How Ma Bell Shelved the longer term for 60 Years [Book Excerpt]

What would the arena be like if fiber optic and cell phones have been available within the 1930′s? Would the decade be referred to as the start of the data Revolution other than the good Depression?

The good Bell Labs

In early 1934, Clarence Hickman, a Bell Labs engineer, had a secret machine, about six feet tall, standing in his office. It was a device without equal on earth, decades prior to its time. In the event you called and there was no answer on the phone line to which Hickman’s invention was connected, the machine would beep and a recording device would come on allowing the caller to depart a message.

The genius at the guts of Hickman’s secret proto– answering machine was not so much the postulate- perceptive of social change as that was-but rather the technical principle that made it work and that will, eventually, transform the arena: magnetic recording tape. Recall that before magnetic storage there was no strategy to store sound as opposed to by pressing a record or making a piano roll. The brand new technology does not only herald audio cassettes and videotapes, but when used with the silicon chip, make computer storage a reality. Indeed, from the 1980s onward, firms from Microsoft to Google, and by implication all the world, would become utterly dependent on magnetic storage, otherwise referred to as the hard disk.

If any entity can have provide you with advanced recording technology by the early 1930s it was Bell Labs. Founded in 1925 for the specific purpose of improving telephony, they made good on their mission (saving AT&T billions with inventions as simple as plastic insulation for telephone wires) and then some: by the 1920s the laboratories had effectively developed a mind of their own, carrying their work beyond better telephones and into basic research to become the sector’s preeminent corporate-sponsored scientific body. It was a scientific Valhalla, hiring definitely the right men (and later women) they may find and leaving them kind of free to pursue what interested them.

When scientists are given such freedom, they’re able to do amazing things, and soon Bell’s were doing cutting- edge work in fields as diverse as quantum physics and data theory. It was a Bell Labs employee named Clinton Davisson who would win a Nobel Prize in 1937 for demonstrating the wave nature of matter, an insight more typically credited to Einstein than to a telephone company employee. In total, Bell would collect seven Nobel Prizes, more than any other corporate laboratory, including one awarded in 1956 for its most renowned invention, the transistor, which made the computer possible. Other, more obscure Bell creations are nevertheless dear to geeks, including Unix and the C programming language.

In short, Bell Labs has been a superb force for good. It really is, frankly, just the type of phenomenon that makes one side with Theodore Vail concerning the blessings of a monopoly. For while AT&T was never formally required to run Bell Labs as a research laboratory, it did so out of exactly one of these noblesse oblige that Vail espoused. AT&T ran Bell Labs not just for its corporate good but for the greater good in addition. Here’s not to be naive in regards to the corporate profit motive: Bell Labs contributed to AT&T’s base line excess of plastic wire insulation. Nevertheless, it’s hard to peer how funding theoretical quantum physics research can be of any immediate benefit to shareholder value. More to the point, it really is hard to imagine a phone company today hiring someone to be their quantum physicist, with out rules and no boss.

For, partly, the privileges AT&T enjoyed as a government-sanctioned monopoly with government-set prices were understood as being offset by this contribution to basic scientific research, an activity with proportionately more direct government funding in most other countries. Put otherwise, inside the United states of america, the higher consumer prices
due to monopoly amounted, in effect, to a tax on Americans used to fund basic research. This unusual insinuation of an organization between the govt and its goal of advancing American science goes far to provide an explanation for how AT&T, as it matured, became in effect almost a branch of government, charged with top- secret work inside the national interest.

For all of the undeniable glory of Bell Labs, there emerge little cracks inside the resplendent façade of corporatism for the public good. For however many its breakthroughs, there was a technique through which the institution was very different from a college: when the interests of AT&T were at odds with the advancement of information, there was no doubt as to which good prevailed. And so, interspersed between Bell Labs’ public triumphs were its secret discoveries, the skeletons within the imperial closet of AT&T.

Let’s return to Hickman’s magnetic tape and the answering machine. What’s interesting is that Hickman’s invention inside the 1930s doesn’t be ” discovered” until the 1990s. For soon after Hickman had demonstrated his invention, AT&T ordered the Labs to cease all research into magnetic storage, and Hickman’s research was suppressed and concealed
for more than sixty years, coming to light only when the historian Mark Clark found Hickman’s laboratory notebook inside the Bell archives.

” The impressive technical successes of Bell Labs’ scientists and engineers,” writes Clark, ” were hidden by the upper management of both Bell Labs and AT&T.” AT&T ” refused to develop magnetic recording for consumer use and actively discouraged its development and use by others.” Eventually magnetic tape would come to America via imports of foreign technology, mainly German.

But why would company management bury such a vital and commercially valuable discovery? What were they frightened of? The answer, rather surreal, is obvious inside the corporate memoranda, also unearthed by Clark, imposing the research ban. AT&T firmly believed that the answering machine, and its magnetic tapes, would lead the public
to abandon the telephone.

More precisely, in Bell’s imagination, the very knowledge that it was possible to record a conversation would ” greatly restrict using the telephone,” with catastrophic consequences for its business. Businessmen, for example, the concept supposed, might fear the possible use of a recorded conversation to undo a written contract. Tape recorders
would also inhibit discussing obscene or ethically dubious matters. In sum, the very possibility of magnetic recording, it was feared, would ” change the total nature of telephone conversations” and ” render the telephone much less satisfactory and useful inside the vast majority of cases during which that’s employed.”

And so we see that the enlightened monopolist can occasionally prove a delusional paranoid. True, once magnetic recording arrived in America, there were several, from Nixon to Lewinsky, whose sordid secrets could be exposed by it. But, amazingly enough, we all still use telephones. Such are the liabilities of being subject to the whim of even one of the most high-minded corporation: even the fantasy that the fate of the company can be at stake may have significant consequences. It was safer to shut down an exhilarating line of analysis than to risk the Bell system.

This is the basic weakness of a centralized strategy to innovation: the notion that it’s a planned and systematic process, best directed by a type of central intelligence; that it can be simply of matter of assembling the entire best minds and putting them to work in unison. Were it so, the long run might be planned and executed in a scientific manner.

Yes, Bell Labs was great. But AT&T, as an innovator, bore a significant genetic flaw: it may not originate technologies that may, by the remotest possibility, threaten the Bell system. Within the language of innovation theory, the output of the Bell Labs was practically restricted to sustaining inventions; disruptive technologies, folks that might even cast a shadow of uncertainty over the business model, were simply out of the question.

The recording machine is simply one example of a technology that AT&T, out of such fears, would for years suppress or fail to market: fiber optics , mobile telephones, digital subscriber lines (DSL), facsimile machines, speakerphones – the list goes on and on. These technologies, ranging from novel to revolutionary, were simply too daring for Bell’s comfort. Without a reliable sense of ways they would affect the Bell system, AT&T and its heirs would deploy each with painfully slow caution, if at all.

Perhaps the response seems less neurotic if we consider how deep-seated should be would becould very well be the apprehension of the Kronos effect . Not for nothing would the Bell system prove itself among the finest defended and most secure monopolies in corporate history. Whatever the opportunity inherent in new technology, there was always also a threat, person who prudence demanded be devoured at birth. Bell’s own genesis had proved that bit of wisdom. In 1876, Alexander Bell had patented the machine that at last dethroned and replaced what was then the nation’s greatest corporation, Western Union . What charm of the brand new can possibly rival the instinct for self-preservation? By no means a plastic cup.

Tim Wu is an author, policy advocate and author of The Master Switch. He is a professor at Columbia Law School, the chairman of media reform organization Free Press. Wu was recognized in 2006 as one of 50 leaders in science and technology by Scientific American magazine, and in 2007 Wu was listed as one of Harvard’s 100 most influential graduates by 02138 magazine. Tim Wu’s best known work is the improvement of Net Neutrality theory, but he has also written about copyright, international trade, and the study of law-breaking. He previously worked for Riverstone Networks within the telecommunications industry in Silicon Valley, and was a law clerk for Judge Richard Posner and Justice Stephen Breyer. He graduated from McGill University (B.Sc.), and Harvard Law School.

The Master Switch: The upward push and Fall of knowledge Empires is on the market from Amazon.com

Excerpted from The Master Switch by Tim Wu Copyright © 2010 by Tim Wu. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No portion of this excerpt could be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Source

This post is tagged: answering machine, computer storage, magnetic recording, plastic insulation, recording technology, technical principle