The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner Read Free Book Online Page A

archives.
    21 Phil Anderson, “Physics at Bell Labs, 1949–1984,” unpublished. Given to the author by Anderson.
    22 Interview of Addison White by Lillian Hoddeson, September 30, 1976, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD; www.aip.org/history/ohilist .
    23 Shockley, “The Invention of the Transistor—An Example of Creative-Failure Methodology.”
    24 Richard Rhodes,
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), p. 655. Rhodes notes that the Trinity core could not have been larger “than a small orange.” While he put the weight at eleven pounds, other descriptions of the plutonium core have ranged higher—up to fourteen pounds, and the size of a softball.
    25 Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson,
Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 164.
    26 Letter, Jay W. Forrester to Ralph Bown, July 22, 1948. AT&T archives.
    27 Letter, Ralph Bown to Jay W. Forrester, July 26, 1948. AT&T archives.
    28 A discovery of similar import occurred in the early 1960s at Bell Labs, when Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered the cosmic microwave radiation that remained from the Big Bang. The men later won the Nobel Prize for their work. Jansky would have almost certainly been considered for the prize, too, had he not suffered an early death, in 1950, at the age of forty-five. After Jansky’s death, a lingering and insoluble disagreement arose over Bell Labs’ suggestion that Jansky move on from his discovery and redirect his research to more practical matters. Jansky’s brother, C. M. Jansky, has made the case that Bell management’s orders not only were shortsighted but were implemented against Jansky’s wishes. Jansky’s supervisor Harald Friis has disagreed.
    29
Oxford English Dictionary
, 2nd ed. See “innovate” and “innovation,” vol. 8, pp. 997–98. Usually, for science mandarins such as Frank Jewett, the chairman of the Labs and head of the National Academy of Sciences, the descriptive language for innovation in the World War II era, and immediately thereafter, was “ingenuity,” “invention,” and “development.” Though it may well have been used earlier, the first reference I came across to the word “innovate” in the Bell Labs literature was in a 1958 speech by Jack Morton and in the 1959
Bell Laboratories Record
touting the Labs’ involvement in the military’s Distant Early Warning (DEW) line. For further reference, see chapter 9 , endnote 4.
    30 Ernest Braun and Stuart Macdonald,
Revolution in Miniature: The History and Impact of Semiconductor Electronics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 5.
    31 Ralph Bown, “The Transistor as an Industrial Research Episode,”
Scientific Monthly,
January 1955.
    32 Jack A. Morton, “From Research to Technology,”
International Science and Technology
, May 1964.
    33 Jack A. Morton, “The Innovation Process,” date unknown. AT&T archives.
    34 Eugene I. Gordon, “Morton’s Legacy,”
New Jersey Council News
, 1991; also author interviews.
    35 Michael Wolff, “The R&D ‘Bootleggers’: Inventing Against the Odds,”
IEEE Spectrum
, July 1975.
    36 “Kelly’s favorite room” is from an author interview with Robert Von Mehren, Kelly’s son-in-law; the description of the “stately room” comes from my visit to the actual house in Short Hills.
    37 Interview of Walter Brattain by Charles Weiner, AIP.
    38 Ralph Bown had already explained the technical reasons for spreading the invention around. An internal Bell Labs memo written a decade after the transistor became a commercial product noted that the large semiconductor industry, “with its center of gravity outside the Bell System,” was the deliberate result of a policy that the Labs’ managers settled on in the months after the invention. By involving engineers around the world in the evolution of the device—making it better, cheaper, more