The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
by Jon Gertner · 15 Mar 2012 · 550pp · 154,725 words
-tone telephone handset with a line of buttons to control the screen. If you wanted to make a Picturephone call at the fair—or more precisely, if you wanted to talk with the Picturephone users at other booths—you simply pressed a button marked “V” for video; after that you could
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either talk through the handset or through a speakerphone on the picture unit. Without question, the Picturephones were diverting. In several obvious respects, the device was less a radical innovation than an elegant melding of the established technologies of television and telephone
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. But it wasn’t entirely clear whether the Picturephone actually solved a problem. Some Bell Labs engineers worried about this. As far back as the mid-1950s, John Pierce was exchanging memos with colleagues
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wondering about the utility of the new device: “The need for acceptability of such a service,” Pierce wrote of the Picturephone, “has not been adequately evaluated, and the [phones] themselves were not at the point at which they could be put into commercial use.”3
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To be sure, the Picturephone technology had come a long way since then. By 1964, the video image was crisper than what Pierce had critiqued in the late 1950s; also
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whether the nation was ready. But the response of visitors to the New York fair—usually a line of people were waiting to try the Picturephones—suggested a substantial degree of public curiosity, and perhaps even enthusiasm. AT&T executives had in fact decided to use the fair as an opportunity
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unit; a few found it difficult to stay on camera. But a majority said they perceived a need for Picturephones in their business, and a near majority said they perceived a need for Picturephones in their home. Would they pay for it? Here, the results were less clear. For a price of
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between $40 and $60 a month, for instance, only 12 percent of the couples interviewed said they would want a Picturephone in their homes. Business customers, however, seemed more amenable. Even if the cost were substantially higher—$60 to $80 a month—29 percent said they
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would be interested in having the device at their place of business. When the AT&T market researchers asked Picturephone users whether it was important to see the person they were speaking to during a conversation, a vast majority said it was either “very important
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,500,000,000,000,000 possible interconnections between subscribers.5 In light of this, the Labs’ primary innovation of 1964, for all the attention the Picturephone received, was actually something nobody who used a telephone would see or even understand. It was known as ESS No. 1, a new electronic switching
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could handle more traffic than any previous switching system. It could provide services that hadn’t previously been available. And it could help integrate the Picturephone into the existing system. Like the microwave towers that had recently been introduced to the long-distance transmission system—the ones that were a cheaper
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, as phone subscriptions and calls continued to increase; data, as computers began conversing with one another over the phone wires; and video, as television and Picturephone devices became increasingly popular—would lead to overwhelming floods of information. How to accommodate it all? ESS would help. But ESS could only switch information
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LABS’ vast plans for the future were two of Jim Fisk’s deputies, Julius Molnar and William Baker. Molnar, the Picturephone’s primary champion, believed that by the year 2000, “Picturephone will be the primary mode by which people will be communicating with one another.”11 Molnar oversaw the numerous development projects
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massive telecommunications capabilities of the future,” he explained, still depended on waveguide pipes, which would carry all the traffic and easily handle the demand for Picturephone circuits. The future, in other words, still looked the same to Baker as it had to Fisk at the beginning of the decade: the
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Picturephone, waveguides, electronic switching. These were the Bell System’s bets, and they were sticking with them. ANY SCIENTIST WHO WORKED at Bell Labs—especially anyone
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of Bell Labs, seemed more a missed opportunity than a misstep.28 But nobody could offer such a mitigating rationale to explain the waveguide and Picturephone, two interrelated and fabulously expensive follies.29 It seems worth considering not only how those endeavors failed, but what those failures represented. Innovators make different
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to its modest appeal, or because it arrives in the marketplace too early or too late. Or because of all those reasons combined. The Picturephone was a mistake in judgment. The Picturephone began on a high note of optimism. “We have now received a clear go-ahead from AT&T on the
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we proposed,” Julius Molnar, Bell Labs’ executive vice president, informed the staff in late summer of 1966.30 The actual Picturephone technology was being upgraded and redesigned; instead of the egg-shaped futuristic device that had made a splash at the World’s Fair, Molnar told
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Molnar’s goal was to field test the device in 1968 and begin a rollout of “commercial face-to-face picturephone service” soon after. A small exploratory marketing study of the Picturephone, comprising ninety-nine employees from major corporations and nonprofit institutions, was compiled at the end of 1967. Meant to investigate
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the views of “a cross-section of business customers,” the study’s conclusions sounded no alarms. The market potential for Picturephone service appeared to be strong among the survey participants, the study concluded: “Many would be willing to pay more than $50 monthly for a
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a replay of the skeptical response which greeted [Alexander Graham] Bell when he tried to promote the telephone over 90 years ago.”32 OFFICIALLY, the Picturephone rollout began with a trial at the Westinghouse Corporation in Pittsburgh, starting in February 1969; during the summer of that year Bell Labs devoted an
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entire issue of its magazine, the Bell Laboratories Record, to explain the science and engineering of the new launch. The possible impacts of the Picturephone, Julius Molnar suggested in an introductory note, could well be seismic: By lessening the need for shopping trips or for conducting in-person business, “there
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will be less need for dense population centers,” as well as reduced traffic. “Picturephone is therefore much more than just another means of communication,” Molnar wrote. “It may in fact help solve many social problems.” AT&T began offering
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Picturephone service in Pittsburgh and Chicago at the end of 1970. Other electronics companies—RCA and GTE, for instance—readied similar technologies. If video telephones were
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reason to let the Bell System reap all the rewards.33 But within about twelve months, Bell executives saw that the anticipated demand for the Picturephone service was not materializing. In a speech to Bell Labs’ department heads in March 1972, Julius Molnar went through the results: “Most of you probably
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Pittsburgh after a year and a half there are only eight paying customers with 30 sets in service.” The monthly price in that city for Picturephone service was $160. But in Chicago, where the price was set at a cut-rate figure of $75 per month, the results were nearly
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why they hadn’t anticipated that outcome. Most began their list of reasons with one fundamental realization: People just didn’t like the idea of Picturephones that much, and the market research indicating otherwise had been flawed and inadequate. Customers simply liked the impersonal aspects of a regular phone call—or
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explain the immense appeal of the telephone system and Internet. However, the smaller the network, the lower the value of a device to each user. Picturephone’s network was minuscule. Price cuts didn’t seem to be working. And so its value was vanishingly small, with little prospect of any increase
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. For years, Bell Labs executives in Murray Hill, Holmdel, and Whippany had communicated with one another via Picturephones in their offices. “I used it all the time,” Dorros recalls. “I used it every day. I thought it was terrific.” Not all the directors
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remarkably attentive and invariably interested in whatever was being said—so that he could move about his office during a chat.37 Eventually, as the Picturephone initiative died out and the reality of its technological and economic failure set in, the Bell Labs bosses stopped using
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Internet might seem to validate this view. But to an innovator, being early is not necessarily different from being wrong. And in any event the Picturephone’s rejection in the marketplace was swift and decisive. As he looked around his Holmdel office just a few years after the Chicago rollout and
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his eyes rested on his Picturephone, Bob Lucky recalls, “I thought I had the last one in the world.” And on that day it occurred to him, he adds, that
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all the communication that optical fibers can provide, and that light-wave communication is bound to get cheaper.”21 It was now obvious that the Picturephone wasn’t going to soak up all that extra bandwidth. Perhaps something else would come along. AT THE PRECISE MOMENT that optical systems were ready
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as optimistic. But anyone worrying that the cellular project might face the same disastrous fate as the Picturephone might see that it had one advantage. A Picturephone was only valuable if everyone else had a Picturephone. But cellular users didn’t only talk to other cellular users. They could talk to anyone in
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T and Bell Labs had concluded that fiber, at least at first, would be most useful for high-traffic areas within cities. Even without the Picturephone, copper lines were becoming congested with the steady increase in phone calls and computer data.15 The first fiber was fabricated at a new manufacturing
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point. Bell Labs and AT&T had “never really had to sell anything.”3 And when they had tried—as was the case with the Picturephone—they failed. Government regulation, as AT&T had learned, could be immensely difficult to manage and comply with. But markets, they would soon discover,
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no similar examples after the war—indeed almost the opposite seemed to hold true. Innovations that should have been discontinued (such as the waveguide and Picturephone) were not; meanwhile, innovations that seemed a conceivable threat to wireline service, such as cellular telephony, were funded. 7 “The Bell Is Ringing,” Time, May
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_from=PL&playnext=1&index=16. 3 John R. Pierce, letter to W. E. Kock, August 20, 1956. Pierce Collection, Huntington Library. 4 “Study of Picturephone Service, 1964 World’s Fair,” American Telephone and Telegraph Company, Business Research Division, June 1965. AT&T archives. 5 From the start of telephone service
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using an electro-optical device—the Kerr Cell.” 13 Herwig Kogelnik, author interview. 14 An undated explanatory flyer about the Bell laser research explained, “When Picturephone service becomes common, when high-speed data communication between computers is more widespread, and when all of today’s communications services have expanded, present message
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. 32 James B. Fisk, speech given at the Midwest Research Institute, Kansas City, Missouri, May 22, 1968. Whether or not the technological hunch behind the Picturephone was correct, Bell Labs executives could rightly point to the device as a significant feat of engineering, one that indirectly yielded not only the CCD
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in integrated circuits and (during the manufacturing process) ruby lasers. 33 To some extent, there was an expectation that in preparing the Bell System for Picturephones, Bell Labs was also laying the groundwork for high-speed network services for businesses. “The switching and transmission capacity provided for
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Picturephone service will also enable us to move into flexible high-speed message data services which customers could use as easily as they place an ordinary
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call today,” Ray Ralston, the Picturephone’s engineering chief, remarked (195 Magazine, November–December 1967). Indeed, the Picturephone was able to connect with a computer and thereby provide rudimentary data to its user. 34 Julius Molnar, “Technical
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Program of Bell Laboratories: Talk to Department Heads,” March 2, 1972. AT&T archives. 35 One of the more curious things about Picturephones emerged from research in John Pierce’s communications science department. Tests showed that it was easier to lie to someone during a
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Picturephone conversation than in an ordinary telephone conversation. The researchers concluded that when not distracted by a visual image, a caller attends more closely to the
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87, 88, 91, 96, 112, 166, 171, 172, 316 Pfann, Bill, 114, 134 photography, digital, 261 photolithography, 251, 254 Physical Review, 100 Pickering, William, 210 Picturephone, 229–31, 233, 235, 236, 260, 262–65, 279, 289, 296, 333 Pierce, John, 2, 3, 38–39, 189–204, 212–13, 225–27, 232
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, 258, 276 mobile phones and, 282–83 music and, 225, 244, 325–27 New York World’s Fair and, 228–31 Parkinson’s of, 323 Picturephone and, 230 retirement of, 267 satellite work of, 203–4, 205, 207–27, 228, 254 Shannon and, 196–97, 201, 225, 318, 323–24
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s first science advisor. To John Pierce, Kelly was “an almost supernatural force.” Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center A GREAT MISTAKE: The Picturephone model that debuted at the 1964 World’s Fair. At the fair, a survey conducted by AT&T indicated that a majority of those who
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tried the device perceived a need for Picturephones in their business. A near majority said they perceived a need for Picturephones in their home. The rollout of the device proved disastrous. Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center
How to Prevent the Next Pandemic
by Bill Gates · 2 May 2022 · 406pp · 88,977 words
any other area—depends on how widespread adoption is. * * * — In 1964, Bell Telephone exhibited the first-ever video phone at the World’s Fair. The Picturephone looked like something from The Jetsons, with a small live image embedded in a futuristic-looking oval tube. I was eight years old at the
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, I’d spend hours of my day on video calls. Virtual meetings have come a long way since this early prototype of Bell Telephone’s Picturephone in 1964. It’s easy to see technology as mundane when it’s just part of our day-to-day life. When you take the
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, 31 Banda, Sister Astridah, 176–77, 177 Bangladesh, masking in, 109–10 Barcelona Institute for Global Health, 59 Bedford, Trevor, 72, 76 Bell Telephone’s Picturephone, 248–49, 249 “Best Stats You’ve Ever Seen, The” (Rosling, TED talk), 204, 204n Bharat Biotech, 169 Biden, Joe, 35 Biological E. Limited, 166
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, only two years after the telephone was patented. A series of working prototypes were demoed by the German post office in 1938. Commercial versions, called Picturephones, were installed in public phone booths on the streets in New York City after the 1964 World’s Fair, but AT&T canceled the product
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ten years later due to lack of interest. At its peak the Picturephone had only 500 or so paid subscribers, even though nearly everyone recognized the vision. One could argue that rather than being inevitable progress, this was
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, The (Schwartz) parasitism Paris 1900 Great Exposition in slums of patents Perrow, Charles Petrequin, Pierre phonograph photography processing of satellite physics, laws of picture phones Picturephones pixels plagues Planet of Slums (Davis) plants chlorophyll of domestication of gathering of insectivorous intelligence of Plato Poincare, Henri Poisson distribution, statistical Ponnamperuma, Cyril Popper
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, strolling by inventions that would soon fill their department stores and homes. Bell Labs had an exhibition that introduced millions of Americans to their first “Picturephone.”26 Westinghouse showed off a new electric toothbrush and credit card, before placing both in a time capsule to be opened in several thousand years
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Telephone Magazine, Spring 1964, https://www.worldsfairphotos.com/nywf64/articles/bell-telephone-magazine-spring-64.pdf; Damon Darlin, “How the Future Looked in 1964: The Picturephone,” New York Times, June 26, 2014; Bell System Pavilion (photographs), The 1964–1965 New York World’s Fair, worldsfairphotos.com, Bill Cotter, updated December 27
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