The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (2 page)

His father—kindly and bookish, and not nearly the go-getter his son was turning out to be—was named Joseph Fennimore Kelly. As a young
man, Joe Kelly had taught high school history and English, but by 1900, when the Kelly family was counted for the first time in the Gallatin census, he was managing a hardware store on the east side of the town square. Despite being seventy-five miles from Kansas City, far enough away to be considered a backwater, Gallatin’s downtown bustled. The clear reason was its location at the intersection of two train lines, the Rock Island and the Wabash, both of which stopped in town to take in and disgorge passengers. As a result, Gallatin, with a population of just 1,700, boasted three hotels and several restaurants. The town had two newspapers, two banks, five dentists, four druggists, two jewelers, and nine physicians. There were two cigar factories, four blacksmiths, and several saloons. In Gallatin, the Kelly family had settled in a prosperous place that was perched on the cusp of modernity.

All around was the simplicity of small-town life. The days were mostly free of noisy machinery or any kind of electric distractions. You butchered your own hogs and collected eggs from your own hens. Farmers and merchants alike visited with acquaintances around the crowded town square on Saturday nights. The Old West—the Wild West—had not quite receded, and so you listened quite regularly to reminiscences about the trial of Frank James, Jesse’s outlaw brother, which Gallatin had hosted a few decades before. On hot days in the summer you walked or rode a horse a half mile from town to the banks of the Grand River, where you would go for a swim; and on some summer evenings, if you were a teenager (and if you were lucky), you danced with a girl at an ice cream social. There were no radio stations yet—the device was mostly a new toy for hobbyists—so instead there might be a primitive Edison phonograph or a string band at the party, some friends who could play fiddle and mandolin.

In the meantime, there was little doubt that Gallatin was moving ahead with the rest of the world. And the disruptions of technology, at least to a young man, must have seemed thrilling. It wasn’t only the railroads. As Mervin Kelly attended high school, automobiles began arriving in Gallatin. Thanks to a diesel generator, the town now enjoyed a few hours of electricity each evening. A local telephone exchange—a
small switchboard connecting the hundred or so phone subscribers in Gallatin—opened its office near the town square, in the same brick building as the Kelly hardware store. To see the switchboard in action, Kelly would only have had to step outside his father’s store, turn right, and walk around the side of the building to the front door of the exchange. In a sense, his future was right around the corner.

At sixteen, he was awarded a scholarship to the Missouri School of Mines, located in the town of Rolla, 250 miles away. To someone from Gallatin, such a distance was almost unimaginably far, yet Kelly seemed to have no reservations about leaving. “I was really pretty lucky,” he later said. Few people in his town made it through high school; fewer still made it to college. When he departed, the young man thought he might ultimately work as a geologist or mining engineer. That way, he would travel to the far reaches of the earth. He seemed well aware that the course of his life might be determined by his energetic impulses. “My zeal,” Kelly noted in the Gallatin High School yearbook, “has condemned me.”

I
N
1910, when Kelly set off for mining school, few Americans recognized the differences between a scientist, an engineer, and an inventor. The public was far more impressed by new technology than the knowledge that created the technology. Thus it was almost certainly the case that the inventor of machinery seemed more vital to the modern age than someone—a trained physicist, for example—who might explain how and why the machine worked.

There seemed no better example of this than Thomas Edison. By the time Kelly was born, in 1894, Edison was a national hero, a beau ideal of American ingenuity and entrepreneurship. Uniquely intuitive, Edison had isolated himself with a group of dedicated and equally obsessive men at a small industrial laboratory in New Jersey. Edison usually worked eighteen hours a day or longer, pushing for weeks on end, ignoring family obligations, taking meals at his desk, refusing to pause for sleep or showers. He disliked bathing and usually smelled powerfully of sweat
and chemical solvents.
¹
When fatigue overcame him he would crawl under his table for a catnap or stretch out on any available space (though eventually his wife placed a bed in the library of his West Orange, New Jersey, laboratory). For his inventing, Edison used a dogged and systematic exploratory process. He tried to isolate useful materials—his stockroom was replete with everything from copper wire to horses’ hoofs and rams’ horns—until he happened upon a patentable, and marketable, combination.
²

Though Edison became rich and famous for his phonograph and his filament for the electric light bulb, some of his less heralded inventions were arguably as influential on the course of modern life. One of those was a new use for a compressed carbon “button,” which he discovered in 1877 could be placed inside the mouthpiece of a telephone to dramatically improve the quality and power of voice transmission. (He had first tried lead, copper, manganese, graphite, osmium, ruthenium, silicon, boron, iridium, platinum, and a wide variety of other liquids and fibers.) A decade later Edison improved upon the carbon button by proposing instead the use of tiny roasted carbon granules, derived from coal, in the vocal transmitter.
³
These discoveries made the telephone a truly marketable invention.

Edison’s genius lay in making new inventions work, or in making existing inventions work better than anyone had thought possible. But
how
they worked was to Edison less important. It was not true, as his onetime protégé Nikola Tesla insisted, that Edison disdained literature or ideas. He read compulsively, for instance—classics as well as newspapers. Edison often said that an early encounter with the writings of Thomas Paine had set his course in life. He maintained a vast library in his laboratory and pored over chemistry texts as he pursued his inventions. At the same time, however, he scorned talk about scientific theory, and even admitted that he knew little about electricity. He boasted that he had never made it past algebra in school. When necessary, Edison relied on assistants trained in math and science to investigate the principles of his inventions, since theoretical underpinnings were often beyond his interest. “I can always
hire mathematicians,” he once said at the height of his fame, “but they can’t hire me.”
⁴

And it was true. In the boom times of the Industrial Revolution, in the words of one science historian, inventing products such as the sewing machine or barbed wire “required mainly mechanical skill and ingenuity, not scientific knowledge and training.” Engineers in the fields of mining, rubber, and energy on occasion consulted with academic geologists, chemists, and physicists. “But on the whole, the industrial machine throbbed ahead without scientists and research laboratories, without even many college-trained engineers. The advance of technology relied on the cut-and-try methods of ingenious tinkerers, unschooled save possibly for courses at mechanics institutes.”
⁵
Indeed, by the time Mervin Kelly began his studies at the Missouri School of Mines around 1910, any sensible American boy with an eye on the future might be thinking of engineering; the new industrial age mostly needed men who could make bigger and better machines.

And yet the notion that scientists trained in subjects like physics could do intriguing and important work was gaining legitimacy. Americans still knew almost nothing about the sciences, but they were beginning to hear about a stream of revelations, all European in origin, regarding the hidden but fundamental structure of the visible world. Words like “radioactivity,” “X-rays,” and, especially, “quanta”—a new term for what transpired within the tiny world of molecules—started filtering into American universities and newspapers. These ideas almost certainly made their way to Missouri, where Kelly was paying his rent in Rolla—a room on the third floor of the metallurgical building—by working with the State Geological Survey for $18 a week numbering mineral specimens. During one of his summer breaks he took a job at a copper mine in Utah, an experience that repelled him permanently from a career as a mining engineer and pushed him closer to pure science. After graduating he took a one-year job teaching physics to undergraduates at the University of Kentucky. The school also gave him a master’s degree in that subject. After that, he headed north to Chicago.

.   .   .   

F
OR DECADES
, any serious American science student had to complete his education in Europe, most often at schools in Berlin and Gottingen, Germany, where he could sit at the feet of the masters as they lectured or carried on laboratory research. (The language of science was German, too.) But early in the twentieth century a handful of American schools, notably Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and the University of Chicago, began turning out accomplished graduates in physics and chemistry. In 1916, Robert Millikan at the University of Chicago was establishing himself as a leading physicist and teacher of the subject. Then in his forties, he would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1923, and grace the cover of
Time
magazine in 1927. Ultimately, he would build the California Institute of Technology into one of the country’s great scientific institutions, and throughout his career he would guide many of his brightest students to jobs with AT&T. To a student like Kelly, Millikan would have seemed heroic. His textbooks on physics were becoming the standard for college instruction, and his work on measuring the exact charge of an electron, an experiment that was continuing when Kelly arrived in Chicago to study with him, had made him famous in the small community of academic physicists.

Rather like Kelly himself, there was something authentically, irresistibly American about Millikan. Though he’d received a year’s worth of instruction in Paris, Berlin, and Gottingen, he was nevertheless the son of an Iowa preacher, cheerful, earnest, conservative, boyishly handsome, and almost always neatly dressed in a collared shirt and bow tie. Also like Kelly, Millikan was a man of action. He worked himself not quite to Edison’s extreme, but close, which suggested the bootstrap ethic could apply to physicists as well as inventors. As a younger man, the professor had almost missed his own wedding because he was so busy reviewing a scientific manuscript in his office.

By the early twentieth century, physicists were already dividing into camps: those who theorized and those who experimented. Millikan was an experimentalist. He shrewdly devised laboratory tests that validated
theoretical work but also built upon the work of other experimentalists, “discovering the weak points that could be improved upon,” as his student Paul Epstein described it. Millikan’s first great claim to fame was something known as the oil-drop experiment, which was representative of those early-twentieth-century forays into laboratory physics. The experiment was both creative and demanding—creative in how it attempted to reveal the elements of the cosmos by way of a small device constructed from everyday materials, and demanding in how it required years of follow-up work (even after the results were first shared in 1910) before it could be deemed precise. It was also, not incidentally, Mervin Kelly’s first real encounter with deep, fundamental research.
⁶

The oil-drop experiment would, in Millikan’s own words, serve as “the most direct and unambiguous proof of the existence of the electron.” More precisely, it would attempt to put an exact value on
e
, which is the charge of the electron, and which in turn would make a range of precise calculations about subatomic physics possible. Other researchers had already tried to measure
e
by observing the behavior of a fine mist of water that had been subjected to an electric charge. The experimenter would spray a mist between two horizontal metal plates spaced less than an inch apart. One plate carried a negative charge and the other a positive charge. The electric field between the two plates would slow the fall of some droplets. The idea, or rather the hope, was to suspend a droplet of water between the plates; then, by measuring the speed of the falling droplet and the intensity of the electric field required to slow the droplet, you could calculate its electric charge. There was a problem, however: The water in the droplet evaporated so fast that it would only remain visible for a couple of seconds. It was proving difficult to get anything beyond a rough estimate of the charge. The experiment was going nowhere.

One of Millikan’s great ideas—he would claim it came to him on a train traveling through the plains of Manitoba—was to change the measured substance from water to oil, because oil wouldn’t evaporate, and measurements would thus improve. (It was more likely that a graduate student of Millikan’s named Harvey Fletcher actually suggested the switch from water to oil and helped him create the testing apparatus.)
⁷
In time, the experiment came to work something like this: A researcher would stand in front of a boxlike chamber and spray a fine mist of oil from a tool called an atomizer; he would look through a close-range telescope at the droplets, which were illuminated by a beam of light; he would then turn on the electric plates and measure (stopwatch in hand) how the oil drops behaved—how long it took for them to move down or up in their suspended state—and write down the observations.

When Millikan’s student Harvey Fletcher first tried the experiment—when he looked through the telescope at the tiny oil drops suspended in air that sparkled like “stars in constant agitation”—he felt the urge to scream with excitement. To do the experiment for hour after hour, day after day, counting how long it took for a certain-sized drop to rise or fall a certain distance when a certain amount of current was applied, was a painstaking process. Fletcher was well matched for such work. But for someone in a hurry, for someone whose very constitution was unsuited to the practice of quiet and diligent observation, the time spent in the Millikan lab must have seemed like a kind of torture. Eventually, Fletcher’s role in the lab was taken over by a younger graduate student—Mervin Kelly. On some evenings, Kelly asked his new wife, Katherine, a pretty girl from Rolla whom he had met as an undergraduate and had married after a brief courtship, to come to the lab with him. On Chicago’s south side, late into the night, she would help him measure the drops.