The Genius of Bell Labs' Bill Baker
WIL LEPKOWSKI · Research-Technology Management · 2006
Research-Technology Management is not in the habit of printing obituaries of the many luminous figures who have managed industrial research. But William O. (Bill) Baker, who guided research at Bell Telephone Laboratories during its most prolific era of discovery, played a legendary role in developing and deploying critical espionage and surveillance technologies during the Cold War, and shaped fundamental policies for the support of U.S. science and engineering, died at 90 in a New Jersey nursing home last October. Baker's passing was only minimally noted in newspaper obituaries and hardly mentioned in the major scientific journals. For a community of industrial researchers to whom he gave generous time, Baker's loss is thus worth more than a few impersonal and uninformed lines. He retired from Bell Labs in 1980 but remained active on committees and boards (Robert A. Welch Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Rockefeller University) through the 1990s. He adhered to one basic thought pattern, one way of expressing what he was about: Improving communications and the more efficient and satisfying handling of information. His detailed insights into the connections between the development of new materials and the physics of communication had a deeper goal of, as he put it, civilizing the future. Here, based on what Baker wrote and said at various times, are some of his observations and prescriptions for what it took to run what was arguably the most successful and envied industrial laboratory of the 20th century. Before and During Baker's Time In its 80-year history, Bell Labs, through its research, developed the techniques and materials for such developments as stereo recording, sound motion pictures, long-distance television transmission, fax transmission, the touchtone phone, the modem, communications satellites, lasers, solar cells, cellular telephony, lightwave communication systems, and software that operates, maintains and manages communication networks everywhere. laser, the transistor and the first digital computer based on transistor technology were invented at the Labs, as was the Unix operating system, which made the Internet practical. Labs developed the network management and operations systems that support voice and data transmission. Under Baker, Bell Labs made possible today's proliferation of optical fiber and cell phone communications. All of that was the result of research in solid state physics, materials science, computing science, the behavioral sciences, and communications theory. Special Character of BTL Research Because the job of Bell Labs was to serve the full range of communication needs, its research menu was practically unlimited. Here's what Baker said in an oral history undertaken by the Chemical Heritage Foundation: We had to be very basic in the new sciences. It was not only solid state, but it was quantum electrodynamics, it was the whole range of synthetic chemistry. It was the range of physics that dealt with collective phenomena and physical mechanics. It was the mathematics that dealt with the quality assurance and statistics and statistically viable experiments. It was the fundamental measurement and expression of signals and encoding. It was the communications science of the organism, of the behavioral features which we didn't quite yet know but which we had a background on from John Pierce's work. It was the acoustics which we made into a new laboratory at one point. It was the fact that all those fundamentals were coming together in disciplines of understanding that we really hadn't exploited very heavily before. Computers were shaping up as one of the ways you could do it. exploitation was enormously enhanced because we [were able to] handle quantities of data. The whole point was keeping track of the many fields that bore on transforming communications technology. That meant changes in management. This wasn't simple like the research work in industrial chemistry. …