was a very different kind of device. Um, really took years. And I think it's interesting just for a second to think about it that you know this was a device that was kind of in a vague way on Mvin Kelly's mind in the mid1 1920s and then 22 years later was invented but probably wasn't 20 till 22 years after this that we started to see its real impact on the world. So we get to see that kind of long time frame. I think we're used to like, oh, let's just roll out a new iteration of software. But, you know, sometimes with these kinds of innovations, hardware especially, it really we we see how long it can take from ideiation to actually scaling up. Um, now in the same lab actually where the transistor was made, um, these guys are working on a totally different technology, but they're also using um, semiconducting materials. So, um, that's Gerald Pearson. He's a physicist on the left. He was actually on the transistor team, too. He was the one who said they were groping in the dark. And the guy on the right, also on the transistor team, was a guy named Cal Fuller, and he's a chemist. And together, Pearson and Fuller were working on this product called a silicon power rectifier. But the important thing is that Fuller was making in his lab, he was actually baking in his lab, these kinds of pieces of silicon with a very, very fine impurity on top. And the way they were coming out, Pearson had noticed that you could shine a light on them and they would generate an enormously um impressive photoelectric electric effect. Um larger than anything actually that they had seen before. Now what was also striking is that Pearson had an old college friend um Daryl Chapen who worked in a different building and was had nothing to do with their work at all. And one day, Chapen and Fuller are talking. I'm sorry. Chapen and Pearson are talking, excuse me. And Chapen explains to to to Pearson that he's been asked to come up with power sources for remote repeater stations. So, remember I talked about those repeaters tubes that were in the repeater stations to get a long-distance phone call across the country. Um, some of these repeater stations that would amplify long-distance phone calls were in pretty remote places and they depended on backup generators for when the power went out, but that wasn't ideal. Um, Chapen was actually looking into wind power. He was looking at these kind of very primitive nuclear batteries. And Pearson said, "We have these these silicon chips. Maybe we can use actually sun power to do it." And together the men got together sort of as we might say serendipitously and started working I think finally with their boss's permission on creating a solar battery as they called it at the time. And um within a year they came up I think it's 1954 I think I have this slide wrong. The first um solar panel installation at a remote repeater station in Americus Georgia. It actually worked really splendidly. It had other problems of economics that I'll talk about in a second. But this was the um this is really the the the the the grandfather of all solar panels in the world today. And it came out of the labs from this kind of collaboration um between three guys working kind of um and meeting and just benefiting from the fact that they were in the right place at the right time with I think the right problem. So what do we learn from these instances? You know, what are what are some things you can think about on the on the way home as you're talking about animation? I'm sure. Um, you know, one thing I think is that, um, I'll talk a little bit about, I won't get too wonky. Um, sometimes I talk to audiences and they really want the wonk, but um, you know, you can tell me if I'm too in the weeds, but, um, Mvin Kelly didn't have a creative formula. He had a a kind of creative structure, I think, for how he wanted or thought innovation can work. Um, I didn't get really too deep into the Murray Hill lab that that that campus-like lab, but you know, they spent years trying to design this place to kind of foster an innovative atmosphere. And just to use an example, they made sure that that that scientists had their office and their lab in different places. So, they would sort of have to go travel amongst other people. They created these long hallways so people would bump into each other. they created a kind of um regular lecture series so people would all congregate and hear the newest ideas. So creating this kind of intellectual atmosphere, intellectual format was very important to him. Um he came to believe you didn't there wasn't one right way to innovate. And in fact if we look at the transistor which was this handpicked team of people by Kelly it was very very different from the silicon solar cell which was a a completely different approach that happened without really any kind of management at all. So, um, I think they're both viable and Kelly saw them as both viable, but you had to have the right place at the right time with the right people and the right set of problems. Um, Bell Labs gave people, especially in its research department, great autonomy and patience. Sometimes you could work for a couple years on a problem. Um, sometimes that was it became a joke at Bell Labs. Uh, you were working too long and not showing any kind of um um um product from it. But it did pay off with the transistor team for instance as I talked about those years of failure that preceded the breakthrough. Um I talked about Kelly's interdisciplinary mixes and architecture. Um Bellabs was a place of great expertise but it was also a place where people would come straight out of college and there was a kind of culture at Bellabs that you were never to refuse answering anyone a question. In fact you were never to keep your door closed in that era. Um the only person who kept his door closed was um Claude Shannon who was a mathematician and he was sort of special and private and people let him do it. But otherwise anybody um from the lowest person on could approach a Nobel Prize winner and say I have this question and they were by culture you were you were obligated to answer it. Um in my book I talk a little bit about different archetypes at Bell Labs types of people. I mean there were great managers like Kelly and there were geniuses like Claude Shannon or um William Shockley. Um there were also people who were I think like instigators um people like John uh uh Pierce for instance who came up with communication satellites who were great at like walking into a room and saying why don't you do something on cellular phones and then walking out. Um and in n and in the 1950s um the patent department wanted to figure out why do some people at Bellabs have more patents than others. And they tried to create this this sort of um interview process. And what they learned actually was the people with the most patents either had breakfast or lunch with this guy Harry Nyquist. And Nyquist was an older engineer. He'd had a great career earlier on. But he would just sit with people and try and help them separate good ideas from bad ideas. Um, in that sense he was an instigator in that he wasn't making something himself, but he was getting other people to be their best, I think. Um, and that was, I think, crucial. It's very hard to measure if you're a manager. What are these people doing? How do I how do I value them, I think. But I think they were a kind of hidden hidden um, uh, value of Bell Labs that that often goes under underappreciated. Um, there were manufacturing links by being connected to the largest company in the world. You're also connected to one of the largest manufacturing companies in the world. Um, I think when you're making something, you're always trying to make it better. You're learning about how to make it better. You're learning how to make it better and cheaper. And I think those were crucial. There were feedback loops that I won't go into, but there were there was there was information coming from the factories back to Bell Labs. Sometimes there were engineers and scientists from Bell Labs put in Western Electric factories so that information could actually improve the process of what they're making. and the products too. Um, best ideas come from anywhere there. I mean, I think you know that early laser team here, they just decided to set up and they'd heard about a laser that was built on the West Coast and they said, "Why don't why don't we build one?" Um, and they did. Um, um, again with the silicon solar cell, I think that's a good a good example, too, that sometimes they're just going to bubble up those ideas at Bell Labs. And the idea was you didn't have to tell your boss, but if you told your boss, you could still maybe do it anyway. And some people did it on the slide if they really had an idea that they wanted to do. Um I think, you know, sometimes when I give talks or talk to people, you know, at least in Silicon Valley, there's this kind of small is beautiful, um idea, small teams, um startups. And I I kind of wonder if that distinction is sort of false in some ways that um you know Bellabs sometimes had very small teams within a larger kind of infrastructure. And I think that was kind of key to their success. Um for instance, the transistor team was sort of small. It was 12 people. But it would never have succeeded if it didn't have this group of of kind of brilliant material scientists and metallurgists who were working in South Jersey to actually create these impurities um what we call doping now down in um in in in the Germanmanium and in the silicon that they were experimenting with up in um Murray Hill. Um and again small teams sometimes worked at Bell Labs by being taking the initiative on a product project. There are also big teams trying to implement big switching centers for instance. So it worked both ways at Bell Labs and um it didn't always work which I'll talk about later but it it did work in that um John Pierce was the guy who would walk into a room say Leah let's do something on mobile phones and then walk out because Pierce actually believed that he shouldn't be in put in charge of the actual project because he would screw it up but he was great at coming up with the big idea. Um so I came across like late in life this this this list he had made. it was in the Stanford um archives and um he believed that this was kind of why Bellab's research worked so well that that the managers really understood what people under them were doing um that they didn't raise funds. They didn't have to apply for grants. They for instance the laser team could just actually just get the money or the the actual equipment uh quickly if they had an idea and they could make it happen very fast. Um research on a topic or system could be supported for years. I think there's another way of saying you could fail. You were going to fail and that had to be understood and that was understood there. And that when a time came when you actually had hit the end and you had failed so much that you were ready to stop um that research could end without necessarily damning you. You had exhausted some avenue. Um and then you had found the end. Um I'll add a couple things. I think I talked about problems. I mean there was no end of problems. This was an organization again that was trying to build infrastructure that had never existed before and those necessitated solutions. Um Arnold Penszius who won a Nobel Prize for for uh discovering the background um radiation from the big bang uh told me you know he said you have to understand it was this problemrich environment and to to Pensas that was that was the key thing um that size and quality of that interdisciplinary staff a circumscribed freedom. Um what does that mean? That means that um these people had a mission. and they were going to figure out the future of communications and that had such a wide area by which they could do research. But they understood too that if they found something useful for the phone system, it would actually have some very practical use whether it was transistor or laser or any kind of um actually more mathematical theory too for instance for queuing for how to manage traffic on the system. All of that was practical. Um I might just add that money was really important. they were being they were connected to the largest company in the world. They had enormous budgets um and they had steady budgets and they could think long term on problems that would sometimes take decades and that was essential too. Um the way they could invest in R&D in a way they could actually focus on long-term solution is something that's actually quite rare. Um I don't think corporations any corporations maybe Google for a while had that kind of um length of of of uh of vision but um you know quarterly profits and that kind of um accounting doesn't allow for it in the same way. Um just some final lessons. Um so what can we learn? Um Bellabs made mistakes. They thought the picture phone debuted at the New York World's Fair was the future of communications. Um they were both right and wrong. um you know being early for an innovator can be tantamount to being wrong and you know the system at the time did not really allow for for adequate fidelity and proper transmission but the price of these things was really high and and for me to talk to someone by picture phone they had to have picture phone too so it was very different from laptops and internets it was the wrong technology at the wrong time and it would became this sort of big half billion dollar belly flop which I haven't put that into today's dollars But um the future does come out differently I think. Um also that we're not good at predicting the future impact or economics of even these earthshaking you know innovations. I talked a little bit about the you know I talked a lot about excuse me the the transistor and the and the solar cell. When the transistor was unveiled you know it really made a very small splash. Um you know this was the New York Times. It was buried in the back on page 46 in the news of radio and they said, you know, that there was a there was a news conference to unveil the transistor, but basically they said, "Oh, it's a substitution or it's a maybe a replacement for a vacuum tube, but the impact wasn't really seen." Um, and it really wasn't seen by that many people outside of Bell Labs. I came across in the archives um some letters to Bell Labs from one professor in particular from MIT saying can you give me a couple transistor samples I think they have some application in this computer I'm building and this would have been 1948 um and um but that was very very rare and really it was not seen until much later what kind of impact it would have now on the other hand the s silicon solar cell um was seen as a miracle right away now the interesting ing thing I think is that the silicon solar cell has really taken decades and decades and decades to really reach this kind of scale and impact to where it's really changing the world every day I think. Um but the transistor really had this rapid ascendancy and I think the economics and the applications for the transistor were there very fast and you know you could as you know we could fit billions on a chip and all of a sudden the cost of a transistor went down to like a fraction of a fraction of a penny and you know the solar cell was was a much much slower kind of uh reduction in price. In fact, when it was debuted, I think Daryl Chapen, one of the inventors of the solar panel, I think he thought it would cost him like a million dollars to to actually power his house with enough solar panels. So, it was not um practiceable um at at the beginning at the beginning, but um but as we know now, these these these innovations kind of move on different tracks. And I mean, some people talk about how innovation in energy is different from innovation in hardware. Um, it's a very interesting conversation, but I think we see it here in particular. Um, so sometimes they got it wrong, but often they got it right. Um, it has changed the world. Um, and I guess I guess the final takeaway is it's hard to see the future, but but these people actually saw it better than than almost anyone. Um, thank you very much. >> Hi. A wonderful talk. Um, was the breakup of AT&T was that when Bell Labs ceased to exist or started to fail? And also, was there any time when Bell Labs was still really strong that it had have been able to incorporate women and minorities? >> Yeah, those are great questions. Um so the first question is yes Bellabs was actually very more progressive I would say with women than minorities but they did um super famous um Bell Lab scientist and engineer Jim Bell um came up with the Electrat microphone which is one of the great innovations at Bell Labs um who is African-American and and actually some people said would sometimes get pulled over by local policemen when he was driving which tells you about that era but um Bellabs was pretty progressive especially under William Baker who took over Bell Labs in the 70s. Um but even in the 50s women first entered Bell Labs in the mathematics department and they were you know I don't I physicists are very um masculine the physicists were not actually open to having women in there but women um began working at Bell Labs first in mathematics um then in um chemistry and eventually in physics as for Bellab's um demise if we might call it that I mean the the company Um AT&T was split apart in a 1983 um following a judge's orders to to to actually um break up the monopoly. Um Bell Labs parts of Bell Labs went with different parts of the company. So essentially Bellab stayed um and it stayed as an R&D lab but it kept getting smaller and smaller and it's it's actually remitt got smaller as it kind of worked um with different focus on telecom for instance and telecommunications vendors and wireless um but that kind of grand sweep as sort of anything planning the future of communications um by I would say by the mid to late 1980s even though they were doing really good work and they still had researchers who whose work I think won the Nobell priz's latest work from the 80s and 90s. Um, but it kept getting smaller and smaller and their vision, their their accomplishments, I guess you might say, got smaller, too. >> Yeah. Sure. >> Question. >> I uh I actually um did my first 20 years at Bell Lab. So, I was Bell Lab supervisor >> and I'm 65. >> Oh, okay. >> So, um but one thing >> You look great. >> Thanks. So, one thing I'll say is that I thought Bell Labs was really good about uh bringing in um you know, blacks and minorities. Um I got a full scholarship to go to, you know, school and you join Bell Labs and all that kind of stuff because they were fairly progressive on that. Yeah. >> So, um I appreciated that. Um the other thing I was going to say too is I I worked on a lot of different things computers uh wireless and voiceover IP a lot of technologies but uh one interesting thing about Bell Labs is that um I mentioned became a director. the the uh structure the financial structure for Bell the Bell system was really set up for innovation because um the agreement with the United States was that we would only have 6% in um profits >> uh for the company. And so the only way you could grow um profits was to grow your costs. And so uh you needed to always increase your cost so that you can maintain that 6%. So as a result uh I used to be in part of the business units they used to be like you got to you got to tax the R&D tax and so a lot of money went to R&D just because you know that was a cost that didn't generate more revenue and so it was kind of a nice arrangement that kind of forced a lot of innovation. >> Yeah. No no thank you for that. Um it right the accounting I I often get the accounting question and whenever I write um but you've explained it in a really really nicely too in a way that's very simple um and the the cost plus questions and and uh the the the fact is that that you know phone subscribers were were paying for some of that innovation and it went back into it. Yeah. Um in answering her question about um about minorities about labs I I was thinking more of the 70s and the 60s even before that. Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Um would you say there were uh what other comparable companies were there at the time period that had a a very developed innovation department and what would you say are companies existing today that are similar in structure if if any? Yeah, I mean I think Bell Labs when one way to answer that question is that when they were competing for PhDs for instance, I think they saw General Electric and IBM as their competition and they both had you know very large but I mean that would have been just a uh IBM would have been just a little bit later maybe. Um and actually Mvin Kelly went to work for IBM after he retired from Bell Labs as a consultant. Um, so those would probably be the two examples during that heyday of Bell Labs. Um, today I think it's pretty tough. I mean I I think I think when we look at companies like Apple and Google, um, Facebook, I mean, OpenAI and Anthropic, those are different kinds of companies. They're they're narrower companies. I mean, they're not looking, you know, they don't they're not imbued with figuring out the the sort of broad future. They're not regulated. they're not kind of investing the same amounts in in in sort of innovation and and certainly they're I I'm not um I'm not making a kind of moral or ethical point, but they're very focused on profits and return on investment and in in a way um that's I think different than Bell Labs in terms of like funding scientists for instance that were winning Nobel prizes and just creating trade patents. So um there's there's some element I think Google labs for instance really took a a cue from Bell Labs and sort of giving some of their scientists and engineers free time to kind of find things that that they're interested in or 20% time to kind of pursue their passion. But I think it's a it's a different kind of company. Um that's not a judgment. I think it's just a fact. It's a it's a different kind of company with a sort of more focused um product driven culture. And as a Waltham museum, I would love to mention, you know, the fact that we have GTE and Rathon both represented locally here. >> Yeah. So I had a comment and a question. So I worked at Bell Labs for 40 years from mid70s to mid 2017 >> and I was a vice president at the end of it at Bell Labs all at Bell Labs. But one thing I will I wanted you to sort of comment on is they had the quality of people individuals when they came there >> right >> from all over the world but also the focus on training. >> Yeah. >> And management the best managers the best people how to extract the maximum from teams. >> Yeah. the kind of innovations that were done on teamwork and networking >> and the power of weak links and all these big topics >> were innovations at the lab so I don't know if you when you did your research felt >> that how the whole thing was being leveraged was different from how Google is doing it and how all these companies are doing where a person comes in you expect them to stay for two or three years and leave >> so you don't invest in people >> so what is your sense of of investment and management. >> Yeah, I it changed over time. Um it became much more of a focus. I mean um it's a great point early on at Bell Labs. Um for instance, Mvin Kelly, one of his I don't know if I'd call it an innovation, but one of his great um sort of insights was that people were coming out of college and working at Bell Labs and they weren't really able to kind of work within the culture of the phone company. So he created sort of a continuing education class that everybody had to take. They called it Kelly College and that set and everybody was was taking and it was sort of like well you know you're smart you know your math you know your engineering but you don't know what the phone company is and you don't know how to work for it or how to innovate within it and it became this sort of ongoing thing and I think that set a template for later years but yeah there was there was enormous amounts of research on how teams work I mean and probably you by the by the time you know it had evolved into the 80s and 90s I'm trying to think during my research, I probably was going down that a little bit. I mean, I talked about today like leaving people alone. Sometimes they would leave people alone, but the idea of how to make a team actually work together or how to structure certainly like the fiber optic effort, things like that were really really um complex affairs that were given great amounts of thought. Um, I might also say that, you know, some of these also branched off into like quality control and how to make factories work better and how, you know, there there were so many kind of tentacles reaching out from Bell Labs to kind of manage how to make things better. Um, and and teamwork and managing people. Um, continuing education was part of that. Um, improving factories, improving how people work at factories was part of that, too. Improving products. But yeah, it's a it's a great point. Um, there's a lot there. I'd have to think deeply because this goes back about a decade my research on that of like where I found it. But but it's it's it's really it's really crucial point. Um yeah, sure. Whoever whoever has a mic I I don't Oh, he has a mic. Okay. >> Um first, uh thanks. It's one of my favorite books of the past 20 years. Um >> Oh, wow. not only studying R&D, which I'm in, but uh learned some family stories from someone you covered in the book, uh John Pierce. >> Oh. >> So, um are you still collecting stories is one question because you know, you wrote the book a little while ago. >> Yeah, sure. Yeah, I I I am actually somebody Yeah. Are you going to tell a story or are you going to send me a >> Well, I I can now tell it a little better. Um so, my grandfather took his brother-in-law, John, to a vacuum show and um the way my mother told it was wrong. you corrected it for me, but um it was a show with vacuum tubes and my grandfather didn't understand this. So he goes there, he realizes this is entirely different from what he was expecting. So he's trying to explain to John is like, "Oh well, this is, you know, how it works and everything, not understanding at all his connection, John's connections to this and satellites and the transistor and so on." >> So and there more stories, but my uh cousin JJ's son will be really happy to hear about this event, sending him pictures. >> That's great. >> So >> thank you. Um, so interestingly enough, as you as I went through the book, the the most I say the most comparative company I thought of from reading about history was Xerox Park. >> Yeah. >> And basically Xerx Park was the AT Bell Labs of the West Coast effectively. And I think a lot of the management innovation inside that company was based upon what they had read about at uh the structure of AT&T Bell Labs. >> Yeah. No, I think it that's a fair point. Yeah. >> Right. Yeah. >> Yeah. And and that really interesting history. It was and of course it was separate from the corporate entity that didn't really understand it very well and and culturally distinct and that created problems too. Right. Thank you. >> That will be the conclusion of our formal part. Thank you very much. Thank you.