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WHAT DOES A NOBEL PRIZE FOR RADIO ASTRONOMY HAVE TO DO WITH YOUR TELEPHONE?
It's been a decade since the breakup of AT&T. Has the spirit passed
out of its Bell Labs, as some charge? Or is it still the preeminent
technology lab in the US, only "more nimble, more intelligent"?
By Richard Rapaport
_________________________________________________________________
Edward Eckert walks through a storage area behind a yellow
corrugated-metal warehouse set off a wooded road in piney Warren, New
Jersey. He presses ahead, into a cold storage area filled by a
room-sized mobile file cabinet, set on tracks. This is the archive of
Bell Laboratories, the near-mythological research arm of American
Telephone & Telegraph. Spinning a lever that opens the space between
two of the 7-foot-high files, Eckert pulls out an inexpensive black
Naugahyde case, the kind you can buy at Woolworth's for 15 bucks. He
unzips the case and fishes out an ancient, fraying 3-inch-by-5-inch
notebook in purple alligator-patterned leather. Opening it, he
delicately pages through.
The notebook's yellow-gray pages are lined with faded green ink and
begin with a penciled date, February 1876. Only the first 20 pages of
the notebook are used, filled with the minutiae of a young Boston
laboratory assistant named Thomas Watson, who made his recordings
during the winter of the American Centennial. There are a few simple
sketches of electrical devices - switches and the like. There is a
list of expenses that the frugal 22-year-old incurred during that
winter: "tooth powder - 35," "ice - 10," and even an entry for
"drawers - 1."
Cradling the notebook, Eckert turns to the fourth page. At the top is
the date - March 10, 1876. Below, in tiny script, are seven words that
are among the most momentous in the annals of science: "Mr. Watson
come here I want you."
Such were the words of Watson's employer, a 29-year-old Scottish-born
inventor named Alexander Graham Bell. They were spoken from one room
to another in Bell's laboratory at 5 Exeter Place. The tale is a
staple of scientific lore: Bell really did need Watson, having just
spilled acid on himself. More importantly, his call for help was the
very first electrically transmitted message spoken over Bell's
instrument, soon and forever after known as the telephone.
Other entries on the fourth page of Watson's notebook record more of
that day's prosaic, yet epochal communication. "How do you do," Watson
chronicles. "God save the Queen and several other articulated
sentences," is the final, triumphant entry on the page of the aged
notebook, only one of many rarely viewed prizes tucked away in this
nondescript warehouse in a clearing carved out of the New Jersey
woods.
The artifacts collected here catalog the output of Mr. Watson and his
descendants, the thousands of scientists who, throughout most of this
century, gave Bell Labs nearly as much of a monopoly on scientific
innovation as its parent, AT&T, had on international communications.
The caged and locked holds in the Warren warehouse smack palpably of
the Raiders of the Lost Ark, containing as they do prototypes that do
nothing less than define the course of our technological century.
There, in boxes, is the world's first carbon dioxide laser; on a dusty
table sits the original quartz clock; on a shelf rests the telephone
on which the first transatlantic call was made; scattered about are a
pilot's helmet used for the first ground-to-air radio transmission, an
early loudspeaker used at President Warren G. Harding's inauguration,
the world's first solar battery, and the original artificial larynx.
The archive is the resting place for quaint technological failures as
well - items like the sadly aged 1954 prototype Picture Phone. Then
there are the objects whose ubiquity underscores their importance: the
coffin telephone booth, the black 500 Series Western Electric
telephone (it once graced every office and home in America), and the
green, orange, blue, and white versions of the mod, quintessentially
'60s Princess phone.
But here in Mother Bell's basement, the most awesome artifacts of all
are the more than 100,000 scientific notebooks - tucked away in row
after two-story, pre-fab, metal-frame row - that hold the notations of
Bell Labs scientists, modern-day Leonardos whose theories,
discoveries, and inventions have immeasurably altered humanity.
Since its formal incorporation in 1925, Bell Labs's scientific
fraternity represents a Who's Who of international research. It
includes seven Nobel Prize winners: William Shockley, Walter Brattain,
and John Bardeen, inventors of the transistor; Clinton Davisson, who
demonstrated the wave nature of matter; Arno Penzias and Robert
Wilson, whose work in radio astronomy confirmed the big-bang theory;
and Philip Anderson, for his work on the deep atomic structures of
metals.
Notes of the basic research of these Nobel laureates and other
scientific giants make the Bell Labs archive a veritable pantheon of
technological achievement. There is the work of Claude Shannon, whose
seminal information theory provided the framework for computer
programming; the research of William Pfann, whose "zone refining"
process made possible the mass production of semiconductors; the
formulations of Alfred Cho, whose molecular beam epitaxy allowed
microprocessors to shrink to undreamed-of size and complexity. There
are the scribblings of Ken Thompson, who, along with Dennis Ritchie,
developed Unix, the first cross-platform computer operating system;
and the notebooks of Bjarne Stroustrup, father of the key programming
language C++.
The archive, in total, houses the intellectual foundations of more
than 25,000 patents, nearly one for each day of Bell Labs's existence.
It is an outpouring of scientific innovation that -- in its
breathtaking variety and willingness to push beyond the temporal world
of telephony - has more than lived up to Alexander Graham Bell's
refreshing exhortation: "Leave the beaten path and dive into the
woods."
Bell's dictum is carved into the pedestal of his bust in the lobby of
the sprawling Murray Hill, New Jersey, compound, one of a cluster of
campuses where many of Bell Labs's 25,000 employees work - all within
an hour of the institution's original New York home. But if Bell's
words are cast in stone, much has changed since the time when the
steely monopoly that controlled - nay, owned - virtually every phone,
line, pole, switching station, and PBX in America, showered its
largesse upon Bell Labs, making it, according to one executive, "the
world's best university." If Bell Labs's university lacks students, it
comes complete with in-house physics, art, radio-astronomy,
astrophysics, and its own economics department.
The golden age of pure research at Bell Labs began in the mid-'30s,
when the search for a solid-state device to replace the vacuum tube
began. It was a spirited period when, one former scientist recalls,
"people rode unicycles in the halls and invented mind-reading
machines." It lasted into the late '50s, when Sputnik-phobia drafted
Bell Labs into the Cold War, even as it remained a bastion of reason
and safety against the loyalty oaths that were requisite in many
American institutions for years during the frenzy of McCarthyism.
Though staff sizes and budgets remained generous afterward, subtle
changes in mission and status came along with the anti-establishment,
anti-scientific Luddism of the late '60s. Regulatory hearings into
Bell system rate-making in the '70s further diminished its hegemony.
Then came the 1982 federal court consent decree that broke up the Bell
system, awarding Bell Labs to AT&T, while setting up a parallel
organization, Bellcore, as the research wing of the so-called "Baby
Bells." The transformation accelerated during subsequent internal
reformations at AT&T, as the company slowly moved away from its
research orientation and sought to evolve from ponderous scientific
sovereign into successful business and technology competitor.
In his searching 1984 book on Bell Labs, Three Degrees Above Zero,
Jeremy Bernstein posed a troubling scenario about the effect AT&T's
breakup would have on the scientific crown jewel that was Bell Labs.
"Clearly with the divestiture," Bernstein wrote, "Bell Laboratories is
at a watershed. If all goes well it can continue its great tradition
of basic and applied research, and if things do not go well it runs
the risk of becoming just another large, conventional industrial
laboratory."
Has the past decade written the d?nouement in the drama of Bell
Laboratories's event-horizon research? Other phone companies, like MCI
and Sprint, have become profitable and competitive - while providing
little or none of their own basic research - and have cut into the
AT&T profit margins that fund Bell Labs. Bell Labs nevertheless
remains a scientific hothouse, with a US$3 billion total budget - $2.7
billion for development and $300 million for research. It is the
richest and largest private research lab in the world, still leading
in fields as diverse as photonics, fiber optics, HDTV, artificial
intelligence, cellular telephony, digital radio, and computer
software.
Still, Bernstein's decade-old rumination resonates with some veteran
Bell Labs scientists and executives, who are steeped in the Labs's
research tradition and watch each change with some trepidation. Are
things going grandly? In the words of current vice president for
research and Nobel laureate Arno Penzias, is "the company more nimble,
the academy more intelligent"?
Or has Bell Labs conceded its preeminence in basic science, opting
instead for the kinds of business-driven technological innovations
that can come to term in months instead of years or decades; has the
institution opted, in other words, against the lightness of the
scientific and toward the gravitational pull of the commercial?
Bob Lucky, Arno Penzias's counterpart at Bellcore, believes the
latter. Lucky, who served at Bell Labs for 31 years, is one of a
number of "old-timers" who longs for "the golden years," believing
that "the spirit has gone out of the place, a spirit whose passing
people mourn."
Lucky is quick to point out that many of the changes at Bell Labs were
necessitated by AT&T's own deregulated, diminished status. And he
lauds the current AT&T chair, Bob Allen, for fighting hard for the
Labs US funding and staffing. But with a new president, Daniel
Stanzione, just beginning his administration, Lucky and others wonder
if Bell Labs is not necessarily in for a downsizing or a restructuring
that will see an increasing number of scientists attached directly to
business units rather than remaining in independent research groups.
For his part, Stanzione tries to answer Bernstein's question by
talking reassuringly about maintaining Bell Labs's historic commitment
to scientific independence. "We have continued the tradition of both
ba
"I find it hard to believe that people who are idea-driven are not
entrepreneurs today," Waring Partridge, AT&T's WASPily articulate vice
president for multimedia strategy, suggests over mid-morning coffee.
We are sitting in an empty cafeteria within the central atrium of the
sprawling, brown-brick cluster that is Bell Laboratories's Murray Hill
campus. Partridge, whose group brings to market AT&T consumer
multimedia services, has come over from his Basking Ridge offices to
tap some of the rich Bell Labs brainpower, as well as to talk with me
about what he sees as the "new tradition" of AT&T business/science
dual citizenship - a trend that has seen many once-independent Bell
Labs researchers go to work directly for AT&T business units.
Partridge is a new phenomenon at AT&T. He is an entrepreneur, a former
McKinsey management consultant and the founder of small
telecommunications, paging, and cable companies. "Instead of picking
up my chips and playing golf," he says, he decided, at the age of 49,
to sign on to one of the world's least entrepreneurial
mega-corporations. "In the '80s, I said I'd never work for AT&T,"
Partridge recalls about a company that, to his mind, is still
"commercially underdeveloped."
But when Partridge, who looks and sounds a bit like a techno-George
Plimpton, finally did take a look at the new, deregulated AT&T, he
liked what he saw: for starters, a company spending $3 billion a year
on software alone, with the resources and staying power to force what
he believes will be the technology passage to the future: the
convergence of telecommunications, broadcasting, and computing. Like
many of his AT&T colleagues, when Partridge looks at such soon-upon-us
wonders as interactive TV, he doesn't see television, he sees
telephone.
During his four years with AT&T, Partridge has become a Bell Labs
partisan. It is, he says, the kind of place "I go for ideas." But
Partridge is cd down
the halls, banging on executives' doors, bringing them into the
conference room to give Vistium a try.
Throughout the conversation, Partridge returns to one point: the
successful technology company of the future will likely emerge, not
from the computer industry, with its vested interest in the
microprocessor box, but from the telecommunications industry, with its
tradition of networking and interoperability. He also believes that
AT&T's long-standing "plug and play" credo, which eschews instruction
booklets, will be the successful future technological research and
development paradigm. "Most things that succeed," he suggests drolly,
"don't require retraining 250 million people."
The great intelligence of the network
Waring Partridge's point is also Eric Sumner's. Sumner is
demonstrating the Sage Project - recently rechristened the more
commercial "AT&T TV Information Center" - in a comfortable, gray- and
cranberry-accented loud fluster the average PC user in Sumner's demo.
With the push of a button, the TV Information Center can record,
store, and then visually render telephone messages or faxes; it can be
programmed to automatically dial up and store voice and text services;
it can give an instant readout on all the day's relevant stats -
before you've even brewed your morning coffee, something it cannot do.
The Information Center's simplicity - you plug a black box into a
phone jack and then into your television - is hardly accidental.
Technological "ease of use," to borrow the jargon, is a major, perhaps
the major, new Bell Labs paradigm. Retiring Labs president John Mayo
compares its importance to "improving the efficiency of the vacuum
tube in the '40s."
Sumner once worked under Mayo at the Labs, but transferred to the AT&T
consumer side when, he says, "a cool new head of consumer products
brought me over here." But he didn't exactly leave Bell Labs behind:
he forages there frequently, "looking for what needs to be built, and
then wandering the halls looking for someone to build it."
Sumner has found a collaborator in Thaddeus Kowalski, chief architect
for products, into whose PC- and circuit-board-strewn lab we wander
after the TV Information Center demonstration. "This shop allows more
practical people to have an effect," the stocky, intense Kowalski says
about products that have come out of his laboratory, as he catalogs
existing pieces of Bell Labs technology that went into the Information
Center. "We borrowed the graphics, we lifted the computer codes
wholesale, and we already have the best transmission and
file-compression techniques," he says. He winds up echoing the typical
Bell Labs attitude: "People in the research area had all sorts of
technology, and they were eager to get it out."
Kowalski and Sumner are especially jazzed about another Sage Project
product that will allow the so
Plan 9, the system, not the movie, is a descendant of Unix. It is a
shell program that allows different and differently programmed devices
the freedom to network and process distributively in the simplest and
most economical way ever.
Allowing transparent distributed processing over a network, Plan 9
already drives such products as the TV Information Center and AT&T's
World Wide Web 800-number directory. It will, according to Ritchie,
give users the freedom to work simultaneously with different
processing activities taking place in varying locations, but, to the
user, still be part of a unified activity. This is handy, he explains,
because "sometimes it's better for the data to be near the CPU and
sometimes it's better - in graphics, for example - to be near the
user." With Plan 9, the user is unconscious of where the processing is
taking place -- he or she knows only that a complex job is getting
done.
I ask Dennis Ritchie about the operating system's curious name.
Sitting in his tiny, cluttered office in Plan 9 Land, around the
corner from the former Unix Room, he answers by rubbing his chin and
repeating my question out loud. In his 50s, impish, bearded, and
dressed down, Ritchie scrunches up hio big. It was an engineering issue to
design more powerful features with a simpler code." The result,
underway in 1988, was Plan 9.
Ritchie is modest when he compares his hopes for the new operating
system with the enormous impact of Unix. "The main effect of Unix, the
portability of an operating system, can be done only once," he says.
But Dennis Ritchie's unassuming description - he's trying hard not to
scare the business types who are still calculating Unix's losses -
belies the great excitement in Bell Labs about the potential for Plan
9.
Beginning this year, Bell Labs will be offering Plan 9 on CD-ROM, with
source codes and manuals available to developers at a modest price.
The idea, Ritchie suggests, is twofold. First, he says, "it is a way
to get it out and make it visible." And second, "by making it more
available outside, it will make it more credible inside."
Plan 9's importance may be that it is an operating system designed
from the start to allow computers and communications devices to work
together in tandem. This, of course, advances AT&T's prime directive:
complete the interoperability for more and more of the highly
profitable "fat minutes" that come from the processing and transfer of
broadband data, natu
But perhaps the era of downsizing has had a discernible effect at the
Labs. "It's possible," Cheswick says, "if you're bright enough, to
spend the year fishing on a boat, then write a three-page paper, and
get your salary.
"But it's risky," he adds with thoughtful, practiced timing.
These days, someone like Bill Cheswick is happy to avoid those risks,
so delighted is he with his job and the encouragement Bell Labs gave
him to write his book "on company time." Over a dessert of ice cream
(a soda fountain's worth of flavors and toppings is kept in a nearby
freezer), Cheswick spends a moment explaining the seemingly salubrious
arrangement in which "you keep the royalties, and the company keeps
the copyright."
"It's a good deal," he notes.
As are other perks, including his ability to acquire equipment.
Cheswick, with only a BA, has the authorization to request "any kind
of computer or software I want with less review than I have with my
wife when we go shopping." He logs into a new $20,000 3430 Dual CPU
NCR server to create extremely fast Internet security gateways. "I can
cut as much rope as I want," he smiles, "and hang myself with it."
Aside from the potential for scientific self-strangulation, Cheswick
does have a few complaints with the current system. "We are part of
the overhead," he explains. "Therefore, you get bean counters telling
you, 'I'm paying a percentage of my profits for this, what am I
getting?'" But in general, the prestige, salary, informality - today
Cheswick is wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and sandals - and interesting
assignments at Bell Labs make for an unusually contented and motivated
work force.
This includes those still huddled over chess as Cheswick excuses
himself and walks out. As he passes, another hard-fought game is
ending.
"Nothing I can do," one of the players shrugs to his audience as he
concedes ill travel in light pulses, each pulse
moving as much as 40 billion bits a second. This is the equivalent of
2.5 million simultaneous telephone conversations over a single strand.
DiMarcello fingers a length of optical fiber: it looks like
monofilament fishing line and can be tied into knots and still
transmit bursts of photons, carrying a thick bandwidth of information,
audio, text, or video. Millions of miles of such fiber-optic line will
be required to fiber the nation. AT&T produces all of its fiber at
just one specialized facility in Georgia. The race to develop faster
lasers to pump more data over fiber-optic lines is matched by a
separate race to speed up the fiber-production process.
"We're using larger tubes to try to make 100 kilometers of fiber with
each," says the thin, intense DiMarcello over the hum, as he picks up
a 4-inch-thick-by-3-foot-long glass pre-form, looking vistol continues working his way through a
demonstration of Bell Labs's SEPTEMBER Project. The nightmare of every
online freedom fighter, Bell Labs's "Secure Electronic Publishing
Trial" project offers the possibility of bringing the electronic
network into the realm of laissez faire economics and making "pay per
piece" electronic publishing possible.
If electronic copywriting and producing online credit cards is his
official raison d'?tre, Kristol is more than happy to move on to
demonstrate his real love - audio and video over the World Wide Web,
into which AT&T has jumped with a vengeance. On his workstation,
Kristol calls up a short video of AT&T chair Bob Allen giving a
speech. It is being sent from a server at another Bell Labs campus and
is part of what is known as "Nemesis," a network-friendly service that
allows video and audio to be sent and viewed straight off a server as
needed, rather than forcing a user to download an entire file first.
Kristol is equally proud of the Bell Labs's version of Internet talk
radio and the in-house "jukebox," a server on which various recordings
are stored. He plays a portion of the radio series Hell's Bells: A
Radio History of the Telephone, before getting to the p??ce de
r?sistance - over a speaker hooked up to Kristol's workstation comes a
ghostly version of T. S. Eliot's signal poem, "The Wasteland." The
solemn, late autumn sky outside K
Belle, the Bell Labs's champion chess-playing computer, retired in the
early '80s. There was a ping-pong playing robot, a marvel of
trajectory plotting, fuzzy logic, and space/time coordination that was
quietly ditched because scientists feared stockholders and rate payers
might grow cranky with such seeming frivolity.
Bellcore's Bob Lucky, who moved into Arno Penzias's spot when the
latter was promoted to vice president of research, recollected an even
closer-to-home example of AT&T's unease with nonproductive science.
When Lucky inherited Penzias's office, he found a plaque made from an
AT&T advertisement produced when Penzias and Wilson were awarded their
Nobel in 1978. "What does a Nobel Prize have to do with your
telephone?" the ad asked. The questions troubled Lucky. "It didn't
ring true," he commented. "Why should you have to explain why the
discovery was important, why it was good for the telephone?"
It was an important question, and a difficult one for Penzias, who,
although clearly sympathetic to the need for intellectual elbow room,
seems compelled to tow the AT&T market-driven-technology party line.
In a discussion about Bell Labs's grand dilemma, Penzias is almost
wistful as he reflects on the Unix Room and the highly consequential
results of just hanging out. "One doesn't know when it's best to
work," Penzias says, his precise English touched by an accent
somof our great luxuries," he admits,
"is that we don't always have to be right."
Another great advantage is that Bell Labs can invest in defensive
research. "We don't want to be blindsided," he says, citing the
example of a project investigating the neural nets of small animals to
see if they are applicable to future chip design that more nearly
approximates living intelligence. "Biology has a lot to teach us," he
says. He also mentions some of the other marvels still pouring out of
Bell Labs: the optical amplifiers and wavelength multiplexing
technology that will broaden bandwidth to unimaginable degrees; the
revolutionary digital-audio compression algorithms; the optical
trapping technology that allows levitation and precise manipulation of
matter down to the molecular level; the new type of semiconductor
laser, the quantum cascade, able to emit light at fantastically
specific wavelengths; and even the newly created lead-free brass
alloy. Then there are the Nobel Prize winners of the future.
But, finally, Penzias is a realist when it comes to assessing Bell
Labs's role. "We're filling in a piece of the technology puzzle, an
important piece but one not as grand," he says. Still,twork thrusts were not
dominating attention, activity, or money as they are today. All of
them are getting more funding. And in each, software is a key.
Are there fundamentals that underpin all of those areas?
They all involve developments in user interface. If you look at the
history of these networks, you'll see that they were preceded by the
invention of a user interface. Before there were telephone networks,
somebody had to invent the telephone; before there were cellular
networks, someone had to invent two-way radio handsets; before LANs,
the PC had to come along; and before a new age in which broadband and
wireless will allow networks to take off, someone will have to come up
with new user interfaces. There are two other fundamentals: silicon
and software.
The AT&T ad that was done after Penzias and Wilson became Nobel
laureates in 1978 asked the question "What does a Nobel Prize have to
do with your telephone?" What is the answer to that question?
Most technological advances that profoundly affect people's lives
have, at their root, changes in the basic sciences. At Bell Labs, we
have a dual obligation and also a dilemma: to make fundamental
contributions for the betterment of all, and also to use technology
for AT&T's competitive advantage in the marketplace.
How do you do good and also do well?
We need to do a better job getting that technology to market. You have
to differentiate between invention and innovation. Invention is a
wonderful quality of uniquely brilliant people but does not
necessarily turn into real products and services. Innovation is
getting technology to the marketplace. Never has there been an
opportunity for technology to have such an impact around the world. If
innovation is being able to get invention to the marketplace, then the
golden age is still ahead of us.