這是第n本關於 Bell Labs 的史詩故事
又可參考我前年的書 系統與變異: 淵博知識與理想設計法 u.3
也也
Inventing the Future
‘The Idea Factory,’ by Jon Gertner
Reprinted with permission of Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc. and courtesy of the AT&T Archives and History Center
By WALTER ISAACSON
Published: April 6, 2012
In 1909, top executives at AT&T decided to commit themselves to a
challenge: building a transcontinental phone line that could connect a
call between New York and San Francisco. The problem was one that
required not just engineering skill but advances in pure science. They
needed, among other things, to create a repeater or amplifier for the
electric signals so that they would not attenuate after a few miles.
Thus was the seed planted for a new collaborative industrial
organization — teaming up theoreticians, experimentalists, material
scientists, metallurgists, engineers and even telephone pole climbers —
that eventually became Bell Labs. Jointly owned by AT&T and its
affiliated equipment maker, Western Electric, Bell Labs went on to
invent the transistor and make major contributions to the field of
lasers and cellular telephony.
THE IDEA FACTORY
Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
By Jon Gertner
Illustrated. 422 pp. The Penguin Press. $29.95.
Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center
Jon Gertner, an editor at Fast Company magazine, has produced a
well-researched history of Bell Labs, filled with colorful characters
and inspiring lessons. But more important, “The Idea Factory” explores
one of the most critical issues of our time: What causes innovation? Why
does it happen, and how might we nurture it? The lesson of Bell Labs is
that most feats of sustained innovation cannot and do not occur in an
iconic garage or the workshop of an ingenious inventor. They occur when
people of diverse talents and mind-sets and expertise are brought
together, preferably in close physical proximity where they can have
frequent meetings and serendipitous encounters.
Bell Labs was created on Jan. 1, 1925, and was originally based on West
Street in Lower Manhattan. During the 1930s it was the site for many
lectures, scientific visits (Einstein dropped by) and informal study
groups. Among those groups was one that discussed the latest advances in
solid-state physics, an emerging field that analyzed the conductivity
and other properties of different materials in relation to their atomic
structures. It included William Shockley, who was an intense
theoretician, and Walter Brattain, who was a verbose experimentalist.
Shockley was inspired by a talk given by the Bell Labs research
director, Mervin Kelly, who wanted to find a way to invent electronic
switches and amplifiers that could replace the relay switches and vacuum
tubes that underlay the telephone exchanges. So Shockley began to think
about using a type of material known as the semiconductor, which partly
conducted and partly resisted electric current; it also sometimes acted
as a rectifier that would allow current to move in only one direction.
His idea was that semiconducting materials might be used to make small
devices that would serve as electronic amplifiers. He urged Brattain to
try to fabricate one using copper oxide.
It didn’t work, and for a while the endeavor was put aside as Bell Labs concentrated on helping the military during World War II.
But in the middle of the war, Bell Labs began moving to a new campus in
Murray Hill, N.J., and Kelly began to create interdisciplinary teams
that threw theorists and engineers together into the same work spaces.
“By intention, everyone would be in one another’s way,” Gertner writes.
Among the teams was one doing solid-state research. It included Shockley
and Brattain. Kelly recruited John Bardeen, a very quiet theorist, to
join the group, but there was no vacant office, so Bardeen decided to
share space with Brattain, the experimentalist. This was a smart idea.
Gertner describes how innovations came not just from new theories but
from linking them to advances made by the lab’s experimental chemists
and metallurgists who were creating a revolution in materials. “Indeed,
without new materials,” Gertner writes, “Shockley would have spent his
career trapped in a prison of elegant theory.”
Having failed with copper oxide, the team tried two other semiconducting
materials, silicon and germanium. By December 1947, they had rigged up
thin slices of those materials with a wire tipped by a gold-foil point
and were able to show that the contraption could act as an amplifier. It
also proved able to serve as an electronic switch and do everything a
vacuum tube could do at a fraction of the size and electricity use.
After polling 31 members of the Bell Labs staff, they decided to name
the new device a “transistor.” Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain would
share the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery.
Like Bell Labs, the transistor stood at the intersection of theoretical
science and applied engineering. It could be described as both a
discovery and an invention. It was also an example of the “linear
argument” in the history of science that was expounded by Vannevar Bush,
James Conant and other academics who were involved in World War II’s
scientific endeavors and wanted to encourage continued government
funding of pure research: The theoretical discoveries of pure science
would lead to applied science breakthroughs and new technological
inventions. Gertner explains how this process could result in sustained
innovation:
“If an idea begat a discovery, and if a discovery begat an invention,
then an innovation defined the lengthy and wholesale transformation of
an idea into a technological product (or process) meant for widespread
practical use. Almost by definition, a single person, or even a single
group, could not alone create an innovation. The task was too variegated
and involved.”
Because Bell Labs was part of the AT&T monopoly, its executives felt
a moral, political and legal imperative to share the discovery with
other researchers and license it to other companies. “AT&T
maintained its monopoly at the government’s pleasure, and with the
understanding that its scientific work was in the public interest,”
Gertner writes. The transistor would end up doing a lot more than make
telephone circuits function better. It would start a digital revolution
in computing and information technology.
Bell Labs had just the right person to help its people imagine the
transistor’s larger implications. Claude Elwood Shannon was a very
eccentric theoretician who amused himself by juggling while riding a
unicycle up and down the long Bell Labs corridors. He had the insight
that the best way to understand complex circuits that contained many
on-off switches was through Boolean algebra, which assigned each
operation a value of either 0 or 1. Shannon went on to develop an
information theory in which all communications and sequences of
information could be measured in the number of binary digits (either a 0
or a 1), known as bits, they required. This was one of the great
intellectual achievements of the 20th century, and it correlated neatly
with the advent of transistors that could permit circuits to have huge
numbers of on-off switches.
The application of these theories and discoveries helped to spawn the
computer revolution, but Bell Labs did not lead the way. In part this
was because, with the threat of antitrust lawsuits looming, the company
decided not to go into the computer or consumer electronics business. In
fact, it did not even take its invention of the transistor to the next
step, which was figuring out how to etch a circuit of multiple
transistors onto a single chip, an idea that became known as the
integrated circuit, or microchip. That breakthrough came in 1958 at two
small companies that had licensed semiconductor patents from Bell Labs —
Texas Instruments, led by Jack Kilby, and Fairchild Semiconductor, led
by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, who had worked for the increasingly
erratic Shockley after he quit Bell Labs but soon rebelled against him.
Bell Labs had other great successes that it failed to capitalize on
fully. It did pioneering work in the invention of the laser, a
super-focused beam of visible light based on the stimulated emission of a
stream of photons. Laser beams could carry information, like voice and
data, and Bell Labs began a cumbersome and expensive endeavor to create
hollow pipes that would serve as waveguides to send the beam to the
proper destination. Another concept, developed elsewhere, was to direct
the beams by creating incredibly pure strands of glass fiber. The Bell
Labs brain trust concluded this would be unfeasible, and besides, they
already had a lot invested in the waveguide pipe infrastructure. Thus
Bell Labs lost out to Corning Glass and others on the chance to be a
leader in the development of fiber optics.
Gertner draws smart insights from the successes at Bell Labs, but he
does not do quite as well drawing lessons from its lapses and failures.
Perhaps these were inevitable; in innovation as in hitting home runs in
baseball, you have to be willing to strike out a lot to be successful.
Whatever the case, it was not the failures that doomed Bell Labs. That
was mainly the decision of the Justice Department, in 1974, to file a
sweeping antitrust suit against AT&T that led, 10 years later, to
the breakup of the company. Bell Labs gradually withered.
Steve Jobs once said that the most difficult and important thing to
create was not an innovative product but a great organization that could
continually create innovative products. That required joining creative
people with product designers and great engineers so that imagination
and technology could be connected. For much of the 20th century, Bell
Labs played that role. It showed the value of having theoreticians,
researchers, developers and engineers all huddled together. “People had
to be near one another,” Gertner writes. “Phone calls alone wouldn’t
do.” Mervin Kelly even created branches of Bell Labs at the phone
company’s factories so that the theoreticians and scientists could be
closely involved with the manufacturing workers.
The ability to combine theory, creativity and engineering was a great
achievement of postwar America. For 50 years, economic growth and job
creation were propelled by transistors, lasers and other discoveries
that came from the willingness to nurture theoretical research in
conjunction with applied science and manufacturing skills. But these
days, manufacturing is being outsourced, and funding for pure science is
being curtailed. With Bell Labs and other such idea factories
disappearing, and with government research money endangered, what will
propel innovation and job creation for the next 50 years?
沒有留言:
張貼留言