Abstract
Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where the Transistor (1947), Information Theory (1948) and Error-correcting codes (1949) were invented was of course a dream place to start one’s career as a mathematically inclined physicist. I am not implying that people at other times and other places cannot enjoy their work as much as we did. But there is a general perception that Bell Labs was something special—a “national resource.” This did not come about by accident: Bell management decided early on that freedom to pursue one’s own ideas and stable long-term funding were the best well-springs of innovation.—I do hope that industrial research at some future time will see the light again and not limit research to short-range goals and immediate profit. Some of the greatest advances in the past have come from taking the long-range view.
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Notes
- 1.
After explicating my thesis work, I asked the recruiter to tell me a bit about the Bell System. Well, there was the parent company, AT&T, Western Electric, the manufacturing arm, Bell Laboratories, and 23 operating companies: New York Telephone, New Jersey Bell, Southern Bell when, in the middle of this recitation, he stopped short and, with his eyes, followed an elegant young lady (an incognito countess?) traversing the long lobby. After a minute or two, without losing a beat, he continued yes, and there is Southwestern Bell, Pacific Telephone… Twenty-five years later, to the day, on April 25, 1979, I went back to the Dorchester. At the far end of the lobby there was a kind of hat-check counter with an elderly lady behind it. I went up to her and asked “Could it be that on this day, 25 years ago, on April 25, 1954, a Sunday, a young woman might have appeared from the door behind you—it was about 2 p.m.—crossed the lobby and then exited by the revolving door?” She must have thought I was from Scotland Yard or something. But, unflustered, she answered “Oh yes, of course, at 2 p.m. we had a change of shifts then. This entrance was for service personnel—chambermaids and so forth.” I asked her, “How do you know this?” And she said, “I have been here for 30 years.”
- 2.
Some New York restaurants are actually bona fide French. Anny and I often lunched with the Einsteins (Charlene and Ernst, of carpet fame) at such establishments, Charlene, a French native, usually making the reservations (au nom d’Einstein). When we happened to arrive first, asking for a table pour quartre—au nom d’Einstein, the maitre d’ invited me, in a loud voice, Suivez moi Monsieur Einstein—and the whole restaurant would look up but was of course disappointed when they saw little me instead of the famous physicist. But it was fun—quite apart from the good food!—While we take French for granted in New York City, I was surprised when once, in Saarbrücken, only a few miles from the French border, nobody in a French-name restaurant could handle the language.
- 3.
A patent held by one of my collaborators, Joseph L Hall, recently figured in a suit brought by Alcatel Lucent against Microsoft for infringing on their MP3 patent. Lucent (the former Bell Labs) was awarded $1.52 billion (February 22, 2007). This patent was an outgrowth of our work on perceptual speech compression, applying it to music signals.—Of course, Microsoft will appeal the decision.
- 4.
In a piece on technical neologisms in the New York Times Magazine (in the Fall of 2006) James Gleick, who should have known better, claimed that the name transistor was the work of a committee. Yes, a committee of two! (Where did Gleick get the idea? From Wikipedia? No, Wikipedia actually got it right.) My Letter-to-the-Editor of the Times, a paper that prides itself on correctness, pointing out the error, was ignored.
In fairness, I should add that the Times and the International Herald Tribune have published all my previous letters: one concerning a story (about 1980) of a “singing computer” in Dresden, then part of communist East Germany. I pointed out to the Trib that the first singing computer (“Daisy, Daisy…”) was demonstrated by J.L. Kelly and Carol Lochbaum at the Fourth International Congress on Acoustics in Copenhagen as early as 1962. Their reporter had simply been duped by communist propaganda.
Another of my printed letters concerned the use of a script L by Einstein in a paper on special relativity and his famous formula E = mc 2.
One of the most astounding admissions of “guilt” by the Times concerned a (very subtle) grammatical error they had committed in an editorial. I wrote them that I was a recent immigrant and English was my second language but something in the construction of one of their sentences seemed amiss to me—and the Times published my letter in full. Long live the New York Times!
- 5.
Richard Feynman, one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century (and indefatigable pranksters), couldn’t even get a summer job at Bell on his first try in the early 1940s. But AT&T, the “mother” of Bell Labs, was by no means alone in its anti-Semitic policies among major US corporations until after World War II.
- 6.
Win Kock asked me whether my bride was a “professional.” I firmly swore No—with my still limited knowledge of English I thought professional was an allusion to the “worlds first profession.”
- 7.
Here is what Doherty wrote to the Immigration and Naturalization Service:
As director of research in electrical communications, I was responsible for the selection of Dr. Schroeder in 1954 to work in our company as a result of strong recommendation by his professor at the University of Göttingen. My recollection of the incident in question is that I received a telephone call from the General Manager of our company, indicating that he had heard about Dr. Schroeder being observed taking pictures from the Hoboken waterfront. I immediately discussed the incident with Dr. Schroeder, and he showed me the pictures as soon as they could be developed. The pictures could not conceivably have been for anything except artistic purposes. I can well imagine that the persons who observed Dr. Schroeder might have been suspicious because of his telephoto lens. He has followed a long-time hobby of amateur photography, in which such a lens is increasingly common, and he has received awards in our company contests. I trust that this information may be of assistance in expediting Dr. Schroeder’s petition. If it is possible to have this matter come up for final hearing on June 10, 1963, Dr. Schroeder would be able to commence his travel to Europe on government research business on June 14 as a United States citizen rather than a resident alien. This result would be in the public interest as well as in the interest of scientific research.
- 8.
There is now (2006) a Stephen O. Rice Prize by the IEEE Communications Society.
- 9.
An earlier presentation of our work on predictive coding was at the first IEEE meeting on speech communication in Boston, 1967.
- 10.
Vic also fled to Brazil for a couple of years around 1960 because he was afraid the Northern Hemisphere would soon become unliveable, contaminated by the radiation fall-out of an impending nuclear war.
- 11.
To test the intelligibility of my synthetic speech, I asked people walking by in the corridor outside my lab whether they could understand it. I said “One—two—three—four—five…” over the device and, yes, they understood every word: One—two—three—four—five… Of course, people could guess what was said just from the very rhythm of the utterance. But I honestly believed my correlation vocoder produced intelligent speech! (This is reminiscent of a similarly silly procedure adopted by prisoner-scientist Rudin in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle of Hell, when Rudin wanted to convince himself that frequency division by a factor of 32 would produce intelligible speech—an outrageous claim, as Solzhenitsyn, an engineer himself, no doubt knew. As test material Rudin chose the first paragraph of lead articles from Pravda, entirely predictable boilerplate, invariably beginning with the words: “The Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics …”).
- 12.
I remember Vice President Baker thanking me for having “insisted” on the need for small on-line computers when leaving our demonstration lab. (“Thanks for your insistence, Manny [sic]” etc.)
- 13.
Correspondences with Bishnu Atal and J.L. Hall during the development of LPC are archived at the University Libray Archives of the University of Göttingen.
- 14.
The nude study of Debbie was published in the New York Times on October 11, 1967. Harmon’s block portrait of Lincoln was incorporated (without permission or attribution) into one of Salvadore Dali’s paintings.
- 15.
I used the Eikonal Portrait as a cover of a book I edited (Speech and Speaker Recognition) where it was promptly misinterpreted (by G. Fant among others) as a contour spectrogram of speech.
- 16.
Cage was perhaps best known for his “composition” 4’33,” i.e., 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence (divided into three movements).
- 17.
Jim West, who was of African and American Indian descent, once, during a scientific talk, warmed my heart by mentioning how considerate I always was about his feeling at home in my area (in which he was the only member “of color”). In 2007 Jim was awarded, in a White House ceremony, the National Medal of Technology for his invention (with Sessler) of electret transducers now ubiquitous in cell phones and numerous other applications. Here is an excerpt from Jim’s acceptance speech:
The two billion Electret Microphones made each year have transformed the world of acoustics by providing a simple, inexpensive, very linear transducer for telephones, cell phones, microphone arrays, hearing aids, professional measurements, and outer space communications. The Electret Microphone is the only transducer in mass production that delivers very linear sound reproduction universally in all applications.
It is also important to acknowledge the importance of the electret’s engine, the storage of real charge in inexpensive polymers that have been used in air filtration, radiation detection, wound healing, cell development in animal and cell cultures, and piezo-active polymers.
Mr. President, Mr. Secretary, and members of the Nomination Committee thank you for awarding me The National Medal of Technology.
- 18.
Later I became a confidant of Avery Fisher, who had donated $10 million for correcting the acoustics of the hall. Fisher introduced me to the architect Philip Johnson who showed me the new design, as suggested by Cyrill Harris of Columbia University. (Of course, I couldn’t give an impartial evaluation of the design—Cyrill was a good friend.)—Avery invited me once or twice for lunch in the Century Club in New York City. Anny and her sister, Hella, had to wait in the lobby. This was in the days (1975) when the Club was a purely male preserve.
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Schroeder, M.R. (2015). Bell Laboratories. In: Xiang, N., Sessler, G. (eds) Acoustics, Information, and Communication. Modern Acoustics and Signal Processing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05660-9_20
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