The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (58 page)

32 Dennis Flanagan, managing editor,
Scientific American
, letter to John Pierce, March 3, 1949. Pierce Collection, Huntington Library.

33 Pierce was rejected, repeatedly, by most of the major magazines:
Harper’s
,
Time
, the
Atlantic
, the
New York Times Magazine,
and so forth.

34 Pierce,
My Career as an Engineer
.

35 John Pierce, oral history conducted by Andy Goldstein.

36 J. R. Pierce, “Visit with H. G. Wells.” Pierce typed up his handwritten notes from the meeting in November 1944 on July 8, 1971—“a transcription of an account that Mr. Pierce wrote shortly afterward.” Pierce Collection, Huntington Library.

1 Simon Flexner quoted in Ron Chernow,
Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
(New York: Random House, 1998), p. 474.

2
Charles H. Townes, Patent No. 2,879,439, March 24, 1959. The device emits radiation when the molecules drop from a high-energy state to a lower-energy state. Townes’s device was known as a two-level maser; in subsequent years, physicists developed a three-level maser and replaced the gas component with solid-state materials. Many of these improvements were attributed to a team led by the Harvard physicist (and later Nobel laureate) Nicolaas Bloembergen.

3
The scientists at the Labs most closely associated with the maser work were H. E. D. Scovil and R. W. DeGrasse. Nicolaas Bloembergen (see above) had come up with a workable idea for a solid-state maser slightly ahead of the Bell Labs team. In a long private memo (September 14, 1956) Rudi Kompfner detailed how “a rumor” reached the Bell Labs team of Bloembergen’s invention; what followed was an invitation by Kompfner to Bloembergen to advise Bell Labs on their maser work. The precipitating reason seems to have been the avoidance of a patent infringement suit at a later date. Bloembergen declined a formal consultancy with the Labs but agreed to an “understanding” with Bell Labs regarding a future patent license.

4
H. E. D. Scovil, “A Three-Level Solid-State Maser,”
Bell Laboratories Record
, July 1958.

5
Calvin Tomkins, “Woomera Has It!,”
New Yorker
, September 21, 1963.

6
John R. Pierce,
My Career as an Engineer: An Autobiographical Sketch
(University of Tokyo, 1988).

7
Ibid.

8
“An Interview of Dr. J. R. Pierce by Mr. Lincoln Barnett for the American Telephone & Telegraph Company,” February 13, 1963. AT&T archives.

9
Chuck Elmendorf, author interview.

10 John R. Pierce, memo to Mr. J. A. Morton, April 14, 1959. AT&T archives.

11 Advent, after burning up more than $170 million, according to Pierce, never got off the ground. As it happened, though, the first communications satellite test—at least in a technical sense—was Project Score, launched by the Army Signal Corps in December 1958; it was an Atlas rocket, outfitted with a short recorded message by President Eisenhower that was transmitted to earth as it orbited. Score burned up upon a planned reentry the following month.

12 John R. Pierce,
My Career as an Engineer
.

13 Estill I. Green, memo to Mervin Kelly, July 25, 1958. The memo suggested that a satellite system “at best … would probably yield barely acceptable transmission performance as contrasted with the excellent performance obtainable with submarine cable. … The satellite system would be a major undertaking. With so many uncertainties in the picture no accurate estimate of research and development cost can be had but comparison with other large system developments would suggest a minimum cost of $20,000,000 and a possibility of a considerably higher figure.” The memo also predicted, incorrectly, that the “propaganda value” (i.e., the public relations boost) from a communications satellite would be minimal.

14 The term was coined years after Kelly’s reign, by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen.

15 J. R. Pierce and R. Kompfner, letter to M. J. Kelly, 8 October 1958. In Kompfner’s handwriting at the top it reads: “Copy given to J.R.P. who showed it to W.O.B. Not Sent.” J.R.P. is Pierce; W.O.B. is William (Bill) Baker. AT&T archives.

16 J. R. Pierce and R. Kompfner, “Proposal for Research Toward Satellite Communication,” January 6, 1959. AT&T archives.

17 Hugh L. Dryden, Deputy Administrator, NASA, letter to Mr. R. Kompfner, January 13,
1959. “At the present time it is our plan to launch a 100-foot balloon sometime in the early fall.” AT&T archives.

18 Bill Jakes and Mary Jakes, author interview. Also see P. B. Findley, “The Laboratories in Monmouth County,”
Bell Laboratories Record
, March 1950.

19 In fact it was named Crawford’s Hill, though it was almost always referred to as Crawford Hill.

20 Costs for the antennas from “Project Echo Meeting” memo, by W. C. Jakes, August 20, 1959. AT&T archives.

21 W. C. Jakes, “Project Echo Conference Report,” June 16, 1959. AT&T archives.

22 “News Release, Project Echo Payload and Experiment,” Release No. 60-186, National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

23 Mary Jakes, author interview.

24 Calvin Tomkins, “Woomera Has It!,”
New Yorker
, September 21, 1963.

25 Bill Jakes, author interview.

26 “A Different Drummer,”
Time
, August 22, 1960.

27 “BALLOON SATELLITE ORBITS; RELAYED MESSAGE HERALDS NEW COMMUNICATIONS ERA” was the headline of a front-page story in the following day’s
New York Times
. The issue also contained a “Man in the News” profile of Pierce.

28 “Project Echo: Chronology 8/12/60–4/24/62,” undated memo. AT&T archives.

29 Steven M. Spencer, “Dial ‘S’ for Satellite,”
Saturday Evening Post,
January 14, 1961.

30 John R. Pierce, “Telstar: A History,” SMEC Vintage Electrics 1990;
www.smecc.org/john_pierce1.htm
.

31 Lawrence Lessing, “Laying the Great Cable in Space,”
Fortune
, July 1961.

32 “Interview with Frederick R. Kappel, President of AT&T,”
U.S. News & World Report
, July 10, 1961.

33 The meetings for what was called the “Active Satellite Program” were begun in the spring of 1960. Pierce as well as Kompfner were attendees. Memoranda by L. C. Tillotson, March 8, 1960, and April 11, 1960. AT&T archives.

34 Eugene O’Neill, oral history conducted in 2001 by David Hochfelder, IEEE History Center, New Brunswick, NJ.

35 Ibid.

36 J. R. Pierce,
The Beginnings of Satellite Communications
(San Francisco: San Francisco Press, 1968).

37 John W. Finney, “Nation Sees Tests: Experimental Device Launched by Space Agency for AT&T,”
New York Times
, July 11, 1962.

38 Richard Kostelanetz,
Master Minds: Portraits of Contemporary American Artists and Intellectuals
(New York: Macmillan, 1969).

39 John Pierce, oral history conducted by Andy Goldstein, IEEE History Center, New Brunswick, NJ, August 19–21, 1992.

40 A deeper discussion of the political tensions between AT&T and NASA, along with a broader overview of the history of modern satellites, navigation, and tracking, can be found in Helen Gavaghan’s
Something New Under the Sun: Satellites and the Beginning of the Space Age
(New York: Copernicus/Springer-Verlag, 1998).

41 Pierce was not of the belief, however, that all Bell Labs work was automatically superior to the competition. In active satellites, for instance, he admired the work done by Harold Rosen at Hughes Aircraft, which in 1963 and 1964 put up a series of high (22,300-mile) geosynchronous satellites known as Syncom.

42 For instance, W. S. Shockley—Journal, Tuesday, 4 October 1955. Shockley archives, Stanford University. Reviewed by author.

43 Pierce was often a visitor, according to interviews with Shannon’s wife, Mary. Atypically for Shannon, he would actually write back to Pierce. A March 8, 1957, letter
from Shannon to Pierce reads, “We are all excited here about a) our new house on the Mystic Lake, a tremendous Thomas Jefferson Type establishment with built in swimming, boating, skating, skiing and arboretum, b) a year (next year) in California at the Behavioral Institute in Palo Alto, of all places, c) a new Microbus we are outfitting for camping to make the trip this summer to California. Why don’t you come up to Boston sometime and see these things (also us) and make sidetrips to the M.I.T. labs., etc?” Pierce Collection, Huntington Library.

44 John Pierce, oral history conducted by Andy Goldstein.

45 John R. Pierce, March 9, 1961, letters to Copland and Bernstein. Pierce Collection, Huntington Library.

46 Cronkite interviewed Pierce for a January 29, 1967, show, “The Communications Explosion.” Transcript in the Pierce Collection, Huntington Library.

47 John R. Pierce, letter to Harald Friis, June 6, 1957. Pierce Collection, Huntington Library.

48 “Death of a Satellite,”
Bell Laboratories Record
, July 1968.

49 Bill Jakes, author interview.

1
An internal AT&T memo noted that one of the main reasons for participating in the New York show was “to take advantage of the opportunity to create, at a reasonable cost, a favorable image of the Bell System in the minds of millions of people.” AT&T archives.

2
Some of the Bell System exhibits in Seattle, as well as the company’s strenuous public relations efforts, are captured in the blithe Bell-funded short film “Century 21 Calling,” posted at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4Iu3JEsoQY&feature=PlayList&p=15491C1FCC325BC4&playnext_from=PL&playnext=1&index=16
.

3
John R. Pierce, letter to W. E. Kock, August 20, 1956. Pierce Collection, Huntington Library.

4
“Study of Picturephone Service, 1964 World’s Fair,” American Telephone and Telegraph Company, Business Research Division, June 1965. AT&T archives.

5
From the start of telephone service in the 1880s, it was understood that each phone could not be connected to every other phone and that therefore a central switching office would be essential; a formula for figuring out the number of interconnections—
n(n-1) ÷ 2—
demonstrates why. Even a small group of
n
callers—100, say—necessitates nearly 4,950 possible combinations, meaning 4,950 wires. But it increases exponentially after that. A phone system of 10,000 subscribers, for instance, where each subscriber had a line to each other, would necessitate nearly 50 million lines.

6
The first call was made through ESS No. 1 in Succasunna, New Jersey, on May 27, 1965.

7
“First Call Made Through Electronic Central Office in Succasunna,”
195 News Bulletin
, May 28, 1965. AT&T archives.

8
Arthur Albiston, memo, “Guidelines for Talking and Writing About #1 ESS,” from “Public Relations Program for the Introduction of No. 1 ESS,” November 30, 1964. AT&T archives.

9
Robert Alden, “A Shift to All-Electronic Phones Begun in Biggest Step Since Dial,”
New York Times,
September 20, 1964.

10 James B. Fisk, text of statement submitted to the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Science, Research and Development, December 11, 1963.

11 Julius P. Molnar, “BTL’s Response to Competitive Thrust: Talk to Western Electric Spring Conference,” May 19, 1971. AT&T archives.

12 Bill Fleckenstein, author interview.

13 Ed David, author interview.

14 These comments were repeated, almost verbatim, in several author interviews, including those with Ian Ross and Henry Pollak.

15 Irwin Dorros, author interview.

16 Ian Ross, author interview.

17 Helen M. Baker,
Turkeys: Common Sense Theories, Practical Management, Incubation and Brooding in Detail, Feeding Directions, Feeding Formulas
, 2nd rev. ed. (Baltimore, 1933).

18 William O. Baker, interviewed by Marcy Goldstein and Jeffrey L. Sturchio, Chemical Heritage Foundation oral history, May 23 and June 18, 1985. Used by permission.

19 On the Baker farm, at least, the diseases affecting their turkeys were coccidiosis and blackhead.

20 William O. Baker, interviewed by Marcy Goldstein and Jeffrey L. Sturchio.

21 Helen M. Baker,
Turkeys.

22 William O. Baker, “Materials: The Grand Alliance of Engineering and Science,” Dedication of Center for Materials Science and Engineering, MIT, October 1, 1965.

23 William O. Baker, “James Brown Fisk,” American Philosophical Society, 1988.

24 Dean Gillette, memo, “Replacement of Lead Sheath by Polyethylene and Copper Wire by Optical Fibers,” February 14, 1979. Baker Collection, Princeton University.

25 Calvin Tomkins, “Woomera Has It!,”
New Yorker
, September 21, 1963.

26 Ken Reese, “World War II: The Rubber Shortage,”
Today’s Chemist at Work
, June 1992; also see William O. Baker, interviewed by Marcy Goldstein and Jeffrey L. Sturchio.

27 Baker apparently knew a great deal about Pierce’s family life—his handwritten notes taken during meetings and phone calls with Pierce through the 1960s follow the course of Pierce’s drawn-out and painful divorce, during which Baker served as a sounding board and informal counsel. Baker Collection, Princeton University.

28 Baker Collection, Princeton University.

29 Bill Baker, telegram to William Shockley, November 1, 1956. Shockley Collection, Stanford University.

30 William O. Baker, letter to James B. Fisk, August 21, 1963. Baker Collection, Princeton University.

31 Will Lepkowski, interview with Dr. Frederick Seitz, March 2006. From “Final Report: The William O. Baker Papers and Biography,” booklet. Baker Collection, Princeton University.

32 William O. Baker, National Reconnaissance Office Oral History, conducted by R. Cargill Hall, May 7, 1996.

33 William O. Baker, Q&A,
Chemical and Engineering News
, November 25, 1996.

34 There exists a lack of clarity regarding the commission’s official members and evolution. A photo provided by Baker to an interviewer from the National Reconnaissance Office shows the members “circa 1957” as being Hendrik Bode, Oliver Selfridge, Nathan Rochester, David Huffman, Luis Alvarez, Richard Garwin, William Friedman, William Baker, and John Pierce. In
The Puzzle Palace
(New York: Penguin, 1983), author James Bamford’s exposé of the National Security Agency, he cites Claude Shannon and Andrew M. Gleason as members but not Nathan Rochester (p. 429).