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

reliable—the hope was that everyone would profit from the advances, especially the Bell System.
    39 Ralph Bown, letter to M. J. Kelly, Baur au Lac Hotel, Zurich, Switzerland, August 20, 1948. AT&T archives.
    40 Oliver Buckley to M. J. Kelly, Savoy Hotel, London, England, September 15, 1948. AT&T archives.
    41 M. J. Kelly, “Remarks Before Bell System Lecturer’s Conference,” October 2, 1951. AT&T archives.
    42 Milton Silverman, “Ma Bell’s House of Magic,”
Saturday Evening Post
, July 1947. The publication of the feature sparked an internal correspondence between Bell Labs executives, all of whom viewed the story critically.
    43 William G. Pfann, “Some Remarks on the Discovery of Zone Melting,” May 3, 1965. AT&T archives.
    44 Mervin J. Kelly, “Semiconductor Electronics: A New Technology—A New Industry,” 1958. AT&T archives.
CHAPTER SEVEN: THE INFORMATIONIST
    1 Claude Shannon, Kyoto Prize acceptance speech, 1985. Shannon Collection, Library of Congress. See also Anthony Liversidge, “Profile of Claude Shannon,” in
Claude Elwood Shannon Collected Papers
, reprinted (in a slightly different form) from
Omni
magazine, August 1987. Used by permission of Liversidge.
    2 Vannevar Bush, letter to Professor E. B. Wilson, Harvard School of Public Health, December 15, 1938. “As he appeared to have great promise, and moreover appeared to be a decidedly unconventional type of youngster, I made it possible for him to go on with his studies.” Shannon Collection, Library of Congress.
    3 Vannevar Bush, recommendation for Claude Shannon for a National Research Fellowship, undated, circa late 1939. Shannon Collection, Library of Congress.
    4 Erico Marui Guizzo, “The Essential Message: Claude Shannon and the Making of Information Theory” (master’s thesis, MIT, 2003).
    5 Len Kleinrock, a former student of Shannon’s, author interview.
    6 Liversidge, “Profile of Claude Shannon.”
    7 Claude Shannon, letter to Dr. V. Bush, December 13, 1939. Shannon Collection, Library of Congress.
    8 Liversidge, “Profile of Claude Shannon.” Biographical facts relating to Shannon’s father are in a personal letter Shannon wrote, October 20, 1981, to Ms. Shari Bukowski: “[My father] was born in Oxford, New Jersey in 1862, came to Ovid, Michigan when very young and was raised and graduated there. He was a traveling salesman for a periodand came to Gaylord shortly after 1900. There he bought a furniture and undertaking business, and, having confidence in Gaylord’s future, built the Shannon Block and Post Office building on Main Street.” Shannon Collection, Library of Congress.
    9 Robert McEliece,
Claude Shannon, Father of the Information Age
, directed and written by Doug Ramsey, produced by Ramsey and Mike Weber; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2Whj_nL-x8 . In a profile of Shannon in his
Collected Papers
(New York: IEEE Press/John Wiley & Sons, 1993), the book’s editors, N. J. A. Sloane and Aaron D. Wyner, refer to H. H. Goldstine’s book
The Computer from Pascal to Von Neumann
, which described the thesis as “one of the most important master’s theses ever written … a landmark in that it helped to change digital circuit design from an art to a science.”
    10 Claude Shannon, letter to Dr. V. Bush, December 13, 1939. Shannon papers, Library of Congress.
    11 Norma (Levor) Barzman, author interview.
    12 Claude Shannon, letter to Dr. V. Bush, March 8, 1940. Shannon Collection, Library of Congress.
    13 Claude Shannon, letter to Dr. V. Bush, February 16, 1939. “Off and on I have been working on an analysis of some of the fundamental properties of general systems for the transmission of intellegence [
sic
], including telephony, radio, television, telegraphy, etc.” Shannon,
Collected Papers
, p. 455.
    14 Claude Shannon, oral history conducted in July 1982 by Robert Price, IEEE History Center, New Brunswick, NJ.
    15 Claude Shannon, interview with Robert Price, December 20, 1983. Shannon said: “… a lot of