What would the world be like if fiber ocular and mobile phone had been useable in the 1930 ’s ? Would the decade be known as the start of the Information Revolution rather than the Great Depression ?
The Great Bell Labs
In early 1934 , Clarence Hickman , a Bell Labs engineer , had a secret machine , about six feet grandiloquent , standing in his federal agency . It was a machine without adequate in the world , 10 ahead of its prison term . If you called and there was no answer on the phone line of reasoning to which Hickman ’s invention was connected , the machine would beep and a recording machine would come on allow the caller-out to leave a message .
The genius at the heart of Hickman ’s clandestine proto – answering machine was not so much the concept- perceptive of social change as that was - but rather the technical principle that made it work and that would , eventually , metamorphose the world : charismatic recording tape . call up that before magnetic warehousing there was no means to salt away strait other than by exhort a record or make a piano rolling wave . The new technology would not only usher in audio cassettes and videotape , but when used with the Si chip , make computer reposition a reality . Indeed , from the 1980s onward , firms from Microsoft to Google , and by implication the whole world , would become utterly qualified on charismatic storage , otherwise lie with as the operose movement .
When scientist are sacrifice such exemption , they can do astonishing thing , and presently Bell ’s were doing cutting- boundary body of work in fields as divers as quantum physics and information 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 set companionship employee . In total , Bell would collect seven Nobel Prizes , more than any other bodied laboratory , including one awarded in 1956 for its most famous invention , the electronic transistor , which made the estimator possible . Other , more obscure Bell initiation are nevertheless near to eccentric person , include Unix and the C computer programing speech communication .
In short , Bell Labs has been a great force for skillful . It is , frankly , just the sort of phenomenon that make one side with Theodore Vail about the approval of a monopoly . For while AT&T was never officially require to go Bell Labs as a research research lab , it did so out of exactly the form of noblesse oblige that Vail sweep up . AT&T ran Bell Labs not just for its corporal good but for the greater good as well . This is not to be naive about the corporate earnings motive : Bell Labs lend to AT&T ’s bottom line far more than formative wire insulation . Nevertheless , it ’s hard to see how funding theoretical quantum physic research would be of any immediate benefit to shareholder value . More to the point , it is hard to reckon a phone company today rent someone to be their quantum physicist , with no formula and no foreman .
For , in part , the prerogative AT&T enjoyed as a government - O.K. monopoly with political science - determine price were understood as being offset by this contribution to basic scientific research , an activeness with proportionately more direct administration financing in most other countries . Put another way , in the United States , the higher consumer prices
result from monopoly amounted , in effect , to a tax on Americans used to fund basic inquiry . This strange innuendo of a corporation between the administration and its goal of pass on American scientific discipline cash in one’s chips a long way to explain how AT&T , as it get on , became in effect almost a offshoot of politics , institutionalize with top- secret workplace in the home interest .
For all the undeniable glory of Bell Labs , there egress little quip in the splendid façade of corporatism for the public good . For however many its breakthroughs , there was one way in which the institution was very different from a university : when the involvement of AT&T were at betting odds with the advancement of knowledge , there was no question as to which good prevailed . And so , interspersed between Bell Labs ’ public triumphs were its secret discoveries , the skeletal frame in the imperial closet of AT&T.
Let ’s return to Hickman ’s magnetic tape and the answering simple machine . What ’s interesting is that Hickman ’s invention in the 1930s would not be ” discovered ” until the 1990s . For soon after Hickman had demonstrated his excogitation , AT&T ordered the Labs to cease all research into magnetised storage , and Hickman ’s research was suppressed and concealed
for more than sixty age , coming to sparkle only when the historiographer Mark Clark come in across Hickman ’s laboratory notebook in the Bell archives .
“ The telling technical successes of Bell Labs ’ scientists and engineer , ” writes Clark , “ were hidden by the upper management of both Bell Labs and AT&T. ” AT&T “ refused to build up magnetic recording for consumer employment and actively discourage its development and use by others . ” Eventually magnetised tape would get to America via importation of foreign technology , mainly German .
But why would company management sink such an important and commercially worthful discovery ? What were they afraid of ? The result , rather surreal , is manifest in the collective memo , also unearthed by Clark , imposing the research proscription . AT&T firm believe that the answering machine , and its magnetised tapes , would lead the world
to abandon the telephone .
More precisely , in Bell ’s imagination , the very knowledge that it was possible to record a conversation would ” greatly restrict the role of the telephone , ” with ruinous consequences for its business . business community , for instance , the possibility say , might reverence the likely use of a recorded conversation to unwrap a compose contract . Tape recording machine
would also inhibit discussing obscene or ethically dubious matters . In sum , the very possibility of magnetic transcription , it was feared , would ” change the whole nature of telephone conversation ” and ” render the telephone much less satisfactory and useful in the huge legal age of vitrine in which it is engage . ”
And so we see that the enlightened monopolizer can occasionally prove a delusional paranoiac . True , once magnetized recording go far in America , there were a few , from Nixon to Lewinsky , whose sordid secrets would be expose by it . But , amazingly enough , we all still employ telephones . Such are the liability of being subject to the whim of even the most high - tending corporation : even the fantasy that the luck of the caller could be at stake can have substantial consequence . It was safe to shut down a thrilling line of enquiry than to hazard the Bell system .
This is the essential weakness of a centralized approach to innovation : the whimsey that it can be a plotted and systematic process , well directed by a sort of central intelligence ; that it is just of thing of assembling all the honorable intellect and set them to work in unison . Were it so , the future could be planned and executed in a scientific mode .
Yes , Bell Labs was great . But AT&T , as an trailblazer , carry a serious genetic flaw : it could not originate technology that might , by the distant possibility , threaten the Bell arrangement . In the words of innovation theory , the output signal of the Bell Labs was practically restricted to sustain inventions ; disruptive engineering science , those that might even cast a shadow of uncertainty over the business concern model , were just out of the question .
The recording car is only one example of a technology that AT&T , out of such fear , would for years suppress or fail to market : fiber optics , fluid telephones , digital endorser lines ( DSL ) , facsimile machine , speakerphones – the lean get going on and on . These engineering , ranging from novel to revolutionary , were plainly too daring for Bell ’s puff . Without a reliable sentience of how they might touch the Bell system , AT&T and its heirs would deploy each with sorely deadening caution , if at all .
Perhaps the response seems less neurotic if we consider how deeply - seated can be the apprehension of the Kronos effect . Not for nothing would the Bell system prove itself among the skillful defended and most dependable monopoly in collective account . Whatever the chance inherent in unexampled technology , there was always also a terror , one that circumspection take be devoured at birthing . Bell ’s own genesis had proved that bit of wisdom . In 1876 , Alexander Bell had patented the simple machine that finally dethroned and replaced what was then the nation ’s expectant pot , Western Union . What magical spell of the new can possibly equal the instinct for self - saving ? Certainly not a formative cup .
Tim Wu is an author , policy advocate and writer of The Master Switch . He is a prof at Columbia Law School , the chairman of media reform organization Free Press . Wu was recognized in 2006 as one of 50 leadership in science and technology by Scientific American cartridge clip , and in 2007 Wu was listed as one of Harvard ’s 100 most influential graduates by 02138 magazine . Tim Wu ’s best lie with work is the development of Net Neutrality hypothesis , but he has also write about copyright , international craft , and the study of police - breaking . He antecedently worked for Riverstone Networks in the telecommunications industry in Silicon Valley , and was a law of nature clerk for Judge Richard Posner and Justice Stephen Breyer . He graduated from McGill University ( B.Sc . ) , and Harvard Law School .
The Master Switch : The ascension and Fall of Information Empires is usable fromAmazon.com
excerpt from The Master Switch by Tim Wu Copyright © 2010 by Tim Wu . Excerpted by permit of Knopf , a division of Random House , Inc. All right field reserved . No part of this excerpt may be reproduce or reprinted without permission in writing from the publishing company .
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