Bell Labs is often remembered as the epitome of unfettered exploration, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), but that framing misses a crucial point:
Eric Gilliam, who studies and writes about innovation history, coined the beautiful phrase “long leash, narrow fence” to describe the ethos at Bell Labs in its heyday. New researchers were given extraordinary latitude in determining what to work on, but were expected to interact with engineers and manufacturing facilities to identify specific problems that needed solving.
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John R. Pierce, a Bell Labs scientist and “father of the communications satellite,” recalled in an oral history: “Too much freedom is horrible. It’s like telling a young child, ‘Do whatever you want to.’… It’s certainly bad to be directed to do things very, very narrowly and with no freedom. It’s my guess that for every person who needs more freedom, there are ten people who need more help in finding their way.” What they had at Bell Labs, as another famous scientist put it, was “circumscribed freedom”—freedom within a framework.
Gilliam shares just an excerpt from an interview with Pierce, from 1979, after he had earned acclaim as the father of the communications satellite:
LYLE: I want to talk about research in the Bell Labs and how that’s done. That is, when you first started there, you were working with vacuum tubes. Who decides what problems will be worked on?
PIERCE: That’s very different then and now. I was told to do research on vacuum tubes. People sort of just left me alone. They did suggest that I go and see Philo Farnsworth, who was working on electron multipliers and television pick-up tubes, but I was left pretty much to myself. This was very, very confusing to me. I didn’t know what to do.
LYLE: Were you doing it alone?
PIERCE: Yes.
LYLE: Did they say, “So-and-so has been doing this and this is where he left off”?
PIERCE: No. I was just supposed to plan something to do and do it. I think that is close to cruel and unusual punishment.
LYLE: And full of anxiety, I’m sure.
PIERCE: Yes, but I didn’t know enough to be unhappy. I did crazy things. I did some useful things. I invented an electron multiplier. I was greatly helped at this point, but not so much by the people who were close to such work. I felt a certain secretiveness in the people who were working near to me. They were doing their own thing, and I was doing other things. Heaven knows how I found anything useful to do. I was exposed to things by some of the people who were less secretive. I was very much helped by Bill Shockley, who came to Bell Laboratories about the same time I did. He had been an undergraduate at Caltech but did his graduate work at MIT. He was a very sympathetic person, and taught me a good deal. Somehow I hit on things that were worth working on — electron multipliers and the question of noise in electron multipliers, and later trying to make high transconductance vacuum tubes.
Then, as the war came, I was drawn into microwave tube work, and the outcome of that was a little bit by accident. First, I tried to make klystron amplifiers—I’d heard about klystron. Then I stumbled onto reflex klystrons, which was not a new idea, but I stumbled onto it independently. Gerry [William Gerald] Shepherd, who’s now at the University of Minnesota, and I made some klystrons that were in all American microwave radar receivers. The magnetron was the big thing of the day, but we made these beating oscillators for receivers instead.
Too much freedom is horrible. It’s like telling a young child, “Do whatever you want to.” You’ve heard this story. There are various outcomes. One is, “Do I have to do what I want to?” Complete freedom is not very helpful to a person who is inexperienced in the world. It’s certainly bad to be directed to do things very, very narrowly and with no freedom. It’s my guess that for every person who needs more freedom, there are ten people who need more help in finding their way.
LYLE: So, did they tell you why they wanted the vacuum tubes, when you started off?
PIERCE: Not really. I found out some way, inadvertently. Some people were working on electron multipliers, and I made some improvements on them. It became clear that people needed better vacuum tubes for building negative feedback amplifiers, and I worked on that. I don’t think I was told this formally; I just found out by talking to people. Then, as the war approached and we got into war, it became apparent that microwave radar was very, very important, and I worked on tubes for radar. It was a process of osmosis rather than direction that led me into these things, as I remember it.
LYLE: How was the research tied in with the general business of Bell Telephone? kind of a relationship exists between these two parts of the company?
That is, what kind of a relationship exists between these two parts of the company?PIERCE: It’s a very important relationship. The Bell System has AT&T, which is sort of a holding company, but it also runs the long lines that provide long distance telephone service. It establishes engineering practices for the Bell System. It owns Western Electric, which is a manufacturing organization, and it also owns, together with Western Electric, the Bell Telephone Laboratories.
I remember that during the war we saw a good deal of people from Western Electric, who were going to manufacture the things that we devised. Because all of these people were engaged in telephony, or during the war because they were all engaged in radar and other military things, you got to talk to people who were engaged in the operation of things, who were engaged in the manufacture of things, and you got a picture of the rest of the world which certainly influenced what research you did.
I can understand a university, which does teaching and research. But the idea of a research institute without ties to either teaching or to manufacturing or operational organization seems a terribly sterile idea. You see that in the Soviet Union; there’s a lot of good activity that never results in anything. When they want to build automobiles, they hire Fiat to build an automobile plant, instead of relying on what they have learned.