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The Once and Future Lab
Times come, and they pass. But there are special periods of time that are so extraordinary that they deserve special cataloging and remembrance. One such time involved the Bell Laboratories along with its research head, William O. Baker. It was a unique time in the history of policy and science, unique in epic ways. The technical field was telecommunications and the period ran roughly between 1950 and 1980. That was the era when Bell Labs, supported by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company--AT&T--stood glittering as a research center that was focused on a single mission, communications, and the knowledge that underlay the whole shebang. Shebang captures the technical scope of that enormous industry, telecommunications, a field so alive with technical accomplishments, but in such chaos today. Shebang means "everything." And that is what communication technology is, swaths and rafts of basic studies for linking people up, work that led to today's Internet, broadband conveyance of data, and all the technologies that integrate the many ways data get into homes and offices in ever more interlinked ways. During that three-decade period, at the height of the Cold War, Bell Labs generated an astonishing series of ideas and discoveries. Nothing has matched it since, including the significantly smaller Bell Labs of today. As telecommunications historian Peter Huber has said, "The regulatory convulsions of the 1960's and 1970's, which culminated in the Bell divestiture of 1986, all flowed directly from the discoveries at Bell Labs." That breakup, into seven regional telephone companies nicknamed the "Baby Bells," signaled the end of Bell Labs as an across-the-board citadel of major discoveries. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 further convulsed Bell Labs by opening the entire communications field to competition. A private company's blending of science, technology, manufacturing, and public service had formed one coherent fabric. The end of that unity of purpose and practice was also the end of an era. Baker headed research at Bell Laboratories at probably the most exciting time in communications research history, the dawn of the digital era. Digital computer technology was invented at Bell Labs for its own internal use in switching, along with the information theory that formed the basis of clear voice communication. Transistors and semiconductors had their functional birth there, along with the laser and fiber optics. Cellular telephone technology also had its start at Bell Labs. Linux, the operating system that serves as the basis of Internet content rose from Bell Labs, as did, earlier the coaxial cable and millimeter wave guides. Bell Labs' task, in other words, was to invent the future in a single service industry. And the key was a small group of people led by Baker, always seeking new ideas, especially if they ignited continuity and connection with existing concepts. Baker always encouraged his researchers to venture beyond the present. It more than helped that Baker had behind him a whole constellation of research stars, big creators in themselves such as Claude Shannon, the pioneer in information theory; John Pierce, who fathered satellite communications; George Stibitz, who in 1939 developed the first digital calculator; John Tukey, one of history's greatest statisticians; John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley, inventors of the transistor; Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow who developed the laser. Those three decades were a very special time and their lessons should not be lost to anyone who makes his or her game the understanding and formation of science and public policy. Scientific drama, corporate emasculation, fabulous inventiveness, government conniving involving the crucial 1986 breakup into the Baby Bells--and one big mistake--AT&T's myopic refusal to create the Internet for the Defense Department--dominate that saga. Baker argued for accepting the offer. Bell Labs, after all, had every connection to the future and Baker and several Labs colleagues could see as inevitable the marriage of the computer and communications technologies. Rejection of the Internet offer was only the first of several innovations AT&T refused to exploit. Baker lost the Internet argument. AT&T at the time was rigidly wed only to telephone lines, analog systems, and microwave transmission of voice. Ahead was fiber optics and cellular telephones--both getting their start at Bell Labs. But AT&T declined to fully develop them as well. AT&T could not keep intellectual pace with its Laboratory. Bell Labs was laying a foundation of technologies that gave birth to the swarms of telecommunications companies and hundreds of accessory and supporting enterprises we see today. Baker is now 88, still active on boards and committees, and hopes to see the legacy of that era preserved in some way. He believes that time represented an era when research, always with an eye toward expanding the versatility and power of communications, was given its full scope at one place. He also believes that AT&T itself and its manufacturing arm, Western Electric, reflected a spirit of integrity in science and industry that is lost today in the race for market and the pursuit of personal wealth. What that primary communications mission meant for Bell Labs was a research program related to almost everything that physical science--and some bit of biological and social science--could study, from radio astronomy for understanding microwave transmission, to the solid state physics that led to the transistor and semiconductor circuitry. Baker did some inventing of his own, work during World War II that made possible the mass production of synthetic rubber, plastic insulating materials that replaced lead and gave stability, flexibility and lower price to undersea communication cables. He also designed the heat-deflecting ablative shield--a mixture of polymers and carbon--that was first applied to protect Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles during re-entry from space, and later was used for the same purpose on the Mercury capsules during NASA's early years. But the most significant work Baker did during that period, the work that led to his legendary reputation, is much less known. That was his key role in developing ways of penetrating Soviet telecommunication systems during the darker days of the Cold War. Baker was called in by President Eisenhower to set up a system melding linguistics, cryptology, and signal interception of Soviet phone lines that would inform the U.S. of Soviet preparations for nuclear missile attack. That story is partially out, yet this portion of Baker's life remains obscure. Baker's presence pervaded the government during that time. His other work, for example, in tapping into undersea cables to listen in on enemy messages, is virtually hidden. But it is vividly memorable to the intelligence community. His work during the Cold War has been commemorated by the President's Baker Medal and the National Security Award. Baker was the ultimate insider. I remember as a reporter during the 1970's frequently calling him for the "real reasons" one decision or appointment was made in various areas of policy. He was connected closely to every agency that had anything to do with science or technology. That was because his intelligence work put him in personal contact with Presidents, especially Eisenhower and Kennedy, who used his breadth of scope for other policy tasks. Baker, who believes that the pursuit of science is one of society's great civilizing principles, constantly scans the spectrums of science and technology for information that might lead to some social or economic good. Baker in fact became the dominant advisory voice for science and technology in the government during those three decades. He helped put on firm footing the National Science Foundation in its early days. He saved the position of Presidential Science Adviser when President Nixon abolished the job along with the whole White House science advisory apparatus. He had a top role of pulling together the communications research and applications work of all the defense and intelligence agencies. And he led a task force that produced a report on policy mechanisms that would integrate in one database as much as possible all research relevant to high technical advance and to social and economic betterment. He was everywhere. He was president of the advisory committee that set up the Defense Telecommunications System, president of Foreign Intelligence Board, a member of advisory committees for all sorts of other intelligence issues. Baker had a passion for educational reform. He was on the committee that produced the landmark report on education, "A Nation At Risk." He helped found Project 2061, the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences' effort to lift standards for the whole country. He founded the Health Effects Institute that studies the human impact of air pollutants. He was on the board that led to the creation of several materials research labs around the country. But Bell Labs was Baker's platform. At first telephone communications was all wires, though dreams of static-free, wireless communications had already been spawned with the development of radio. Telephone connections had to be free of that static, the voice more or less faithfully reproduced, signals needed boosting every few miles, ways had to be found to increase the information capacity of those wires. More and more, microwaves replaced long distance wires. And what we have today is what most of us see and use--wireless technology and broadband communications and all the related technologies that integrate their applications. Again, Bell Labs was right there, the one place, the only place that developed the knowledge base to make all that possible. That role effectively made Bell Labs a national laboratory. It also raises the question of whether at some point another "Bell Labs" will need to be resurrected as a central laboratory for exploring innovative ideas in communication and help make more easy the application of communications to various social purposes. This is where the structure and purpose of any renewed Bell Labs becomes hazy. The big question is whether there is any need in today's climate for a core communications laboratory whose aims are both technical innovation and a social purpose. In other words, research directed at outcomes. Such a lab would need government support for both its philosophy and budget. Michael Noll, a professor of communications at the University of Southern California has suggested that the new entity might be funded partly by the 3% excise task imposed on today's telephone companies. No one today is clamoring for any reconstitution of the old Bell Labs. But the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which plans to build in Virginia an interdisciplinary research lab--the Janiela Farm Research Campus--has chosen as its model two institutions: The Medical Research Council in the UK and Bell Labs. The new Hughes lab would incorporate advanced work in the physical sciences for future applications to biomedical research. Baker spends time these days reviewing the special qualities of that early era and comparing it with the current dissonant state of communications R&D today. He deplores with a strong sense of outrage the waste of trillions of dollars of greedily excessive investments that collapsed and crippled the whole industry. It was money that could have gone into productive research and more reasoned growth. Bell Labs, its scope narrowed, its staff diminished, is seen by people outside the Labs to be in decline. But that doesn't mean it isn't an exciting place to do R&D. Brilliant researchers abound there working at the cutting edge of moving data from one point to another in ever new and efficient ways. The important point is that it isn't the same Bell Labs that it once was, a place of basic, broad but eye-on-the-mission research, with a strong connection to national purpose. It is no longer run by AT&T--the old government-sanctioned monopoly--but by Lucent, which was formerly Western Electric. The old Bell Labs had government on its side, sustaining AT&T's arguable monopoly status and thus its public role. Ten per cent of AT&T revenues were designated to Bell Labs. Researchers there had freedom to pursue their ideas. Management had the burden of explaining why so many far-out ideas might have relevance to the communication needs of the future. The future was what it was all about at the Labs. The Bell Labs of today has to be run at a profit. It must make money for its parent company. Dissolution is being predicted for the Labs because Lucent is one prime symbol of the excesses of the 1990's. Lucent built equipment capacity that the data communications system could not possibly absorb. Internet-related companies went bankrupt and Lucent was left holding a pile of debt from enterprises that collapsed. Part of its plan was to acquire young companies with optical fiber linkups. The acquisition prices were high. Many companies failed. Lucent is still burdened by huge debt and shrunken equipment markets that even now don't promise to grow very much. Lucent's stock is currently hovers around $2.00 a share, down from as high as $108 in 1998. Thanks to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which opened the entire field to competition and allowed the regional systems to proliferate uneconomically in all areas, today's telecommunications world is both exciting and chaotic. As Peter Huber puts it, "Day by day, the [telecommunication] interfaces multiply as equipment providers long distance carriers, Internet providers, wireless providers, and--more recently but importantly--competitive providers of local exchange service. All clamor for new forms of access, steadily blurring the line between customers and providers." He failed to mention that the Baby Bells, now down to four, are a mish-mash of scattered functions, perpetual acquisition, and an unhappy customer base. Baker is more graphic in his description of what followed the breakup of AT&T and the 1996 Communications Act. "There is currently no logic to the current carrier system," he says. "It is utterly disordered and needs some system of regulation that is publicly and politically acceptable. We need more openness in the research as well. The Federal Communications Commission has no centralized philosophy or objectives and they spend their time squabbling about money and access to technology. The results of the 1996 Act illustrated the point that no one has a concept that is fair and accessible. And international telephone communications is especially bad." Telecommunications research, little of it basic, is scattered among dozens of companies. It lacks the old freedom, cohesion, and connectiveness, though those qualities of the old Bell Labs now seems impossible in today's competitive climate. The Federal Communications Commission is worried about the disorder but favoring ever increased competition, can't do much about it. Things will have to continue to settle down, more companies will have to perish, before order of some form is restored within a system that is moving swiftly toward a wireless structure, delivering even more complexity to the communications world. Too many choices, too much competition for phone service, can foster disorder and that is exactly today's concern. A restored Bell Labs would need a company structured pretty much like the old AT&T was. Ma Bell stood alone, its technology running the communications show, the Labs laying out the future and Western Electric building the equipment. The new AT&T's scope is limited, made up of equal parts long distance telephone service, wireless, broadband Internet services, and integrated communication services for companies. As for Lucent, Bell Labs exists to produce ideas for new and immediate products. The old spirit is gone. Lucent, unlike AT&T, does not deliver a service. The old inspirational model is dead. But who can really argue against the process of industrial competition constantly showering sparks of innovation across the breadth of the communications world? At the same time, however, there's logic to establishing a full spectrum, stand-alone communications lab whose research is open and that focuses on the ingredients that improve and reinforce the whole. Work by a few people is underway toward conceiving a new telecommunications company based on the Bell Labs model. Baker is part of the discussion. As he describes such a place, "A model of Bell Labs would not only reflect its flexibility, ingenuity, and the creativity of small groups-pretty much a composite of what we had over the years. It would be much more self-determining and independent. Groups would determine their own plans and tactics. There would be free access to patents, they would not be withheld, but they would be accessible in fair economic terms. The best example was when Bell Labs opened access to transistor patents immediately after they were issued." The whole point of such a new lab would be independence from the mainstream industry. It would push innovation beyond the main goal of profit making. In 1986 Bell Labs' John Pierce described in a private memo his feelings of sharp change in the scope and purpose of Bell Labs. "A laboratory needs a clear purpose. It needs to be essential to some ongoing work or enterprise. The future of that work or enterprise must lie in its hands, or, the researchers must believe that it does. That was the happy lot of researchers at Bell Laboratories before divestiture. The purpose of the Labs and the research was to provide America with telecommunications with a seemingly unending future." "I'm an interested onlooker," Pierce said back then. "I look back fondly on that wonderful old organization. I watch with interest to see whether or not the people and traditions of Bell Telephone Laboratories will somehow be linked to a new mission so as to create wonderful meaningful Laboratories. Right now I just don't know." Nor does anyone. But whatever new things happen, the story of Bell Labs and Baker all by itself stands as a distinct and special unity of person and purpose. As various fields of science in the 21st century find themselves blending in stunningly unconventional ways, research may again organize in new ways around some galvanizing public purpose, as Bell Labs did around communications. For now though, the Bell Labs stands out as a model. How relevant a model remains to be seen. Meanwhile, the story of Bell Labs and Baker at that once and future time remains a smashingly good saga worth keeping alive. End |