Things I Learned from The Idea Factory
Some facts about phones:
Until the 1950s, most rural telephone service was provided by “party lines,” which connected many households to one operator. If another house was already using the line, you could just pick up your phone and listen in on their conversation. One small town in North Dakota relied on a party line until 2001.
In the telephone’s early days, there were no ringers. Callers would get the attention of the person on the other end by yelling loudly into the receiver until someone picked up.
To make sure parts of the AT&T telephone system were durable, Bell Labs engineers would do things like bury them in a swamp for 25 years, then dig them up to see how they’d fared.
When someone is talking on the phone, they send signals only 35% of the time. The remaining 65% is pauses. By briefly disconnecting someone every time they paused, AT&T was able to double the capacity of its early phone channels.
The first car phones were released in the 1940s. Bandwidth was so limited that fewer than a dozen people could use their car phones in Manhattan at any given time.
Cell phones were designed without dial tones so that callers would spend slightly less time connected to the network, saving AT&T money.
The term “cellular phone” comes from the arrangement of the transmitter towers that power the network: they are spread out to create a honeycomb-like grid of coverage areas, each hexagon a cell.
Some facts about the transistor:
During the early development of silicon, none of the existing measuring equipment could tell when the silicon was contaminated with a minute amount of phosphorous. The only way scientists could identify the contaminated silicon was by smelling it for phosphorus.
The first transistors were so delicate that they sometimes failed if someone slammed a door nearby.
The transistor cost $25,000 to license, with one exception: it was free for anyone who wanted to use it for hearing aids, as a tribute to AT&T founder Alexander Graham Bell’s work with the deaf1.
When researchers in the Bell Labs patent department conducted a study to determine what made some people at the company so much more productive than others, they found only one common thread: the most productive people all hung out with a guy named Harry Nyquist, who didn’t accomplish much himself but who had an incredible gift for inspiring others.
Some facts about midcentury American businesses:
Memos used to have way cooler titles, like one from 1940s AT&T called “A First Record of Thoughts Concerning an Important Post-War Problem of the Bell Telephone Laboratories and Western Electric Company.”
Actually, companies used to have way cooler titles too—AT&T stands for American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Or at least, it used to. They very lamely renamed themselves to just “AT&T” in 1994.
So many of the high-level AT&T executives this book worked their way up the corporate ranks from the absolute bottom, like Fred Kappel, who started his career digging holes for telephone poles and ended in charge of all of Western Electric. It’s been a long time since that kind of career path was possible.
The device that would eventually become the laser was given a much dumber name while still a research project: “stimulated emission.” The term—which refers to the way certain photons can make an atom produce additional photons—was not supposed to be funny.
Some facts about William Shockley, co-inventor of the semiconductor:
In a note apologizing to his wife for having attempted suicide via Russian Roulette, Shockley calmly explained that the odds of dying were actually a bit less than one in six, because even if you drew the loaded chamber, there was still the small chance the gun might misfire.
Later in life, Shockley became an extreme racist and eugenicist. One time, a reporter asked why, if his eugenecist views were true, none of his children had accomplished anything significant. Shockley responded, “In terms of my own capacities, my children represent a very significant regression.” He blamed the situation on his ex-wife’s lesser intelligence.
In 1956, Shockley returned to his hometown of Palo Alto and founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. He recruited a group of brilliant young engineers, but his paranoia, micromanagement, and poor leadership led eight of the best ones to leave and start their own companies—thus birthing Silicon Valley.
Shockley is often called “the Moses of Silicon Valley,” having led a group to the promised land but having failed to enter it himself. Another parallel, which this book criminally fails to call out, is that Moses’ children—neither of whom are significant biblical figures—could also be said to represent “a very significant regression.”
For fun, Claude Shannon once built a device he called “the ultimate machine.” It was a box with a single switch. When you flicked the switch on, the box top opened and a mechanical hand came out and reached and turned the switch off, then retracted back into the box.
Fiber-optic communications required the development of a new kind of super-translucent glass. If you were to look through a pane of this glass that was an entire kilometer thick, it would be as clear as looking through a regular window.
The failure of the Picturephone:
AT&T first developed video calling technology in the 1950s and made plans to bring it to market via a dedicated device called the Picturephone. Early market research was promising.
The Picturephone debuted to delighted crowds at the 1964 World’s Fair and was launched commercially in 1970. The monthly fee for the device and thirty minutes of calls was $160—roughly $1,200 in today’s dollars.
If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard about this before, it’s because the Picturephone was a spectacular flop. In the four years before it was unceremoniously discontinued, it sold fewer than 500 units.
The Picturephone was unpopular even among AT&T employees. In a story with echoes of Infinite Jest, one executive positioned a still photo of himself looking attentive in front of his set so that he could walk around his office during calls.
The Picturephone’s failure discouraged work on similar technology for decades, and current video call interfaces are still heavily informed by its lessons. For example, Picturephone users didn’t see themselves until their call connected—and were often unhappy with how they looked. That’s why modern video calling apps show you a preview of your camera before the call starts.
The most significant engineers at Bell Labs almost uniformly hailed from the kinds of small midwestern towns that today are hollowed-out shells of their former selves. One of the main forces behind these towns’ declines was the development of communication technologies that these engineers themselves created.
Why are there no great corporate R&D labs today? Many point to the unique status of AT&T’s monopoly—Bell Labs was supported by those monopoly profits, and its innovations were dispersed freely thanks to the regulatory agreements AT&T made with the federal government to be allowed to keep that monopoly. When AT&T was finally broken up in 1984, Bell Labs’ decline soon followed.
But another factor is the rise of startups. In the Bell Labs era, scientists and engineers generally didn’t have a shot at getting rich, so industrial labs (and academia) were their most compelling options. Today, the tech industry provides not only a potential path to real wealth, but—as important, if not more so, for many—the ability to work on technologies that will reach the general public quickly, and not risk being locked away in a lab for decades.
Thomas Edison disliked bathing and regularly worked for days on end without pausing to sleep, eat, or shower. Unsurprisingly, he often smelled terrible.
Graham Bell married a deaf woman and saw himself as an advocate for deaf people, but today he’s one of the Deaf communities biggest historical villains thanks to his crusading for oralism—a movement that discouraged the use of sign language and pushed deaf people to speak and lip-read, often at the cost of their language and cultural identity. He also pushed for laws that would discourage deaf people from marrying and having children with each other, fearing it lead to “the production of a defective race of human beings,” which would be “a great calamity to the world.”