Genius, Innovation, and Jealousy: The Story of Bell Labs
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Hello, everyone. Stuck Are You Here? And I'm Gabby. And welcome back, my friends. Welcome back. Welcome back. Welcome back. Okay, we've missed a lot here over the previous past month. I'm going to apologize right now. And I know that even on Patreon, when I put out things for apologies for when it is that we have missed things, I get messages that are like, oh, yeah, you know, it'd be a great apology, not missing things.

Let me tell you all what it is that has happened over the past month. I have talked about a couple of times here in social media and with people that we've had delays due to medical issues and everything that has gone down. In addition to travel, right before it is that we had gone and traveled to Mongolia and had no signal to be able to work or do anything for two weeks, which we thought, all right, going into it, we're going to work a bunch ahead of time in order to be able to prepare for that trip so that we're going to be fine.

What ended up happening is that my wife and I suffered a miscarriage during that time. And it put us very far behind physically and emotionally, I will say, to the point that we...

We're really off this past month. So I do apologize personally for all of you that are Patreon subscribers. I apologize to all of you who have waited for episodes and haven't really heard much of what has been going on for us. But it is a mixture between quite literally being in a place in the middle of the Gobi Desert where there is no signal to be able to do anything. And also at the same time,

being behind due to this very uncomfortable medical experience.

With that, my friends, we are back. We are back to producing things. And I do appreciate all of you for joining us here today. The story that we're going to be telling you about today is something that is so fantastic, amazing and spectacular that you would think that we were about to tell you about the history of Marvel Comics with the way that I'm going into this right now. But no, what we're going to be talking about today is we're going to be talking about the single largest collection of intellect, capability, talent and knowledge of the entire 20th century and possibly ever.

For the history of mankind, with all this being located in one location, we're going to be talking about something that should really ring familiar for us. Gabby. Bell Labs.

Make sure to thank James for doing a solid and researching this for you. Yeah, this script does not even necessarily come from us. It specifically comes from our podcast researcher and writer, James, who has done fantastic work for this diving deep into the history of not just telephones, but specifically the company behind just about every kind of aspect of modern technology that you would have today that we use on a daily basis.

Okay, now, there's a lot to talk about in precious little time, so I'm going to jump into it and get started with the creation of a company that would found Bell Labs. Which, no, this is not related to me. I am Stephen Bell, but that is not me. Though, ironically enough, if I recall correctly, my mother's side, which is not the Bell line, I am related to Alexander Graham Bell. At least, I need to confirm the actual name.

accuracy of that as well as what specific relation it is. But I remember being told that years ago. Anyway, moving on from that, this is about Bell Labs, the American Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, more commonly known as AT&T, which, yes, they are that old going back into the 1800s. I gotta stop. What? Yes, they are. Gabby, do you know what AT&T stands for? Attention. American Telegraph and Telephone.

Because back when the telegraph was invented in the 1800s, they were one of the primary companies that were doing it. Wow. That's the whole point. So before you had anything with smartphones and the iPhone specifically, AT&T was one of the dominant entities for things like telegraphs.

So started in 1874 as a way to protect the patent rights of Alexander Graham Bell after he patented the telephone literally on the same day that Elijah Gray would attempt to patent the same damn invention. It should be noted that Bell's version of the patent for the telephone ended up being approved first.

This used electromagnetism to reproduce the human voice, while Gray's patent used a water transmitter, because this is the thing that people were researching at the time, which did reproduce one's voice, but at a lesser quality. Also, Gray never went and contested the patent. He never even tried. Bell would even admit to having seen Gray's patent that day and making notes for his own, which he would test later.

But it just turns out that the thing that he had was much better. Like the electromagnetic design just worked much more efficiently. And so he focused on improving that.

Initially called the Bell Telephone Company in 1880, they would introduce AT&T Long Lines, which would be the world's first attempt to start a nationwide long-distance network. They connected New York to Chicago by 1892, just in time for Alexander Graham Bell to show off his new long-distance call, which yes, long distance back in the day was a couple states over.

This being to the masses in 1893. And this was at a gleaming white city that Gabby, can you guess where this is? Because we've covered it here before. No, a white city, a white city. Wasn't every city back then white? You're right.

You're right. No, this was for the Chicago World Fair. Like the Colombian expedition, if you will. The 1893 one that was a collection of buildings that were temporarily put up there that looked like white marble, even though they weren't and was not Tartaria. I'm telling you this right now. Oh, God, that conspiracy pisses me off. Anyway, back to the story that we're actually trying to tell.

A little over a decade prior to the Chicago World's Fair, in 1880, the French government had awarded Alexander Graham Bell the Volta Prize of 50,000 francs. This being for the invention of the telephone, which was the equivalent of around $10,000 back in the day, and that is around $340,000 today.

He used the award to fund the Volta Laboratory, also known as the Alexander Graham Bell Laboratory in Washington, D.C., and it focused on the analysis, recording, and transmission of sound. Bell would use his considerable profits from the laboratory for further research and education, advancing the diffusion of knowledge relating to the deaf, which is fascinating.

In 1893, he would go and construct a new building close by at 1537 35th Street NW specifically to house the lab, and this building was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1972.

In 1896, Western Electric would buy property at 463 West Street to centralize the manufacturers and engineers which had been supplying AT&T with such technology as telephones, telephone exchange switches, and transmission equipment. On January 1, 1925, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. was organized to consolidate development and research activities in the communication field and allied sciences for the Bell system.

Ownership was evenly shared between Western Electric and AT&T. This new company was massive. It had 3,600 engineers, scientists, and support staff, and its 400,000 square foot space was expanded with a new building occupying around one quarter of an entire city block.

Western Electric initially started its own company way back in 1856, doing electrical engineering and manufacturing for the telegraph system, and it hopped into the telephone market once they were created.

Ironically, the early version of Western Electric at one time sold parts to a young inventor by the name of Elijah Gray, Alexander Graham's competitor, if you will. The two owners at the time had such a good relationship with Gray that when he bought shares in Western Union, they frequently did business with Gray and his company.

As a testament to how completely Bell and his company ran out any competitors, Gray's Western Union initially tried to compete with Bell in the telephone market, and they were ran out so quickly and thoroughly that they never tried to do business in the telephone market again. And by 1915, Western Electric had been purchased by AT&T, and now it's electrical engineering and was at that point then it's electrical engineering and manufacturing division.

To complete their new acquisition, AT&T decided to fund and build Bell Labs as the research and development division of AT&T, and it quickly earned a reputation as a hub for some of the world's smartest minds. All in one place. But still, this is the beginning. AT&T was going to grow even larger.

In 1929, land had been purchased by AT&T in Holmdel Township, New Jersey. Eventually, the lab would move there and progressively would outgrow its facilities until 1967 when they built a massive, fuck-off-sized complex in Murray Hill, New Jersey. And when I say huge, this thing was a whopping 2 million square feet.

Wow. Which is freaking huge for any kind of facility. So it's a building, right? It's a building. Does it still exist? Because two million square feet, you can't just tear that down. No, like the thing is massive. But two million square feet. How big is the Google complex? Oh, that's a good question. Hold on. Hold on. I'm going to look this up right now. I'm assuming they build really big. Google complex.

Google complex size. Is that the one in San Diego? I don't know which one is a really big one because I don't think the one. OK, OK. The Google complex is three point one million square feet. See, I know. OK, so it's just like a corporate thing to build a massive. The original Google complex was two million square feet. So the original Google complex was the same size. That makes sense. That makes sense.

Yeah, this is back in the day, though. This is not modern Google with like being able to own nearly as many things. This is a company back in the day owning that much crap. So this thing had a massive atrium situated on 473 acres of land. It was huge.

Now, why move to New Jersey? You may wonder, of all things, like that's not exactly a major hub for technology at the time. I can't talk shit on New Jersey because I promised Arnold that I was going to be really cool about New Jersey. Well, the whole point is that if you want to say this, the state of New Jersey was pretty much a giant suburb for New York. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun to

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That is true pretty much to this day in some capacities. But the thing is, that was very different back in the day, over 100 years ago.

The whole reason they moved to New Jersey is because from an early point in the life of Bell Labs, the management realized that anything they could do to keep their scientists thinking and not being distracted helped them come up with ideas quicker and easier. New York was simply way too busy and loud and smelly and sounds like New York, which is very accurate when describing New York. The area of New Jersey that they moved to was quiet and rural. It was idyllic and beautiful. It was the perfect place to be inspired and not have to deal with the distractions of the city.

So built specifically to cause its developers and researchers to encounter each other daily, each interact or iteration of Bell Labs physical location was designed to make employees have at least one interaction with someone every time they went from, say, their office to their laboratory space, which might be down the hallway and around the corner.

The social interaction about this wasn't a flaw. It wasn't meant to isolate people. It was a detail that was made for purpose. This detail caused literally thousands of random interactions that led to ideas, that led to cooperation, that led to invention, which led to innovation. The rule was, if you needed help, you were required to go ask someone. It didn't matter if you were asking an engineer or the vice president of the labs, which was a brilliant physicist by the name of Mervyn Kelly.

You were just required to do this. Offered a job by the first Bell Labs president himself, Frank Jewett, Kelly had already been a research assistant to a Nobel Prize winner while working on his PhD in 1923. And where Kelly really shined was the creation and improvement of vacuum tubes. Vacuum tubes were needed for everything from radios to TVs, which was booming at the time, to sound recording equipment, to long distance telephone networks, and even early computers.

The main drawback to vacuum tube technology at this point is that it created a lot of heat, and so over time the tubes would blow out. So ever since their creation, the race was on to make them smaller, longer lasting, and more efficient. Mervyn Kelly was one of the leading minds in the world of vacuum tubes.

My favorite thing. OK, so vacuum tubes. I only know about them because of the old timey TVs, which we had like an old one. But I also had like the these bedtime stories, Maxwell something bedtime stories, like a whole bunch of those books. And one of these stories in there was going over vacuum tubes and how they all had to keep fixing their TVs because of the tubes going bad. Yes. Vacuum tubes are quite literally one of those crucial pieces of technology ever invented. Vacuum tubes in the iPhone. Yep.

And most importantly, for the history of Bell Labs, Mervyn Kelly loved his job. Not only did it tap into his special knack of communicating, coordinating and motivating extremely intelligent people, but he let his employees have a level of freedom that most vice presidents of a company would gasp at today. He basically told them, yeah, hey, work on what you want, whenever you want, with whoever you want. Just do it with someone in the building. And then he did his best to just keep on facilitating that concept.

Like Kelly is one of the first of a few people that we're going to go into depth on because he had such a large reach and influence in the Bell Labs ecosystem. But we'll be bringing up a couple other individuals here because if we went into their individual stories of all the inventions and discoveries made at Bell Labs and those who made them, we would be here for hours. And we quite frankly don't have that time at all. Back to Kelly, though.

Between 1922 and 1932, Kelly obtained seven patents related to his work. His work on vacuum tubes as a researcher and leader production chief resulted in the longevity of Western electric telephone repeater tubes increasing from 1,000 hours to 80,000 hours. That is an 80 times increase in longevity.

In 1936, he was appointed director of research at laboratories. And we'll get back to him in just a bit. But the first person that we're going to mention here then is Carl Yansky. In 1931, Yansky built a directional antenna that looked like a Wright Brothers flyer, except take off the fuselage and fabric of the wings and just leave the structural elements and bracing of the biplane wings. He set this lattice metal structure on top of the ring with wheels on it.

Imagine the little wheels that turn underneath the glass plate in a microwave and you get the idea. Anyway, Carl is experimenting with radio waves and how static affects long distance shortwave communication. What he accidentally discovered were radio waves being emitted from the center of the galaxy.

The man invented the entire field of radio astronomy on accident just by messing around with antennas. I love accidental inventions, man. Yep. And still AT&T grew larger. In 1933, Bell Labs invented the technology that allowed the first stereo radio signals to be transmitted live from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C.,

In 1937, a young mathematician and electrical engineer would be hired at Bell Labs, and management knew that he was brilliant, but they had no idea that this young man would play a considerable role in the history of mankind in the next 20 years, and his name was Claude Shannon, and he would eventually lay the foundations for the Information Age. But first, there was something happening over in Poland that had everybody worried and excited.

Yeah, did I mention it was 1939 now? The mustache man of the Hitler variety decided to have a no-no fun time with everyone else. No-no fun time sounds wrong. Considering everything that the Nazis were doing at this time, that's a somewhat accurate description. Valid. Unfortunately. Carry on. So yeah, this is World War II, my friends. And when this broke out, nearly everyone at Bell Labs began doing what pretty much every kind of company in the U.S. began doing at that point.

Switching over to military themed projects. I love the sheer amount of weird little civilian switchovers that you ended up seeing over the course of history. We covered it before at one time where a lingerie company ended up being a crucial developer of parachute technology for pigeons. I love these. I love these little details. So, yes.

They started switching over to military projects, and in the early 1940s, the photovoltaic cell was developed by Russell Ohl.

In 1943, Bell developed SIGSLY, S-I-G-S-A-L-Y, the first digital scrambled speech transmission system used by the Allies in World War II. The British wartime codebreaker Alan Turing visited the labs at this time, working on speech encryption and meeting Claude Shannon. And if you'll notice, I mentioned they invented photovoltaic cell. Yes, that is the world's first version of a solar panel cell.

The first solar cell only had an energy return percentage of like 1.5%, which is great for it being the first, actually. Solar cells are, to this day, not the most efficient, but this is leagues better than what you would originally expect.

In the next 20 years, they would improve solar technology so much that the giant complex they built in Murray Hill, New Jersey, would be entirely covered by see-through solar panels that provided just the right amount of natural light to pass through for it to be pleasant to work there. And they improved the energy return percentages all the way up to 15%. With all the changes and improvements in technology that we've had over the years, Gabby, can you guess what percentage of energy return is on modern-day solar panels?

25. Less. It is actually only around 20 to 21%. Really? Meaning almost 100 years ago, they increased it in the span of just a couple years from 1.5% to 15%. And in the 80 years since, we've only managed to increase it by another 5%. I'd imagine... So, you know, when you're doing a project that's like... It's kind of like when you...

Make all of the developments that you can early on so that it becomes almost impossible to improve it, you know, at a larger level later on. Diminishing returns. Yeah. Yes. That happens in a lot of things, especially with technology, medicine, like

Especially with science, we made like all those leaps and bounds. And unless somebody comes out with a radical new way of doing things, we're probably just going to be stuck here for a little bit. There's only so far you can take things, which is one of the reasons why they talk about in the case of computers. Like the iPhone. Look at the iPhone. Every single year is just unusual, which is insane to me that people keep buying new ones. I have had my same one since 2022 and so have you. And it works just fine because the new ones do not do that much. It's not that big of a difference. No. Like until somebody comes out with a phone that can like...

I don't know. Mine, crypto. I think I'm good. Oh, they already do. Oh, hell yeah. Buy me that one. So, yeah, these guys were so good at their job that in the 50, 60, 70, 80 years that it has been, we've only improved the invention by 5%. And by the time they would come back to finishing innovating and make what would be considered a modern day solar cell, it was 1954. So that is 1954 all the way to now. So that is, you know, 71 years.

Fun. And still AT&T was going to grow larger. See, Claude Shannon was in high demand during this time, and the government couldn't have been more pleased with his work. In 1942, just to make it easier to explain the concepts to others, Shannon up and created signal flow graphs.

Ask any electrician or electrical engineer and they'll tell you that signal flow graphs are like first semester stuff. He made that. Then he worked with Alan Turing in 1943 doing crypto analysis research with a famed British mathematician. They had tea at lunchtime in the Bell Labs cafeteria while Turing showed Shannon his 1936 paper that defined what we now know as the universal Turing machine.

Shannon would later say that he was inspired by Turing's brilliant work, and he found many of the ideas complemented his own and on the concept of computing. But without a doubt, the biggest and most important innovation that was handed to the U.S. government directly from the minds of Bell Labs would have to be the invention of radar.

The AN-TPS-1 was an early warning and tactical control radar developed by Bell Labs and the MIT Radiation Laboratory during World War II. Initially used by the U.S. Army, it was later used by the U.S. Air Force Air Defense Command and a number of European armed forces. This system was among the first portable radars and could track multiple targets simultaneously. The invention saved potentially millions of lives.

millions of lives over its lifetime, specifically during World War II was effective as hell in detecting the Luftwaffe coming from far away and warning those in the crosshairs. In the case of drive-by innovation, Claude Shannon appeared with the team out of nowhere in 1943 and 44 and helped the radar team incorporate a killer feature into the ANTPS-1, the ability to determine the paths for intercepting incoming missiles.

This tied the radar directly into anti-aircraft systems for the first time. Now, to run an anti-aircraft system without a form of radar seems completely stupid and absurd. But if it wasn't for Bell Labs, we might be doing that with our anti-aircraft systems. And if you thought Claude Shannon was done, no, he was just getting started. We're going to come back to him in a minute, though. Because first, we have to talk about possibly the single most important thing ever created by the minds of Bell Labs, the transistor.

And still AT&T was going to grow larger. So everyone just came back from the war. They're all high off beating the crap out of the Nazis and his fascist thugs and everything. And by 1947, a team had been developed that included John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley. And this is when we get to meet our next important player in our story, William Shockley.

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You can Venmo this or you can Venmo that.

The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank, and a pursuant to license by MasterCard International Incorporated card may be used everywhere MasterCard is accepted. Venmo purchase restrictions apply. He'd been personally hired by Marvin Kelly. That's how much promise he had shown. As a solid state physicist, he was just the kind of mind that Kelly needed around. Vacuum tubes had been improved on repeatedly, but Marvin Kelly knew that they were going to need to be replaced in order for technology to move forward.

Vacuum tubes were used by AT&T specifically in their switch relays and their signal boosters. Without vacuum tubes, human voices would attenuate or fade out after like 50 or 60 miles on the phone networks at the time.

This meant that long distance phone networks could not exist without vacuum tubes. It has been theorized that semiconductors could offer a solid state alternative to vacuum tubes for a few years by now. And Marvin Kelly was like a tornado whipping through Bell Labs. If you could catch him, he'd engage in conversation and be more than happy to offer an answer or helpful advice. But he'd probably have a wicked case of ADHD by the standards of today. And the secret was catching him before he just left the room.

This led to numerous famous moments where he would pose a problem to a random scientist, engineer, or physicist, and then after asking the question, he would wait until the person decided they wanted to figure out how to answer the problem. Roughly a year or so after he'd hired the young William Shockley, Kelly literally stopped him in the hallway as he was passing one day and said, Hey, don't you hate how we gotta go through so many vacuum tubes every day just to keep our network going?

Now, this was a deviously smart move by Kelly as he knew that Shockley had a serious interest in solid state devices and specifically semiconductors. Within weeks of this hallway moment, Shockley was begging Kelly to let him start a team to find a solid state replacement for vacuum tubes. So he manipulated them. Oh, yeah, pretty much like literally like he did the thing that you would actually expect a good leader to do. You know who that reminds me of? John.

Yeah. From our old job, John jury. Yeah. Now I understand what he was doing 98% of the time. And you're like, you know, we should really find a way to do this. But yeah, he did this. He did this a lot.

Yeah, John is really smart. Yep. So Shockley and Walter Pertain had worked on early prototypes of a solid state vacuum tube replacement in 39. But the war ended up sidetracking things because go figure. That's what would happen during a war. Kelly promised Shockley that when the war was over, he'd get his chance to head a solid state team.

Shock Lee would then go on to join the radar team and ended up developing methods for countering submarine tactics, optimizing depth charge patterns, and eventually would gain so much notoriety among the military elite that he was asked to write a paper estimating how many casualties would occur if the U.S. invaded mainland Japan instead of dropping a bomb on it.

The numbers he settled on were 5 to 10 million Japanese killed before they would surrender, with the cost of getting that far being between 2 and 4 million American casualties, with anywhere from 400,000 to 800,000 Americans killed. This report heavily influenced the decision of the president and Joint Chiefs of Staff to drop the atomic bomb.

When he got back from the war, Shockley and his team went right back to work on the solid state vacuum tube replacement that they'd been trying to make. This entire time they worked on the project, Marvin Kelly was supporting and encouraging them. And that in itself is kind of wild because Marvin Kelly's entire career and most of his success was in the field of vacuum tubes. So he was the greatest supporter of the technology that was going to make his own life's work completely irrelevant.

But he never tried to slow down or impede the project. And because of this, the team succeeded. But they didn't have a name for what they just created until John Pierce came along and said it was an example of trans resistance. So they should just call it a transistor. And everyone agreed.

The creation of the transistor was such a massive innovation that they immediately shared it with the world. And to fully drive home why they thought so, transistors would end up being used in nearly all modern electronics because they are a key component of computer chips. So anything that even has the smallest computer chip in it has a transistor.

From your coffee maker, to your scale, to your car, to your cell phone, everything. Transistors are what made the digital age possible. And the ability to mass-produce transistors at a low cost made the spread of computers and digital devices possible as well.

It is perhaps the ultimate example of low cost, flexibility and reliability. And most of our digital world would not exist if not for this team in 1947 and their management that decided to try and not just make a profit off of something so groundbreaking and earth changing, instead spreading it around.

Bell Labs was not necessarily really about profit. They didn't have to be. They were supported by the biggest monopoly in the world, AT&T. And the government gave AT&T a lot of leeway because of all the help and technology that Bell Labs workers had given them during World War II. Yet this was still not enough for Bill Shockley.

You see, Shockley wanted his name of the patent, or he wanted his name of the patent for the transistor, whether he made money off of it or not. Because Bill Shockley wanted the attention and the fame. But part of his idea for the transistor, the part that he brought to the project, had been anticipated and patented by a Canadian scientist in 1925. Because of this, the Bell Labs lawyers filed the patent applications without Shockley's name on it. And this enraged him.

He tried to have the patent applications redone to include his name, but in a ridiculously petty move, also tried to have them filed without John Bardeen and Walter Bertain's name on them. He also began work on the junction transistor, which would effectively improve upon and replace the joint transistor the team had initially created, but he made sure to be the only person involved in this project. He didn't want to share any credit this time.

This was the beginning of Shockley's villain arc, if you will, and it would not be the most heinous part of it either. But we're not there yet. In 1951, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He was 41 years old. This was rather young for such an election. Two years later, he was chosen as the recipient of the prestigious Comstock Prize for Physics by the NAS and was the recipient of many other awards and honors.

The ensuing publicity generated by the invention of the transistor often thrust Shockley to the fore, much to the chagrin of Bardeen and Brattain, and by this point, his head was bigger than one of the Pep Boys. Bell Labs management, however, consistently presented all three inventors as a team. Though Shockley would correct the record where reporters gave him sole credit for the invention, he eventually infuriated and alienated Bardeen and Brattain, and he essentially blocked the two from working on the junction transistor.

He sounds like Sheldon Cooper when he worked on that one paper with Leonard and then he did the interview and then was like, Leonard was part of his team. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Yep. So Bardeen began pursuing a theory for superconductivity and left Bell Labs in 1951. Bertain refused to work with Shockley further and was assigned to another group.

Neither Bardeen nor Bertain had much to do with the development of the transistor beyond the first year after its invention. The three men would be awarded the Nobel Prize in 1956 for the creation of the transistor, but the three men involved were almost not speaking to each other entirely by that point. Because, Bill Shockley broke the unspoken rule of Bell Labs.

This act of selfishness and seeking of praise and adulation went against some of the core tenets of Bell Labs. Everyone works as a team. Nobody here is trying to just be famous. We're here to further humanity, not to get rich, but Shockley wanted more. He wanted international fame.

These were all things that everyone at Bell subconsciously knew. But Bill Shockley's callous disregard for the corporate culture at Bell Labs caused him to essentially get doomed to middle management because of this. He would languish without promotion for a few years and decided to leave Bell Labs in 1953, as he could see that he was not going to be on track for upper management. He decided to move out to California and start his own company, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory.

Go figure he would name it after himself. This was the very first company to set up shop in Mountain View, California, making semiconductors. Long before the area was home to Google and called Silicon Valley, somehow Bill Shockley saw the earning potential and got in on Silicon Valley from day one. The only problem was that he was absolutely terrible at managing people. And this makes sense because he was one of the reasons the Bell Labs wouldn't make him upper management.

Yet he had no one to hold him back or tell him no now, and he would undermine his own employees constantly. He was great at hiring brilliant people, but his style would drive them away. According to his own biographer, and I quote, he may have been the worst manager in the history of electronics.

This is the worst manager in the history of managers. This is the worst management. This is the worst management in the history of electronics. I'm telling you now. Not great. Not great. He could resist. He could resist all the change, but it didn't work. That is like a really terrifyingly decent impression. I hate that. In one well-known incident, he demanded the lie detector. He went and straight up demanded lie detector tests to find the culprit after a company secretary suffered a minor cut.

In late 1957, eight of Shockley's best researchers, who would come to be known as the traitorous eight, would resign after Shockley decided not to continue research into silicon-based semiconductors. Like he decided he didn't want the company to do what it was made for anymore. These eight employees went on to form Fairchild Semiconductor, and just like Joe Exotic, this was a loss from which Shockley Semiconductor would never financially recover.

This led to its purchase by another company three years later. And over the course of the next 20 years, more than 65 new enterprises would end up having employee connections back to Fairchild. Shockley then went on to go teach engineering and applied science at Stanford University for eight years before retiring in 1975. And you think that's where things end. But no, that's where he really got into some villain shit.

What could he possibly do? He could have just retired and chilled. Well, get this, get this. In the last two decades of his life, Shockley, who, mind you, remember, his whole thing was like transistors and semiconductors. And he was like, this was for electronics. He had no degree in genetics, but he became widely known for his rather extreme views on race and human intelligence. All is is, man. Yep.

along with strong advocacy for eugenics. Oh my, well, what time? What was the year? So this was like 1970s. Oh, that's a bit late. Dick.

They kind of were really into it in the early 1920s and then like 1940s, 50s, 70s. He kept it going for a while there. Yeah. As described by his Los Angeles Times obituary, quote, he went from being a physicist with impeccable academic credentials to amateur geneticist becoming a lightning rod whose views sparked campus demonstrations and a cascade of calamity. End quote.

He thought his work was important to the future of humanity, and so he described it as the most important aspect of his career. He argued that a higher rate of reproduction among purportedly less intelligent people was having a dysgenic effect and argued that a drop in average intelligence would lead to a decline in civilization. He advocated for essentially the idea of the idiocracy theory, like the same plot for idiocracy, like the comedy movie he put forth as that is what is just straight up happening.

And also, a big shocker, Shockley went and claimed that black people were genetically and intellectually inferior to white people. He proposed that individuals with IQs below 100 should be paid to undergo voluntary sterilization. $1,000 for each of their IQ points under 100.

The Southern Poverty Law Center would describe Shockley as a white nationalist who failed to produce evidence for his eugenic theories amidst near-universal acknowledgement that his work was that of a racist crank. Yet, Shockley consistently insisted that he wasn't racist because his research led him to believe that East Asians and Jews were smarter on average than whites.

So he tried to take a scientific approach to it and say that even for himself. No, no, no, no. Because others are smarter on average than me. Shockley was a candidate for the Republican nomination in 1982 United States Senate election in California. And he ran on a single issue platform of opposing the dysgenic threat that he alleged African-Americans and other groups posed. He came in eighth place. Out of how many? Eighth.

Please say eight. I don't know how many people, but he had 8,000 votes that were cast for him. Dear God. No, you can find crazies in just... Gabby, I have been on college campuses where for people who espouse extreme views on both sides of the political spectrum are very prevalent. You will find someone who is willing to vote for just about anything. What is the curve? Because, you know, between your school and my school back in like 20... I don't know, we were there in like 2014 to...

Some of the views are so extreme on both sides that they would meet in the middle. Horseshoe theory. Horseshoe theory is the term. They would meet in the middle. We're like, yo, y'all could be friends. So as a for clarification on this year, I went to a private liberal arts school that for the most part was extremely left leaning. And Gabby went to a.

Christian school that despite being one of the greatest schools, not only in the state, but also surrounding states, would house some very extreme right wing views in there. And it was very funny. We went for the scholarship money. That's it. Because we didn't want a lot of student loans. And

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If you went on a road trip and you didn't stop for a Big Mac, or drop a crispy fry between the car seats, or use your McDonald's bag as a placemat, then that wasn't a road trip. It was just a really long drive. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba. At Participating McDonald's.

That's why we went to the schools we went to. Yep. So when she talks about horseshoe theory, it was very interesting how at different points on extreme sides of the political spectrum, some people tended to agree on pretty much very similar premises. It's like the KKK allowing in black people, but only if the black person also opposes the mixing of the races. That one makes that that one had me gagged.

I was like, damn. Yeah. Guess what, Gabby? A lot of commenters on the early day when we started out in TikTok would be welcomed into the KKK with how they acted towards you. Do you remember all the people that would leave comments that would call you a race traitor because you were with me? Ah, the good old TikTok. They would fit in very well with the KKK. Yeah. Oh, God. Where were we here? Oh, yeah. No, I didn't even give the percentage. So he had 8,000 votes. Here's the thing. This is over a large area that was less than 0.37%.

Of the votes. He did not even get half of a percentage. That's how bad it was. Ultimately, he would spend the rest of his life miserable and die of prostate cancer in 1989 at the age of 79. And that is the end of him. Anyway, back to the late 1940s where we left off. And we'll be checking in with our old friend, Claude Shannon.

Now, there couldn't be a more opposite type of personality from Bill Shockley than Claude Shannon. He was fun-loving. He was affable, very gregarious, talked with everyone. Claude Shannon was a bit of a celebrity around Bell Labs. And in 1949, this happened to be a really good year for him because not only did he meet his second wife, whom he would happily have a family of three with, but he also was releasing landmark scientific papers that would cement his legacy throughout history.

His 1948 paper, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, laid the foundations for the field of information theory, referred to as a blueprint for the digital era by electrical engineer Robert G. Gallagher and the Magna Carta of the Information Age by Scientific American. An expert in the field once compared Shannon's influence on the digital age to that which the, quote, the inventor of the alphabet had on literature. That is how important it was.

Advancements across multiple scientific disciplines utilize Shannon's theory, including the invention of the compact disc, the development of the Internet, the commercialization of mobile telephony and the understanding of black holes. He also formally introduced the term bit like, you know, a bit within talking about technology and was a co-inventor of both pulse code modulation and the first wearable computer.

He contributed mountains of foundational work to the field of artificial intelligence, yet he never lost his sense of wonder and playfulness. Outside of Shannon's academic pursuits, he was interested in juggling.

unicycling, and chess. You can frequently find him surrounded by co-workers while juggling and engaging in conversations at the same time. You know, something about juggling and the odds of physics in it lit the fire of curiosity in him, I guess, and it was just one of his favorite pastimes. He also invented many devices, including a Roman numeral computer called throwback and juggling machines.

Because I guess if you're going to take a break from inventing stuff for like world changing digital information, you might as well make a device that just juggles things physically. Was juggling his hyper fixation? One of them. Yeah. Along with unicycling and chess. I love smart people because you never know what they're going to do for fun. He also invented flamethrowing trumpets, rocket powered frisbees, plastic foam shoes for navigating a lake and which to an observer would appear as if Shannon was walking on water. Yeah.

It's almost as if his eccentricity would fuel his creativity. Throughout the 1940s and 50s, he had one win after another, and he never threw his colleagues under the bus or tried to take credit for their work. He met his second wife, Mary Elizabeth Moore, when she was a numerical analyst at Bell Labs, and he enlisted her help to build some of his inventions and gizmos, as he liked to call them. The most famous of these having to be the Thessius.

In 1950, Shannon built and designed with the help of his wife a learning machine named Thesios. It consisted of a maze on a surface through which a mechanical mouse could move, and then below the surface were sensors that followed the path of a mechanical mouse through the maze. After much trial and error, this device would learn the shortest path through the maze and direct the mechanical mouse through it. The pattern of the maze could be changed at will.

There is a robotic sporting event called MicroMouse, and if you've ever seen it, or if you've never seen it rather, go look it up on YouTube after this episode. The whole point is for tiny robotic mice to find their way through the maze. And if you've ever seen it, one can't help but think that this must have been directly inspired by Theseus. Mice used in competitions employ the fundamental elements of robot navigation, including mapping, planning, and localization. Additionally, they optimize their path through the maze using various search algorithms.

These are all things that Thesios was an attempt to work towards. And by this point in time, Micro Mouse is looked at as an entry hobby for those who want to get into robotics as their career. Plus, they don't have to destroy the robots after designing and building them like what you see on BattleBots, which I will say this right now is freaking hilarious. I love seeing BattleBots because that is one of the things that pops up on my TikTok and YouTube shorts feed.

Because I love seeing people go, hey, we're going to have these robots fight each other. Are we going to add like, you know, actual proper weapons to it and other things like that? No, no, no, no, no. We're just going to roll with the concept and see if this works. And if it does, it's going to be hilarious. If it doesn't, it doesn't really matter. Like I saw one that was basically a thing that turned into a giant Beyblade because they went, yeah, we're not going to give this robot any weapons to fight. We're just going to make it spin really fast and see if that works.

Did it work? Sometimes. Sometimes it's what gets me. Sometimes it does. Did you do robotics in high school? Like the robotics club? I wanted to. I remember. So you didn't do robotics? No. At one point I was going to end up do, I was going to do it. And then I just, I was on the soccer team. I thought you were cool. I thought you were fun. I was on the soccer team. I just, I did not have the time. Not with the way things were. I thought you were like a hot nerd. You didn't even do robotics? Ooh. Yeah. My nerd type for a lot of that here is, yeah, was anime and history. Okay.

Okay, well, I don't know if we would have been friends in high school then. Got it. That is a tough sell. Got it. Damn. So yeah, even if we weren't happy, Claude Shannon and his wife and kids would live a happy life together.

Damn. That's a transition. That is a transition for sure. In 1956, Claude would take a job teaching at MIT, holding an endowed chair. He worked in the research laboratory electronics and worked at MIT until 1978. He then went and lived another 20 plus years, enjoying his retirement and his family until Alzheimer's would finally take him in 2001 at the age of 84. Back to the golden age of Bell Labs, the post-war up to 1980.

This was the time in which they would just keep innovating, and the government did very little to stop them until 1956 when they made an agreement with AT&T that they would have to share all their patents aside from those having to do with communications industry or any of their work for the military.

Aside from that, they were given unlimited time and freedom to create, work, and research on things. And it was super helpful that a physicist or product developer could think of an idea and then walk down the hall and ask an engineer who would immediately be able to tell them the 30 different ways that idea was stupid or wouldn't work or could possibly break. All of this caused the people at Bell Labs to work less stressed and more freely, and this brought out the best in them.

By this point, Bell Labs had over 4,000 PhDs out of a workforce of 11,000. It was the height of the lab's influence and success, and the amount of things that they developed during this time was truly staggering me. Like, absolutely staggering. And bear with me. I know this is about to be kind of a speed run through Bell Labs' accomplishments, because otherwise we'd be here till tomorrow. But starting in 1954, with the invention of the first modern solar cell, Bell Labs would invent the following.

In 1956, the TAT-1, the first transatlantic communication cable to carry telephone conversations, was laid between Scotland and Newfoundland in a joint effort by AT&T, Bell Laboratories, and British and Canadian telephone companies. In 1958, a technical paper by Arthur Shalow and Charles Hardtowns would first describe the laser. It would be created by someone else, but they planned out how it would work.

On July 10th, 1962, Telstar spacecraft was launched into orbit by NASA, and it was designed and built by Bell Laboratories. The first worldwide television broadcast was July 23rd, 1962, with a press conference by President Kennedy. Telstar happened to be the idea of John Pierce, the guy who named the transistor, and he did it under a time crunch just to see if he and his team could actually do it.

They basically told the government, we can make you a communication satellite. And the government said, oh, yeah, you mean sometime this century? And then the government laughed and Bell Labs rolled its eyes. But no, seriously, John Pierce was like, oh, no, we could totally design and build the world's first communication satellite on a ridiculously short schedule. And then he and his team went and figured out how to do that and make it all possible just because they wanted to see if they could.

The first digital computer art was created in 1962 by A. Michael Knoll. In 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were trying to do experiments involving radio astronomy and satellite communications when they noticed that no matter how much they had tried, they kept getting this consistent background noise that they couldn't get to go away no matter what they did. It turns out they had accidentally discovered the cosmic microwave background for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978.

In other words, they heard the sounds left over by the Big Bang and their discovery is one of the largest pieces of evidence that we have to prove the existence of the Big Bang. In 1966, the concepts that would lead to the design of hexagonal cellular phone networks were first created by Bell Labs scientists.

In the late 1960s, Willard Boyle and George E. Smith at Bell Labs were researching metal oxide semiconductor technology while working on semiconductor bubble memory. And they realized that an electronic charge was the analog of the magnetic bubble and that it could be stored on a tiny MOS capacitor.

As it was fairly straightforward to fabricate a series of MOS capacitors in a row, they connected a suitable voltage to them so that the charge could be stepped along from one to the next, and this led to the invention of the Charge Coupled Device, or CCD, by Boylan-Smith in 69.

CCD image sensors are widely used in professional medical and scientific applications where high quality image data is required. And every single digital camera works because of CCD image sensors. We literally could not have digital imaging without the CCD and still AT&T was growing larger.

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In 1970, A. Michael Knoll invented a tactical force feedback system coupled with interactive stereoscopic computer display, which is right. Rumble features on electronic devices got invented here from New Jersey to your Xbox. That's how it worked. In 1972, Dennis Ritchie would develop and compile programming language C and then later developed an improvement on it called C++. This would be the foundational technology

Functional or this would be the foundational programming language that the entire software community would use for decades going forward. They also invented Unix, which was used to create Linux and serves as the core of Mac OS today. In 1976, they theorized and tested the first conceptual version of fiber optic cables. This project was shelved, but Corning would later pick up the work that they started to create the first actual fiber optic cable just a few years later.

In 1980, they patented the TDMA digital cellular technology that would run the world's first cell phones. Also, at some point during the 1980s, they invented DSL technology that essentially allowed the average person to obtain high-speed broadband internet for the first time.

Arthur Ashkin invented the optical tweezers that grab particles, atoms, viruses, and other living cells with their laser beam fingers. A major breakthrough came in 1987 when Ashkin would use the tweezers to capture living bacteria without harming it.

He immediately began studying biological systems using optical tweezers, which are now widely used to investigate the machinery of life. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018 for his work involving optical tweezers and their applications to biological systems. The Bell system held a virtual monopoly over telephone infrastructure in the U.S. from the early 20th century until January 8th, 1982. That is when AT&T, for the first time,

did not grow larger. As back as 1974, the government had been building an antitrust case against AT&T. And by 1982, they were ready to strike. Figuring it would lose the case, AT&T shocked the world by proposing a radical alternative. It would break itself up instead of making the government do it. It proposed that it should retain control of Western Electric, Yellow Pages, the Bell trademark, Bell Labs, and AT&T Long Distance,

And this meant that it would dismantle its local carriers around the country, which numbered around 30 by this point. It would take those 30 local telephone companies and then divide them into seven different baby bells as they were nicknamed. And these would be independent companies with regional control of the industry.

These baby bells were Ameritech in the Great Lakes, Bell Atlantic in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware region, Bell South in Kentucky, which I remember Bell South. Oh, dear God. As well as the entire deep south below the Mason-Dixon line.

Ninnix for New York and New England, Pacific Telesis in California and Nevada, US West, which is the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest North of Kansas, and all the Mountain Time Zone. And the last was Southwestern Bell, which covered Texas north up to Kansas, as well as Arkansas and Missouri.

This spelled the beginning of the end for Bell Labs, because if the old school AT&T was a perfect example of one thing, it would have to be a monopoly. And it was both a vertical and horizontally integrated company. We've talked about vertical and horizontal integration before when talking about the Keiretsu in Japan and Chibou in Korea. But few companies have such a large reach that they heavily include both versions. Let me explain.

Vertical integration means that you start with Bell Labs. They're making ideas and doing research. Then you pass it up to Western Electric, makes the products the consumers hold and physically interacts with, and then it keeps going up the ladder divisions within the company.

Horizontal integration is perfectly exemplified by the fact that no matter where you went in the country, AT&T ran the telephone systems. They owned all the companies that would get lumped together to make baby bells. And because of this, there was no chance for competition within the industry. Hence AT&T being hit with antitrust suits. So vertical integration is mostly fine, but horizontal integration is what gets your company broken up. And that's what happened.

Without the strength, influence, funding, and long lifetime or timeline of the nation's largest monopoly behind them, Bell Labs began to suffer and its funding started to go down. The massive Bell Labs Holmdel complex out near Murray Hill, New Jersey was closed in 2007. That actually answers your question from the first part here, Gabby.

It was put on the market, but no one wanted to buy it, and it began to show signs of abandonment. Most of the windows were broken. But then, in 2015, a businessman decided to buy it and renovate it with the goal of redesigning it as a business and shopping complex similar to a mall, but with other mixed-use business planned as well.

Today, Bell Works' quarter-mile-long atrium has been reimagined into a publicly accessible pedestrian street with shops, restaurants, healthcare, community services, and more. In addition to offering retail and office space, Bell Works hosts conferences and events, including the annual 4th of July fireworks.

And if you've watched the first and second season of Apple TV's show Severance, the building that the show takes place is in is the Bell Works Complex. It perfectly fit the mood that they were going for in the show, and this revived local interest in the buildings. The complex, which is open seven days a week, is home to public assets such as the Home Dell Library and Learning Center, along with farmers markets and holiday celebrations. It also contains a 285 seat theater, opened in 2024 in what was formerly a lecture hall at the laboratory.

It is constantly full of the sounds of families living their lives, chatting, yelling, running, and laughing, and hopefully is never going to sit empty again, though who knows what the way that economies can work. Either way, the legacy of Bell Laboratories is one of innovation and creativity combined with passion and freedom. It's a scenario that isn't actually very likely to occur at any time in the future, at least no time soon.

To have such a collection of the top minds of research sitting in it like they did, it would require another monopoly with government support being altruistic and designing things for the future without personal compensation, which is pretty much unheard of for things today. But it's important to look back and remember that we set our minds to it as a group. Humans can accomplish a lot. So that really is the end of that. Really, you know what? You know what could probably happen? Yeah, I would theorize that something similar would occur in the event of World War Three.

We don't have to wait that long given the, you know, current world circumstances. Well, you never know. You never know. But in my mind, I cannot help but think it's like pretty much all those other little rules that we have for keeping things kind of separate would break apart in the event of a world war. Because if it becomes a matter of survival, you're going to have to see not everyone is going to do this, but there will be large entities that will set things aside in order to be able to consolidate to preserve what they can. I think that would happen.

I don't know because I don't know. People are very greedy now because the wealth is so much more and so much different. I think from like the earlier part of like the 1900s. I just don't know. You'll have to see really ultra wealthy people put...

good ahead of profits, which is going to be really hard to do. I cannot help but think that the only way maybe World War Three was a wrong term there. World War Three or it would have to be it would not be like a apocalypse level. Yeah, it would have to be apocalypse level because, you know, the ultra wealthy will put profits over the good of people like they genuinely will just they will literally find a way to milk every single penny out of just everyone. You would have to see someone that would rise to prominence.

And the worst part is the dude bros on Instagram will be defending the shit out of them. Like, oh, listen, listen, bro. Listen, bro. I understand they're charging to get into the bunker. But truly, truly, truly. Do you think do you think they will be able to sustain anything if if they didn't charge you an insane amount of money to get into that bunker? Everyone will be saved if they just let everybody in.

They can't do that, bro. You know, you fucking know. I can hear it now, please. Oh my God. I do not want World War III to happen because it will be insufferable on the fucking internet. And also because people would die. But also because the fucking annoying people who defend the billionaires will be out in force. Sorry, that was really political. You can delete that, James. But you know what I mean, Steven. Sorry, did not mean to rant. This is why people hate me on the podcast. I shut up the whole time. And then I threw it away. Sorry, I was just reading comments.

See, that's the source of all rage right there is my wife reading comments. It happens. Well, my friends, that is going to be the end of today's episode. Thank you to all of you for watching. And again, as I said from the beginning, personal apology from me. I'm sorry with the way that things have been here for the past month. We are working to make sure that that is not going to be the case here for going things into this next month. A lot of things are planned to work on, and I have many different things for videos that I have to get ahead on.

So we will see you all here next time. Best of luck. Thank you very much for listening. Goodbye, my friends. Bye. Bye.

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