The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (46 page)

These were last-gasp efforts to garner attention. He had no more real research to do, and no more teaching. Mostly, Shockley organized his vast cache of telephone recordings and papers and did his best to court publicity for his eugenics foundation. All the while, he made notations in his
daily diaries. He had always used multiple books for organization. During any given year, going back to the late 1930s, there had been pocket-sized diaries, booklet diaries, large notebook diaries, and so forth. Some were used to record his personal trials (“sore throat, temperature 98”) and others his professional obligations. Almost compulsively, he made entries on gardening, doctors, business appointments, store purchases, gas mileage, lunches, and exercise regimens; there were notations, too, on colleagues, ideas, and dreams. It was as though there had always been too much occurring in his life, and too much occurring in his mind, to possibly hold it in one place. But now that was not quite the case. In the mid-1980s, Shockley began keeping a diary on a new computer. He seemed mainly interested in observing the behavior of the birds in his backyard, where he would sometimes sit for hours and note their habits and gestures. He fed the birds lovingly. When he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1987, it had already metastasized. Lumps soon began to form in his legs and neck. Shockley’s biographer, Joel Shurkin, relates that in 1989, during the final months of life, Shockley suffered in extraordinary pain, made barely tolerable only by large doses of morphine.

His wife and hospice workers cared for him at home in Palo Alto during his final weeks. There were few visitors.

J
OHN
B
ARDEEN AND
W
ALTER
B
RATTAIN
, Shockley’s colleagues on the transistor invention, fared better after leaving Bell Labs. The two men remained friendly until the end, and whatever bitterness they harbored toward Shockley during the late 1940s seemed to ebb as the years passed. When the men were forced to meet, as was sometimes the case, their relations were civil. In April 1972, for instance, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the transistor, they were interviewed together in Washington, D.C. Bardeen graciously praised Shockley’s insights that led to the junction transistor, and Shockley in turn praised his two former colleagues for their pioneering work on the point-contact transistor. The trio were asked to identify the most important developments that had arisen from the transistor. Brattain said he cherished the fact that
transistor radios could now bring information to people living in the most remote and impoverished corners of the world. Bardeen pointed to communications with the Apollo astronauts. He also noted the invention’s tremendous financial impact in the fledgling computer industry, “which wouldn’t have been possible without the transistor, and now runs in this country—I think—the order of $20 billion a year.”

Shockley suggested that the greatest innovation arising from the transistor might be the compact tape recorder.
²¹

Brattain, still garrulous and rough-edged, had long expressed a desire to someday return to the West. Like so many of his colleagues, he had begun his life with humble prospects and ended with epic achievements. It amazed him. He had grown up amid latter-day pioneers in Washington State, where he spent the days learning his way around heavy machinery and rifles; fifty years later he had ended up on a stage, bowing his head before the king of Sweden, so he could receive a Nobel Prize. All the time he had insisted he was lucky rather than some kind of genius. But there was one part of Brattain’s past that he considered formative above all others, and often it nagged at him. In the 1920s, a professor named Benjamin Brown, at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, had changed Brattain’s life by introducing him to advanced physics. Brattain wanted to do the same thing for someone else. “I’ve gotten to the place where I will retire to my small alma mater out there and do a little teaching,” he told the sociologist Harriet Zuckerman, who interviewed him at Murray Hill in the early 1960s. He left Bell Labs soon after for a second career in academia at Whitman College. Before he died in 1987, Brattain spent his last few years in a nursing home, suffering the effects of Alzheimer’s. John Bardeen later wrote a memorial essay about his friend for the National Academy of Sciences, where he noted that their old office mate at Bell Labs, Gerald Pearson, an inventor of the solar cell and one of the men who signed Brattain’s notebook testifying to the transistor demonstration on December 24, 1947, died just two weeks after Brattain. Pearson, an Oregon native, had also returned to the West after leaving Bell Labs. He had finished his career at Stanford.

Bardeen himself died a few years later, in 1991. He had worked at
the University of Illinois–Urbana from the time he left Bell Labs, in 1951, until then. A good deal of his subsequent research at Illinois had focused on the phenomenon of superconductivity. In other words, he and several colleagues explained the reasons why some substances, at very cold temperatures, can conduct electricity without any resistance. Their ideas took shape in a formidable tract that merged theoretical physics with complex mathematics. In 1972, Bardeen was awarded a second Nobel Prize in Physics for the work. He is the world’s only physicist to have such a distinction.

A
FTER MOVING FROM
B
ELL
L
ABS
to MIT in the late 1950s, Claude Shannon continued to publish important papers on communications. But his most productive years as a mathematician were behind him. Like Shockley, he had left the Bell cocoon; the difference, perhaps, was that Shannon understood the implications. “I believe that scientists get their best work done before they are fifty, or even earlier than that,” he told an interviewer late in life. “I did most of my best work while I was young.”
²²
Indeed, a decade after arriving at MIT, his work on information began to trail off. “He was concerned that he had nothing left to say,” Len Kleinrock, who was a PhD student under Shannon at MIT in the early 1960s, recalls. This may have been another instance of Shannon’s typical modesty. Still, says Kleinrock, “He had his doubts about keeping up with his own field.”

Shannon nonetheless remained interested in the implications of his work. His speeches from that era suggest a man quietly convinced that information—how it moved, how it was stored, how it was processed—would soon define global societies and economies. A few years after he entered academia, in 1959, he lectured to an audience of students and faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. “I think that this present century in a sense will see a great upsurge and development of this whole information business,” Shannon remarked. The future, he predicted, would depend on “the business of collecting information and the business of transmitting it from one point to another, and perhaps most important
of all, the business of processing it—using it to replace man at semi-rote operation[s] at a factory … even the replacement of man in the things that we almost think of as creative, things like doing mathematics or translating languages.”

When he started at MIT, Shannon gave regular lectures on topics that held his interest. He also invited speakers to campus. In 1961, for instance, he arranged for John Pierce to visit and give a talk entitled “What Computers Can Do Better—and How.” Pierce, though enthusiastic about the potential of computers, seemed slightly less optimistic than Shannon (who introduced his old friend with a brief speech of his own). By the late 1960s, though, Shannon’s talks at MIT were becoming rare occurrences. What’s more, his visits to the MIT campus were beginning to grow infrequent. Mostly he stayed home to tinker with his gadgets. Visitors to his large, elegant house in the Boston suburbs would get a tour of his juggling machines, his unicycles, his collection of pianos and musical instruments, and all his hand-built gadgets and automata. One week, he liked to show off a robotic lawn mower he’d constructed; another week, it was a flame-throwing trumpet. Much of it was deposited in what he called his “toy room.” When he visited Shannon, John Pierce seemed less interested in the gadgets than some others; he sometimes told people Shannon built his automata to “show off.” Mostly, Pierce wanted to chat with his friend about ideas and the future. When Pierce was at the Shannon house, Betty Shannon recalls, he and Claude would take a boat out on the lake that adjoined the property and paddle around, talking for hours.

At almost every other opportunity, Shannon seemed eager to project an air of frivolity. “I think he just loosened up,” his wife recalls.
²³
To some fellow academics, his lighthearted obsessions remained puzzling: Wasn’t he wasting his time? But it was worth considering whether his interests were largely consistent with his habits, decades earlier, at Bell Labs. With information theory, Shannon had never had any intention of changing the world—it had just worked out that way. He had pursued the work not because he perceived it would be useful in squeezing more information into undersea ocean cables or deep space communications. He had pursued
it because it intrigued him. In fact, Shannon had never been especially interested in the everyday value of his work. He once told an interviewer, “I think you impute a little more practical purpose to my thinking than actually exists. My mind wanders around, and I conceive of different things day and night. Like a science-fiction writer, I’m thinking, ‘What if it were like this?’ or, ‘Is there an interesting problem of this type?’ … It’s usually just that I like to solve a problem, and I work on these all the time.”
²⁴

The stock market was an interesting problem. In the late 1960s and early 1970s it became something of an obsession. Shannon did not invest because he needed money. He had his MIT salary and pension; he also earned a comfortable sum consulting at Bell Labs. (Though Shannon had long ceased being involved at Murray Hill, Bill Baker, the president of the Labs, kept him on the payroll anyway. Baker insisted it was an honorable thing to do “should the man who came up with information theory” suffer any kind of financial hardship.)
²⁵
Shannon had become wealthy, too, through friends in the technology industry. He owned significant shares in Hewlett-Packard, where his friend Barney Oliver ran the research labs, and was deeply invested in Teledyne, a conglomerate started by another friend, Henry Singleton. Shannon sat on Teledyne’s board of directors. The stock market was therefore just another puzzle, albeit one with a pleasant proof of success. He was convinced that the stock market was less efficient than some economists believed, and that a smart investor who took advantage of mispriced stocks could do quite well.
²⁶

Len Kleinrock, Shannon’s former student, recalls that one day at MIT, Shannon mentioned that he was making a mathematical model of the stock market. “I said, ‘Mr. Shannon, you’re interested in making money?’ ” Kleinrock recalls. “He said, ‘Why yes, aren’t you?’ ”

A
S HE TURNED AWAY
from academic pursuits, Shannon also focused on juggling. To him, the sport had a number of inviting aspects: It was a game, a problem, a puzzle. It produced motions he considered beautiful. And it was something he simply could not master, making it all the more
tantalizing. Shannon would often lament that he had small hands, and thus had great difficulty making the jump from four balls to five—a demarcation, some might argue, between a good juggler and a great juggler. Old friends—fellow jugglers from the Bell Labs days—wrote encouraging letters suggesting he was closer to five balls than he realized. It’s likely Shannon never quite achieved that. Nevertheless, in the late 1970s he found himself consumed by the question of whether he could formulate a scientific theory of juggling to explain its unifying principles. Just as he had done years before—for his papers on cryptography, information, and computer chess—he delved into the history of juggling and took stock of its greatest practitioners.

He began to seek out data. “One day he came to the MIT juggling club, basically with a tape measure and a stopwatch,” recalls Arthur Lewbel, an MIT graduate student who later became an economics professor at Boston College. “And he came up to some of us who were juggling. He didn’t say who he was—none of us would have known him even if he said his name. And he said he just wanted to see if he could measure our juggling.” Shannon came back a number of times, and eventually he became friendly with the students. He invited them for pizza at his house. In turn, when the juggling club decided to go to the Big Apple Circus together, they called Shannon, who was thrilled to be invited. He was now part of the gang.
²⁷

In December 1980, he asked various jugglers he knew to wear electromagnetic sensors—“a flexible copper mesh which was fitted over the first and third fingers of the juggler’s hand”—and then had them juggle lacrosse balls covered in conducting foil. When a ball was caught, it closed the circuit between the first and third fingers, and thereby started a precision time clock; when the ball was released, microseconds later, a circuit opened and the clock stopped. Shannon took exact measurements, comprising hundreds of pages of data, about how long each ball stayed in the juggler’s hand before release.
²⁸
From this information, he put forward a theoretical equation—(F + D)H = (V + D)N—that governed juggling’s physics. (As Shannon’s juggling friend Arthur Lewbel explains, F is the time a ball spends in the air, D is the time a ball is in a juggler’s hand, H
is the number of hands, V is the time a hand is vacant, and N is the number of balls juggled.)
²⁹

This was only one aspect, however, of a longer treatise he was composing at the time. Shannon had traced the origins of juggling back to Egyptian murals from 1900 BC and then through to the ancient Greeks and the jesters and minstrels of the medieval era. “Jugglers,” he had concluded, “are surely among the most vulnerable of all entertainers. Musicians and actors can usually cover their slips, but if a juggler makes a mistake,
it’s a beaut!
” When he showed the juggling draft to some editors at
Scientific American
, they let him know they were interested in publishing it. But then Shannon balked. He didn’t think the work was yet polished or insightful enough to merit publication. In an exchange of letters that continued for several years, the magazine would beseech him to let it print the manuscript. Shannon would pleasantly change the subject. Sometimes he would send his poetry, mostly rhyming doggerel, and suggest the magazine publish that instead. In response the editors would politely decline and change the subject back to publishing the juggling essay—would he please agree to let them?