A Critical Mass Bell Laboratories

By Jamie Murphy.

The computer common room in Bell Laboratories' six-story brick quarters in Murray Hill, N.J., is strewn with a herd of toy sheep, an assortment of plastic ducks and a glass beaker that contains a Madagascar hissing cockroach. Walking along one of the facility's narrow, institutional-green corridors, Mathematician Ronald Graham effortlessly juggles six spinning white balls. Some days the balls are black. Not long ago, in a nearby office, a shimmying belly dancer tried to perk up a brooding scientist who was convinced that he had lost his zest for research. Since its founding on New Year's Day 1925, Bell Labs--AT&T's peerless research and development arm--has been bubbling with creative unorthodoxy. "To work here," says one researcher, "you have to let your hair down and be a free spirit."

You also have to be brilliant. Of the 20,000 people employed by Bell Labs in 19 facilities spread throughout the nation, 2,769 are Ph.D.s. "The brainpower around here is enormous," says Physicist Horst Stormer, referring to the Murray Hill branch, where a force of 3,200 does much of Bell's basic research. "This is like a university with a faculty of 500 physicists. If all of us took off and went to different universities, we wouldn't have the same impact." But clumped together, like uranium fuel rods in a reactor, the physicists and other Murray Hillers form what Physicist Douglas Osheroff calls a "critical mass."

The ensuing chain reaction has changed modern society. Over the span of 60 years, Bell Labs has generated 21,000 patents, one for each of the institution's working days and then some. More than mere inventions, the patents cover breakthroughs that have launched entire industries--developments such as the transistor, the solar cell and satellite TV. Meanwhile, scientists at Bell have raked in seven Nobel prizes and, in the process, inspired some legends.

In an event that came to be called the "well-known accident," Clinton Davisson and his colleague Lester Germer in 1925 inadvertently stumbled on experimental proof of a crucial aspect of quantum theory. Davisson noticed that a stream of electrons beamed at a crystal of pure nickel was diffracted, a phenomenon that is characteristic of light waves. Electrons had been thought to exist only as sub-atomic particles until, just a few years before Davisson's observation, the newly developing quantum theory suggested that electrons could behave as both particles and waves. Here was proof, and it won Davisson a Nobel in 1937.

In 1936 a young M.I.T. graduate named William Shockley joined the labs, where he and his colleagues John Bardeen and Walter Brattain developed the transistor, an electrical device that could perform the duty of a bulky vacuum tube more reliably, with less energy and in a considerably smaller space. The solid-state integrated circuits and chips that evolved from the transistor are the essential ingredients of today's electronic products, from computers to digital watches to spacecraft television cameras. In 1956 the three scientists were awarded Bell Labs' second Nobel Prize for Physics. Arno Penzias, now the labs' vice president in charge of research, was a radio astronomer hired in 1961 to work on satellite communication. While he and his colleague Robert Wilson were attempting to map radio frequencies in the Milky Way, they found they could not subdue a bothersome hiss that their huge horn antenna picked up no matter where in the sky it was pointed. They took the antenna apart and even cleared pigeon droppings from it, but the hiss persisted. Penzias and Wilson finally reached a dramatic conclusion (for which they shared the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics): the noise was the dying remnant of the fierce radiation produced some 15 billion years ago by the Big Bang that created the universe.

The new generation at Bell is equally brilliant--and unorthodox. Physicist David Tank, for example, keeps his experimental subjects in an aquarium where Research Assistant Hillel Chiel uses tweezers to feed them seaweed; they are sea slugs, which have simple nervous systems and large nerve cells that are easy to study. "What we want to know," says Chiel, "is if the animal learns something, what circuits charge?" Computer Scientist Stephen Levison is creating an airline-reservation system that responds to voice commands. "I want to make a reservation, please," Levison says into a microphone. Responds the computer in a gravelly monotone: "Please wait." Another researcher, Alfred Cho, uses a process called molecular-beam epitaxy to tailor-make new semiconducting and optical materials by spraying wafers with thin layers of atoms or molecules. Says Cho: "This is still one of the only places you can devote 100% of your time to basic research without being interrupted to teach classes or fight for funds."

That this is still true after AT&T's divestiture of its regional phone companies in 1984 is all the more remarkable. Having lost its monopoly status, the company now has to compete with other commercial giants. So far, however, its basic research budget has remained intact. "We realize who butters our bread," says AT&T Chairman Charles Brown. "We're not about to deprive the inventors of the solar battery, the laser and the transistor of the ingredients they need to remain inventive and resourceful."

With reporting by Thomas McCarroll and J. Madeleine Nash/Murray Hill