C R Y S T A L F I R E hi Birth of the Information Ag M I C H A E L R I O R D A N L I L L I A N H O D D E S O N S 3 W. W. Norton & Company New York London Copyright © 1997 by Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America The photographs and other illustrations on pages 3,5,49,57,59,61,69,83,91,94,133,136,140,149,154, 160,166,170,172,183,188,189,192,193,198,203, and 258 are the property of AT&T Archives. They are reprinted with permission of AT&T. The photographs and illustrations on pages 210,212,260, and 261 are reprinted courtesy of Texas Instruments. Photographs on pages 263,272, and 273 are reprinted courtesy of National Semiconductor. The text of this book is composed in Simoncini Garamond with the display type set in Univers Extended. Desktop composition by David Gilbert, Wildman Productions Manufacturing by Courier Companies, Inc. Book design by Chris Welch. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Riordan, Michael. Crystal fire: the birth of the information age / by Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-393-04124-7 1. Electronic—History. 2. Transistors—History. I. Hoddeson, Lillian. II. Title. TK7809.R56 1997 621.38T09—dc21 96-47464 CIP W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 http://www.wwnorton.com W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 10 Coptic Street, London WClA 1PU 2 34 56 78 90 5 C 1 TO FREDERICK SEITZ C o n te n ts Preface ix 1 DAWN OF AN AGE i 2 BORN WITH THE CENTURY i i 3 THE REVOLUTION WITHIN 28 4 INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH SCIENCE 55 3 THE PHYSICS OF DIRT 7 1 6 THE FOURTH COLUMN 88 7 POINT OF ENTRY 1 1 5 8 MINORITY VIEWS 1 42 9 THE DAUGHTER OF INVENTION 1 68 SPREADING THE FLAMES 1 95 11 CALIFORNIA DREAMING 225 12 THE MONOLITHIC IDEA 254 Epilogue 276 Acknowledgments 287 Interviews and Conversations 290 Bibliography 292 Notes 303 Credits 333 Index 337 vii THE SLOAN TECHNOLOGY SERIES Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb by Richard Rhodes Dream Reaper: The Story of an Old-Fashioned Inventor in the High-Tech, High-Stakes World of Modern Agriculture by Craig Canine Turbulent Skies: The History of Commercial Aviation by Thomas A. Heppenheimer Tube: The Invention of Television by David E. Fisher and Marshall Jon Fisher The Invention That Changed the World: How a Small Group of Radar Pioneers Won the Second World War and Launched a Technological Revolution by Robert Buderi Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the Twentieth Century by Bettyann Kevles A Commotion in the Blood: A Century of Using the Immune System to Battle Cancer and Other Diseases by Stephen S. Hall Beyond Enginering: A New Way of Thinking About Technology by Robert Pool The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency by Robert Kanigel Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age by Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson Preface Technology is the application of science, engineering, and industrial organization to create a human-built world. It has led, in developed nations, to a standard of living inconceivable a hundred years ago. The process, however, is not free of stress; by its very nature, technology brings change in society and undermines convention. It affects virtually every aspect of human endeavor: private and public institutions, economic systems, com­ munications networks, political structures, international affiliations, the orga­ nization of societies, and the condition of human lives. The effects are not one-way; just as technology changes society, so too do societal structures, atti­ tudes, and mores affect technology. But perhaps because technology is so rapidly and completely assimilated, the profound interplay of technology and other social endeavors in modern history has not been sufficiendy recognized. The Sloan Foundation has had a long-standing interest in deepening public understanding about modem technology, its origins, and its impact on our lives. The Sloan Technology Series, of which the present volume is a part, seeks to present to the general reader the stories of the development of critical twentieth-century technologies. The aim of the series is to convey both the technical and human dimensions of the subject: the invention and effort entailed in devising the technologies and the comforts and stresses they have introduced into contemporary life. As the century draws to an end, it is hoped that the Series will disclose a past that might provide perspective on the pre­ sent and inform the future. The Foundation has been guided in its development of the Sloan Technol­ ogy Series by a distinguished advisory committee. We express deep gratitude X CRYSTAL FIRE to John Armstrong, Simon Michael Bessie, Samuel Y. Gibbon, Thomas P. Hughes, Victor McElheny, Robert K. Merton, Elting E. Morison (deceased), and Richard Rhodes. The Foundation has been represented by Ralph E. Gomory, Arthur L. Singer, Jr., Hirsch G. Cohen, and Doron Weber. Alfred P. Sloan Foundation February 1997 C R Y S T A L F I R E 1 D A W N OF A N A G E William Shockley was extremely agitated. Speeding through the frosty hills west of Newark on the morning of December 23,1947, he hardly noticed the few vehicles on the narrow country road leading to Bell Telephone Laboratories. His mind was on other matters. Arriving just after seven, Shockley parked his MG convertible in the com­ pany lot, bounded up two flights of stairs, and rushed through the deserted corridors to his office. That afternoon his research team was to demonstrate a promising new electronic device to his boss. He had to be ready. An amplifier based on a semiconductor, he knew, could ignite a revolution. Lean and hawk- nosed, his temples graying and his thinning hair slicked back from a proud, jutting forehead, Shockley had dreamed of inventing such a device for almost a decade. Now his dream was about to come true. About an hour later, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain pulled up at this modern research campus in Murray Hill, New Jersey, twenty miles from New York City. Members of Shockley’s solid-state physics group, they had made the crucial breakthrough a week before. Using little more than a tiny, nonde­ script slab of the element germanium, a thin plastic wedge, and a shiny strip of gold foil, they had boosted an electrical signal almost a hundredfold. Soft-spoken and cerebral, Bardeen had come up with the key ideas, which were quickly and skillfully implemented by the genial Brattain, a salty, silver- haired man who liked to tinker with equipment almost as much as he loved to gab. Working shoulder to shoulder for most of the prior month, day after day except on Sundays, they had finally coaxed their curious-looking gadget into operation. 1 2 CRYSTAL FIRE That Tuesday morning, while Bardeen completed a few calculations in his office, Brattain was over in his laboratory with a technician, making last- minute checks on their amplifier- Around one edge of a triangular plastic wedge, he had glued a small strip of gold foil, which he carefully slit along this edge with a razor blade. He then pressed both wedge and foil down into the dull-gray germanium surface with a makeshift spring fashioned from a paper clip. Less than an inch high, this delicate contraption was clamped clumsily together by a U-shaped piece of plastic resting upright on one of its two arms. Two copper wires soldered to edges of the foil snaked off to batteries, trans­ formers, an oscilloscope, and other devices needed to power the gadget and assess its performance. Occasionally, Brattain paused to light a cigarette and gaze through blinds on the window of his clean, well-equipped lab. Stroking his mustache, he looked out across a baseball diamond on the spacious rural campus to a wooded ridge of the Watchung Mountains—worlds apart from the cramped, dusty laboratory he had occupied in New York City before the war. Slate-col­ ored clouds stretched off to the horizon. A light rain began to fall. At forty-five, Brattain had come a long way from his years as a roughneck kid growing up in the Columbia River basin. As a sharpshooting teenager, he helped his father grow corn and raise catde on the family homestead in Tonas- ket, Washington, close to the Canadian border. “Following three horses and a harrow in the dust,” he often joked, “was what made a physicist out of me.” Brattain’s interest in the subject was sparked by two professors at Whitman College, a small liberal-arts college in the southeastern comer of the state. It carried him through graduate school at Oregon and Minnesota to a job in 1929 at Bell Labs, where he had remained—happy to be working at the best industrial research laboratory in the world. Bardeen, a thirty-nine-year-old theoretical physicist, could hardly have been more different. Often lost in thought, he came across as very shy and self- absorbed. He was extremely parsimonious with his words, parceling them out sofdy in a deliberate monotone as if each were a precious gem never to be squandered. “Whispering John” some of his friends called him. But whenever he spoke, they listened. To many, he was an oracle. Raised in a large academic family, the second son of the dean of the Univer­ sity of Wisconsin medical school, Bardeen had been intellectually precocious. He grew up among the ivied dorms and the sprawling frat houses lining the shores of Lake Mendota near downtown Madison, the state capital. Entering the university at fifteen, he earned two degrees in electrical engineering and worked a few years in industry before heading off to Princeton in 1933 to pur­ sue a Ph.D. in physics.