Click here for a larger image of the bag phone

A transportable or luggable phone, the bag phone contained a heavy cellular transceiver with a large battery enclosed in a leather bag. Since battery life wasn't good, most people plugged the unit into a car's cigarette lighter and used it while driving. Power output was twice that of the brick, the hand-held cellular phone that borrowed its name from Motorola's first Handie-Talkie. Dwarfing any present hand-held, except perhaps satellite phones, the brick's battery itself was larger than most cell phones on the market today.

Click here for a larger image of the brick phone

When the first digital networks were built Motorola introduced the flip phone, part of their Personal Digital Communicator Series. It could work in analog or digital mode. Many are still being used although the StarTac, introduced in 1996, and now the MicroTac, have since replaced the original flip phone.

Click here for a larger image of the flip phone

For a look at how Ericsson cellular telephones evolved, click here

We discussed how reducing radio size and weight in World War II was less important than the modulation technology hand-helds eventually used: F.M. Today, as every company produces smaller and smaller radios, the technology used to transmit information is the most important development: C.D.M.A. or code division multiple access. Sometimes called spread spectrum or frequency hopping, C.D.M.A., puts bits and pieces of several calls on different frequencies. It's the most efficient technology, allowing more calls in the same spectrum than older digital systems. And where did CDMA start out? Well, you may have guessed the answer.

Spread spectrum was first used during World War II to prevent signals from being jammed. By rapidly changing frequencies the Allies found the Germans could not interfere with their transmissions. This immunity to interference is yet another reason for C.D.M.A.'s great popularity, indeed, the entire wireless world is embracing this technology. When GSM based systems evolve they will use it, as well as the next generation of I-Mode. This new yet old operating method reveals again the important and continuing link between civilian and military communications.

Patent illustration 2,292,387, for a Secret Communication System, utilizing spread spectrum. Co-filed by the movie star Hedy Lamar

BOOK EXCERPT, CHAPTER ONE

The Most Valuable Cargo

"When the members of the Tizard Mission brought one to America in1940, they carried the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores." --James Phinney Baxter III, Official Historian of the Office of Scientific Research and Development

The black japanned metal deed box could just be seen above thewartime throngs on the shoulder of a railway porter. The small container bobbed along frustratingly out of reach, as Eddie Bowen zigzagged throughthe crowd in hot pursuit. Only moments before, sometime around 8:15 themorning of August 29, 1940, the Welshman had arrived at London's EustonStation with the box safely in his possession. Innocently, Bowen hadhanded it to the porter while gathering up his remaining luggage, thenwatched helplessly as the man headed off to find the 8:30 train to Liverpoolwithout waiting for his customer.

As he struggled to keep the porter in sight, Bowen would not have drawn much attention from busy Londoners. In stature and build he blended into a crowd and would have seemed like any other young man in a hurry. Only his face set him slightly apart. Wavy hair cut short crowned a wide forehead and jaw and gave his head a squared-off look. Old photographs often show an infectious grin spanning the broad tableau. But one could also imagine the weathered visage locked in determination--and that August morning Bowen had reason to be concerned. Just five days short of the war's first anniversary, Britain faced one of her most desperate hours. Bombs were falling nightly on Liverpool, Nazi armies ringed the country from the Norwegian coasts down to France, and an invasion was expected within weeks. As Bowen knew, the seemingly ordinary solicitor's deed box--now visible, now not in Euston's morning rush--held the power to change the course of the conflict.

Inside lay nothing less than the military secrets of Britain--virtually every single technological item the country could bring to bear on the war. Had some freak accident burst the lock off the chest, the platform would have been awash in blueprints and circuit diagrams for rockets, explosives, superchargers, gyroscopic gunsights, submarine detection devices, self- sealing fuel tanks, even the initial germs of the jet engine and the atomic bomb.

Among these treasures, nothing carried the all-pervasive importance of the resonant cavity magnetron, Britain's most closely guarded secret. The black box contained one of the first 12 production copies of the mysterious device--probably the only piece of hardware it sheltered. Small enough to fit in the palm of a hand, the magnetron looked like a clay pigeon used in skeet shooting, with a few wire leads thrown in. Yet, it could spit out pulses of microwave radio energy--on a wavelength of about 10 centimeters--so powerful conventional scientific wisdom still put anything like it years off.

The magnetron was a radar transmitter, one with the potential to bolster British military capabilities almost across the board and give the country the upper hand in what already seemed like a technological war: no one in the country knew it, but the Germans were generally ahead in the radar race until the device arrived on the scene. More immediately to the point, as Bowen chased the porter across the Euston platform, the strange copper disk offered a way to invigorate the strapped British defenses that had been coping with Luftwaffe bombing onslaughts the past six weeks--a softening up before Hitler's planned invasion. Radar, or radio distance finding as Bowen's countrymen called the technology, formed the backbone of these defenses. Imposing towers up to 350 feet tall--the Chain Home station network--lined the country's south and east coasts to provide the only effective early warning of German attacks. These electronic sentries operated round-the-clock, rain or shine, sending out pulses of radio energy and picking up the faint echo from enemy aircraft more than 100 miles away. Radar was basically all the outgunned country had that enabled Fighter Command to husband its too-thin air resources. Without it, planners would have to consider keeping standing patrols aloft, wasting fuel, needlessly fatiguing pilots, and risking being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Magnetrons represented the next crucial step--a leap, really--in the evolution. The Chain Home stations worked well in daylight, when a pilot's sharp eyes could correct for the several-mile error range inherent in their long operating wavelengths of between 10 and 13 meters. But to cut losses, the Germans were widely expected to move soon to concentrated night attacks, when visibility was slashed dramatically. The British had tried to supplement the chain by installing short-range systems inside fighter aircraft--the idea being once the main network got the interceptors close, airborne radars could carry them the rest of the way--but these remained clumsy and inaccurate. Only the magnetron seemed certain to keep the British well ahead of the game. Its 10-centimeter transmissions ran a mere fifteenth those of standard airborne radars. Fitted into nightfighters, such a device would generate sharper pulses in a tightly concentrated parcel of energy that would fan out far less during the brief journey to an enemy aircraft and back, making it immensely easier for pilots to home in on their quarry even on the darkest nights.

That, though, was only the beginning. Although the magnetron had been invented just eight months earlier by two physicists at the University of Birmingham, its portability and versatility soon summoned visions of putting the beleaguered nation on the offensive. Aircraft equipped with centimeter radar might pick out U-boat periscopes rising under cover of darkness. Lancasters and other bombers could use the extremely short waves the magnetron produced to illuminate the way through the thick cloud cover obscuring Hitler's forces and factories on the European continent, keeping planes flying on days the Royal Air Force would normally be grounded.

Yet for all the device's promise, a series of technical glitches continued to plague its development--the most serious stumbling block being uneven power performance. British industry, with its limited production capacity, and already under the threat of bombardment and invasion, simply could not trust that it alone possessed the capability for correcting the problems and churning out magnetrons in the numbers needed for war.

It was this overriding concern--not just in regards to the cavity magnetron but extended to all the devices in the black box--that brought Bowen to the Euston platform that August morning. Though still four months shy of his 30th birthday, the Welsh physicist ranked as one of Britain's defense pioneers. For the past five years he had labored in some of the island's most isolated spots--sometimes night and day--to develop the Chain Home network and the country's first crude airborne radar systems. As a leading defense scientist he had been tapped to join a top secret government mission aimed largely at convincing the still-uncommitted American government and key industrial officials to pick up where British resources left off. The mission was to sail from Liverpool that night.

To pave the way for the venture, a special team had spent the first two weeks of August rounding up the black box's contents. Bowen himself had visited the General Electric Company research laboratory in the London suburb of Wembley, where he picked out the best working model of the first dozen magnetrons made. He had then carried his selection unescorted on the Underground to the Ministry of Supply headquarters between London's Victoria Embankment and the Strand. At the Ministry, the precious cargo had been placed safely in the black box, remaining under lock and key until the evening of the 28th, when Bowen returned to escort the entire booty to Liverpool. A guard delivered it via the arched doorway on the ministry's back steps. From there, Bowen hailed a taxi to whisk him to the Cumberland Hotel, near Euston at historic Marble Arch.

Because the box would not fit in the hotel safe, Bowen had spent the night with England's greatest military secrets wedged under his bed. In the morning, to add to his discomfort, the cabby taking him to the train station would not allow the small chest inside the taxi, insisting it be placed on the roof. The Welshman had thought all was well when the cab finally reached Euston--but then the fast-footed porter had prolonged his unease.

Bowen didn't catch up with the man until they reached the train. At this point, he knew only that a first class seat had been reserved. But when he found his place, it appeared an entire compartment had been set aside: the blinds were drawn and reserved notices placed on the windows. Intrigued, Bowen sat down to wait for the train to leave, figuring all would become clear on the other end.
A few minutes before departure, a well-dressed and exceptionally trim man with a public school tie entered the compartment. With scarcely a glance around, the man took up the seat diagonally across from Bowen and began reading a newspaper. The mysterious companion didn't speak until a few minutes after the train began edging out of the station--when some late- comers opened the door, happy to have found an empty cabin.

"Out," he ordered. "Don't you see this is specially reserved?"
Bowen was struck not so much by the man's words as the commanding tone of the delivery. "The would-be intruders wilted," he later recalled, "and we had no further interruptions." At that moment, for the first time in a harrowing 16 hours or so, Bowen realized, too, that his precious cargo carried some form of protection.

The journey passed in silence. When the train finally pulled into Liverpool's dockside station, Bowen didn't budge from his seat--following instructions to stay put until an Army escort arrived to pick up the box. His compartment mate also remained in place, ostensibly absorbed in the paper.

At last, a dozen fully armed soldiers marched down the platform and came to a glorious, rifle-slapping halt alongside the car. A sergeant barked some orders, put the group at ease, and dispatched three men to collect the cargo. Bowen watched as Britain's technological pride and joy was carried outside, hoisted onto some shoulders, and marched back down the platform. The display of military exactitude eased the young physicist's mind, but not totally. Telling the story later, he joked, "I was beginning to feel that things were well looked after. Alternatively, if this was the enemy making off with Britain's secrets, they were making a spectacular job of it."

Through all the commands and gesturings, Bowen's mysterious cabin mate still had not uttered not a word. Now the man rolled up his paper, and with a slight nod at his fellow traveler, took his leave.

Bowen also roused himself and shuffled off along Gladstone Dock to find his ship, the Duchess of Richmond. On board the Canadian liner, he joined the main body of what was formally called the British Technical and Scientific Mission to the United States. Informally, and far more commonly, the venture was known as the Tizard Mission, after its organizer Sir Henry Tizard, rector of the Imperial College of Science and Technology and chairman of the government's key scientific committee on air defense.

Tizard, an Oxford-trained chemist, had already made his name as one of Britain's shrewdest scientific visionaries. Beginning in 1935, his Committee for the Scientific Survey for Air Defense had pushed radio direction finding over all other competitors--sound mirrors, infrared detection, balloon barrages. In late 1939, recognizing the need for American assistance in developing radar and other military technologies, he had conceived the idea of an exchange mission with the United States. His proposal had received strong support from Archibald Vivian Hill, the influential Nobel Laureate and joint secretary of the Royal Society, who had gone to America early in 1940 to grease the wheels on the other side of the Atlantic.

The plan hinged on making a full disclosure of the kingdom's technical secrets in the hopes that America, even if it stayed neutral, would gear up its immense industrial machine to help develop and produce them. Initially, many British authorities wanted to trade secret for secret--seeing the exchange as a way to pry loose details of the coveted American Norden bombsight. But after months of in-fighting and wrangling, new Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had taken over the governmental reins in May 1940 on the heels of the German blitz into western Europe, decided to make the offer with no strings attached--the prevailing view being that American cooperation would be more complete if there were no attempt to barter secret for secret.

So complete was the offering that by the time Eddie Bowen walked along the Liverpool docks that August afternoon, only two items of any note had been held back--some particulars of the jet engine, and details of the latest German magnetic mines used to block British harbors. Besides the crucial cavity magnetron, nearly everything about radar could be found in the black box; and several containers of working sets and components apparently had been sent through separate channels to supplement its contents.

Tizard deliberately restricted the mission to just seven members-- counting himself. Bowen was his hand-picked radar expert. Cambridge University physicist John Cockcroft, architect of one of the world's first proton accelerators, would brief the Americans on the remainder of the technological booty, as well as a few isolated aspects of radar. In addition to the two scientists, each of Britain's three services--the Royal Air Force, the Admiralty, and the Army--contributed an officer with recent combat experience who could talk about military needs. The last member was Arthur Edgar Woodward-Nutt, an Air Ministry official who served as the mission's secretary.

Tizard and one of the mission's military representatives, Group Captain F. L. Pearce of the Royal Air Force, had flown across the Atlantic a few days ahead of the main body to pave the way for the exchange. But the other members would make the crossing with Bowen on the Duchess.
With the black box safely escorted off the train, the Welshman's responsibility had ended. Aboard ship, Woodward-Nutt, the sole member of the entourage allowed access to the chest during the voyage, saw the secret cargo locked in the strong room. He arranged to meet the third officer, who held the keys, in the event of a German attack--so they could dump the rich bounty overboard.

The ship left its mooring that evening, inching down the Mersey river toward the Irish Sea. An air raid hit Liverpool, with a few bomb splashes rocking the boat right after dinner, so the crew anchored down for the night near the river mouth. The Duchess finally set sail the next morning, Friday, August 30. Minesweepers escorted the liner the rest of the way through the Mersey, which was littered with wrecked boats. Later, two destroyers took over, shepherding the liner through heavy seas for a few hours until she built up speed and opened a zigzag course to elude any lurking U-boats.

Tizard mission members passed time aboard ship in the usual way: reading, listening to BBC broadcasts, playing deck games and bingo, watching films in the ship's cinema, and taking brisk walks in the cold North Atlantic air. About 1,000 sailors also took berths on the Duchess, bound to pick up the first aged U.S. destroyers consigned to Britain in exchange for the rights to various naval and air bases. The well-known Cockcroft lectured the bored servicemen on a scientific subject he felt safe to discuss, since it couldn't possibly have a bearing on the war: nuclear energy. He impressed his audience by pronouncing that a cupful of water held enough atomic power to blow a battleship a foot out of the sea. As a separate exercise, Cockcroft also calculated the black box's chances of sinking with the ship should they be struck by an enemy torpedo--and concluded the buoyant cargo would stay afloat. Holes were drilled in each end.

On the evening of September 5, the ship pulled off Newfoundland's Cape Race. The following morning dawned calm and misty as she slipped into Halifax Harbor. Bowen remembered spying an American armored vehicle, "submachine guns bristling from every orifice..." Woodward-Nutt, though, recorded spending several hours on the phone with the British Embassy in Washington, arranging for a Canadian military guard to take the secret equipment to the U.S. border, where it would be turned over to American authorities and transported to the embassy. He personally saw the equipment off early the next day.

At Halifax, Bowen split off from the rest of the group, heading to Ottawa to arrange for officials from Canada's National Research Council to join the exchange--and to locate some of the equipment presumably shipped over earlier. He would catch up with the others in Washington a few days later. The rest of the mission left Nova Scotia by rail at 8:45 the morning of the 7th--changing trains in Boston and arriving in Washington at 5:30 the next evening.

The group met Tizard at the Shoreham Hotel, overlooking Rock Creek Park near the British embassy in northwest Washington. "I was a bit shaken," writes Woodward-Nutt, "to find that the samples and documents that I had seen off so carefully at Halifax had not yet arrived." It took a series of telephone calls to locate the cargo; and the precious container, bearing the cavity magnetron and the technological hopes of an entire nation, finally arrived at the embassy on Monday, September 9, 1940. There, it was locked in the wine cellar and given to the care of the Ambassador's butler, who as far as could be determined possessed the only key.

The Americans anxiously awaited the Tizard mission. It hadn't seemed that way at first. Sir Henry had arrived in Washington on August 22, expecting a welcome mat arranged by A.V. Hill. Instead, he complained to his diary: "No administrative arrangements made for my Mission. No office, no typists, etc. Felt rather annoyed."

The bad taste had not lingered, however. The next day, Tizard huddled with Navy Secretary Franklin Knox to establish the ground rules for the exchange. On the 26th, he received an audience with FDR, who welcomed him but explained that political considerations prevented the U.S. from sharing details of the Norden bombsight. Most important of all, two days later over dinner at the Cosmos Club, an exclusive Lafayette Square haven for the inner circles of science, art, and literature, Tizard met Vannevar Bush.

With his raw-boned face, wire rim glasses, and piercing gaze, the charismatic Bush in many ways formed Tizard's mirror image on the western side of the Atlantic. Scion of seven or eight generations of Cape Cod Yankees, and equipped with a tell-tale Northeastern twang, he could be confidently stamped Made in America--just as Tizard, with his own accent, pince-nez, and somewhat aloof manner, left no doubt of his origins. Like Tizard, Bush hid a hard edge behind a calm demeanor. Like Tizard, too, he was a scientist--an M.I.T. electrical engineer who had pioneered early computing--responsible for marshaling civilian science and technology for war. Few men would match his power during the war years, as his dominion grew to include medical research, the atomic bomb, and virtually all forms of chemical and conventional warfare. "Of the men whose death in the summer of 1940 would have been the greatest calamity for America, the President is first, and Dr. Bush would be second or third," noted the multimillionaire investment banker Alfred Loomis, a Bush friend destined to play a crucial role in the radar story.

Bush had pitched his tent in the nation's capitol since late 1938 as president of the prestigious Carnegie Institution of Washington, a private research organization endowed by steel baron Andrew Carnegie. However, he dined with Tizard as chairman of the National Defense Research Committee, established by presidential order two months earlier to mobilize civilian scientists for war. Bush had created the N.D.R.C. almost through sheer personal will. During World War I, working on submarine detection, he had seen first-hand the distinct lack of cooperation between civilian scientists and the military. So he conceived the idea of establishing a new national committee to bridge the gap. Maneuvering deftly through theWashington maze, he drew on the influential lawyer Oscar Cox, then Commerce Secretary Harry Hopkins, to negotiate an interview with the President. Bush entered the Oval Office on June 12, 1940, entering the meeting carrying a single sheet of paper with a four-paragraph sketch of the proposed agency. Less than ten minutes later, Roosevelt had signed on: "That's okay," he told the feisty engineer. "Put `OK, FDR' on it."

Some Washingtonians complained that the N.D.R.C. represented a power grab by a small band of scientists and engineers working outside established channels. Bush made no bones about it. "That, in fact, is exactly what it was," he once admitted. But his personal mandate from Roosevelt extended to helping the country "excel in the arts of war if that be necessary." And while he respected the military's turf, Bush made certain people never forgot who had issued his orders.

The Carnegie president moved quickly to solidify his power base, bringing in as key lieutenants some old friends and confreres: M.I.T. president Karl Compton, Harvard University president James B. Conant, and Frank B. Jewett, president of the National Academy of Science and Bell Telephone Laboratories. The scientific cabal, Bush co-conspirators in conceiving the N.D.R.C., immediately launched a survey of Army and Navy research activities and began compiling a list of technical jobs to take over-- either because the work had not yet gotten underway, or because once the U.S. abandoned its neutrality the military would have to drop them to meet more pressing demands. At the same time, the men contacted some 775 universities, industrial labs, and non-profit institutions--compiling a roster of personnel and facilities in scientific arenas likely to affect the war. This was "the Bible."

By the time Bush dined with Tizard on August 28, he had mustered his forces into several main divisions, covering everything from armor and ordnance to communications, explosives and patents. Radar matters fell to Karl Compton's Division D--instruments and controls. Since the military survey showed that the Army and Navy both had already made great strides in meter wave radar, the N.D.R.C. adopted as its domain the vague promise of microwaves--naming Alfred Loomis chairman of a special Microwave Committee, Section D-1. It was a natural, insider's choice. Loomis sat on the M.I.T. board and had contributed funds to the institution's general microwave research. Moreover, he was a noted amateur physicist who conducted his own fledgling microwave radar studies on a private estate outside New York City--and therefore appreciated the challenges in store.

While the various N.D.R.C. divisions could probably all delve into the British black box and find interesting treasures, it was on the microwave radar front--a top priority for both groups--that Bush and Tizard found their perfect match. The American possessed the presidential authority to develop the technology. The Englishman had the cavity magnetron.

When the two men met at the Cosmos Club, Bush remained unaware of the magnetron's existence. But he made it his business to know what was going on--and had been tipped off, probably by A. V. Hill, to certain generalities of the British radar bonanza long before the mission arrived. Face to face at last, however, he felt compelled to advise Tizard that although the N.D.R.C. welcomed a meeting with the British mission, the two groups should keep their distance until the U.S. military opened the talks: that way, Washington insiders could not accuse them of plotting some sort of conspiracy. Once the exchange was formally underway, Bush would take steps to correct the situation.

Tizard took the cue. While waiting for the N.D.R.C. to be let in on the talks, he and Bush met several times "behind the barn," as the wily engineer called it. It is not clear what transpired between the two men, so alike and so seemingly destined to forge a new bond. Most likely they covered general logistics, hinting at the shape of things to come in the clubby ways at which both were so adept. In any case, as his entourage began sharing extensive details on longwave radar and other subjects with U.S. military representatives in early September, Tizard managed to give the impression of an extraordinary advance without revealing the secret of the cavity magnetron--even when the Navy showed its visitors an experimental, extremely low-powered, 10-centimeter radar system. It wasn't until September 16 that Vannevar Bush won formal approval from both the Army and Navy for the N.D.R.C. to join the exchange. Only then did Sir Henry play his trump card.

The British disclosed the existence of the cavity magnetron at the first extensive contact between the Tizard Mission and N.D.R.C. members--a party hosted by Alfred Loomis the night of September 19 at the Wardman Park Hotel. The rambling 1,800-room megacomplex dominated the southeast corner of Connecticut Avenue and Woodley Road, just a stone's throw from the Shoreham, where Tizard had set up shop in an office suite swept daily for bugs.

Eddie Bowen and John Cockcroft showed up at Loomis' rooms around nine o'clock. Bowen had returned from Canada the night of the 11th--and the two men had spent the past week detailing British longwave radar accomplishments to American military officials at the War Department and nearby Naval Research Laboratory. Among the disclosures were technical details of the Chain Home early warning stations already doing yeoman's service in the Battle of Britain; radio homing beacons; submarine-hunting radars; and Identification Friend or Foe, a radio signal carried in planes designed to help radar operators distinguish "friendlies" from the enemy.

The exchange had proven interesting, but only marginally useful to the British. Going into the meetings, both sides were convinced the other could not possible possess radar. But as they quickly discovered, each had invented the technology independently in the mid-1930s, within a few months of each other: in fact, the British Chain Home Low, which guarded against low-flying planes, turned out to be virtually identical to the U.S. Navy's CXAM radar, operating on the same frequency and sharing several other technical features. As far as anything the British could use in the war effort, however, pickings were slim. The Americans did enjoy an edge in receiver technology. But at the same time, the U.S. had not developed airborne radars or anything like IFF--and the few other systems in existence had seen little operational use.

If Bowen and Cockcroft were hoping for more on the microwave front from contact with Loomis' group, they were not disappointed. Vannevar Bush himself was not on hand: he preferred to delegate authority and leave his lieutenants alone. However, besides the host the small gathering included Carroll Wilson, Bush's personal assistant and alter ego, Karl Compton, and Admiral Harold Bowen, director of the Naval Research Lab. The admiral, who had earlier authored an internal memo discounting the idea of British radar, apparently harbored ongoing misgivings about the exchange. He appeared to drink heavily at the party, but Compton suspected his colleague of feigning to be farther gone than he really was in order to avoid sharing information.

The British sensed such misgivings. "I still remember the rather doubtful opening with the U.S. officers suspicious as to whether we were putting all our cards on the table," Cockcroft remembered. The Americans showed their hand first, though, detailing an exhaustive survey of the nation's general microwave research that Loomis and Compton had conducted over the summer. It soon became clear to Bowen and Cockcroft that for the 10- centimeter waves emitted by the cavity magnetron, Bell Telephone Laboratories and General Electric both could contribute a lot to receiver technology. Bell Labs, Stanford University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they were told, also conducted advanced research in microwave waveguides and horn-shaped antennas. The British physicists found the information exceedingly helpful in pinpointing areas to visit.

Their hosts, however, confessed to being at loose ends trying to find a transmitter tube able to generate enough power to make for a feasible centimeter radar system. By the time of Loomis' party, a stymied Microwave Committee had steeled itself to write a report--a sure sign, as one member explained, "that we didn't know what to do next."

Bowen and Cockcroft quietly pulled out the cavity magnetron--by one account, they typically carried the device in a small wooden box whose lid was fastened by thumbscrews--and told their dumbfounded listeners that it could generate 10 kilowatts of power at ten centimeters, roughly 1,000 times the output of the best U.S. tube on the same wavelength. In one fell swoop, the disclosure dispelled any tension left in the room--and from that point on, things went smoothly.

"It was a gift from the gods we disclosed to Alfred Loomis and Karl Compton," Bowen boasted late in life. The financier swiftly embraced the offering, inviting his new-found friends to Tuxedo Park, the posh retreat about 35 miles northwest of New York City where he had built his private laboratory. It was time for mere mortals to get to work.

------------------------------------

"The first radar stations used aerials over 100 m in height to produce a directional beam of radio waves. But if aerials were much smaller and could be steered, they would be much more useful. However, to make smaller aerials meant using radio waves of shorter wavelengths. The cavity magnetron was created to generate such waves. J T Randall and H A H Boot of the Physics Department, Birmingham University, made the first cavity magnetron work in February 1940. Today cavity magnetrons are used in microwave cookers as well as for detecting radio waves reflected from a flying aircraft. . . ."

Motorola TLD-1100 "MJ" IMTS Telephone, 1963. The text reads:

CONFORMS TO ALL IMPROVED MOBILE TELEPHONE SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS INCLUDING: Full 11-Channel Capacity for Unlimited Roaming; Automatic Channel Hunting; Home, Roaming or Manual Operation

PROVIDES BONUS PERFORMANCE FROM ALL SOLID STATE, BUILT IN MOBILE SUPERVISORY UNIT: Totally Silent Operation; Easy Installation of The One-Package Design; Minimum Maintenance from The Solid State Circuitry

Used in Bell territories. Equipment below used in some non-Bell territories.

GTE DTD/DTO Mobile Telephone. Illustration shows the dial control unit, manual control unit, a power/control cable, and the transceiver itself, along with the antenna.

By Geoff Fors:

"This unit is not IMTS but a 1962 manual, operator-assisted 'MTS' radio while the DTD was a 'Dial' radiotelephone. 'Dial' was a proprietary system built by Secode and GE which allowed direct dialing and automatic terminal operation, but it wasn't compatible with anybody else's system. It didn't offer marked idle or channel hunting as IMTS did. Independents (principally REA co-ops and Con-Tel) used 'Dial.' I am not aware of any Bell affiliate which ever used it. Con-Tel in southeastern California was still using Dial up into the early 1980's. Dial is not compatible at all with IMTS, but it is compatible (partially) with MTS. As far as I know, the last Dial phone manufactured was the GE MASTR series (1972), which came in MTS, MTS/IMTS, Dial or 'Identified Dial.' -- Geoff Fors

Product literature scans courtesy of Geoff Fors who maintains this remarkable page:

MOTOROLA EARLY LAND MOBILE EQUIPMENT INDEX, 1938-1946

http://www.mbay.net/~wb6nvh/Motadata.htm

Geoff is an ardent mobile radio enthusiast, please visit his site soon.

More IMTS madness? Of course. Take a look at a company newsletter describing the 1982 cutover in Pac Bell land:
Page One / Page Two / Page Three / Page Four

By Tom Lewis, HarperCollins (C) 1991 Tom Lewis All rights reserved.

THE WILL TO SUCCEED

". . . By 1880, Edison had created a lamp that glowed brightly when direct current passed through its carbon filament in a vacuum. But he found that over time particles of the carbon were transferred to the glass. In experiments to correct the fault, the inventor learned that electric current could flow from the filament through the vacuum surrounding it to a positively charged metal plate, a process later dubbed the "Edison effect"meaning that no one could explain precisely how the process worked. Furthermore, the amount of current that flowed from the filament to the plate stood in direct proportion to the incandescence of the lamp. He noted his findings in a patent that showed how such a modified lamp might measure the flow of electrical current. But the date was 1883, half a decade before Hertz's experiments, and fourteen years before an English physicist named Joseph John Thomson discovered the existence of the electron. Besides, the untheoretical Edison believed inventive genius to be "one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration." Decidedly uninspired at this point, he saw little commercial value for his discovery. Without further speculation, Edison proceeded with his quest to perfect the electric lamp.

John Ambrose Fleming, then an employee of the Edison Company in London, knew of the inventor's patent. His studies of the same carbon deposits led him to publish four papers on the subject to the Royal Society between 1883 and 1896. But then, diverted by other work, Fleming suspended his inquiry for nearly eight years. In 1904, when he had become scientific adviser for the Marconi Company, he was charged with the job of creating a new detector of wireless waves.

"Why not try the lamps?" Fleming remembered thinking years later. This time, working with the alternating current of wireless waves, he made a remarkable discovery: while the current flowing into the filament alternated between a positive and negative charge, the current leaving the lamp from the metal plate was direct. Fleming's bulb was acting as a valve that allowed only the negative electrons to pass. Indeed, he entitled his patent an "instrument for converting alternating electric currents into continuous currents," and he called his bulb an "oscillation valve." Fleming's valve stands as a dramatic achievement. The electrons liberated by Marconi's spark gap transformer imperceptibly traveled through the air at the speed of light. Now they could be captured and converted into direct current through the agency of a small filament and plate in a little glass bulb. From there the current could flow into an earphone and become a perceptible sound once again. Fleming had created a new detector of wireless waves, one that worked with a modified Edison effect lamp.


The Fleming valve. "The valve consists of an incandescent electric lamp comprising a filament (F) of carbon, tungsten, or other material which can be made incandescent by an electric current. Around the filament, but not touching it, is a cylinder of metal (C). The electrical connection to the cylinder is brought out through the side of the glass enclosure." J. Jenkins

The above description and diagram was from John Jenkins excellent site: http://www.halcyon.com/johnj/radios/FLEMING.HTM (Now a dead link)

(This illustration is not in the book.)

In the spring of 1905, Fleming published his discovery for the Royal Society, but the tube was a crude apparatus and needed more study to be practical. If he had had more encouragement, Fleming might possibly have developed-the potential of his tube, but in this he was thwarted by his employer. The Marconi Company, which held all rights to his patent, was more interested in developing galena crystal as a detector. Instead, two years later, Lee de Forest took the fame and some of the fortune for Fleming's work.

De Forest always avoided acknowledging Edison's and Fleming's obvious antecedents to his own work. Though he read voraciously in scientific periodicals at Talladega, at the Chittenden Library at Yale, at the John Crerar Library in Chicago, among others, and though he subscribed to technical periodicals, he steadfastly claimed ignorance of their discoveries.

Since 1900, de Forest had occasionally experimented with the possibility that heat from a gas burner created electrical vibrations. Early in 1905, after Fessenden had launched his suit and de Forest realized he might be forced to abandon his spade detector, he intensified his tests and took out patents on several "oscillation responsive" devices, which used a gas flame. No evidence suggests these inventions ever worked, but patent them he did. In the late summer of 1905, he read Fleming's article on his valve in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

Late that fall, an assistant brought a bulb about the shape of a small pear to Henry W. McCandless at 67 Park Place in New York City and asked him to duplicate it. A manufacturer whose principal trade was making automobile lamps for Westinghouse and General Electric's Mazda [the original name for Edison's line of bulbs, ed.], McCandless had no difficulty meeting this special order. With a brass candelabra screw base and a carbon filament, the lamp resembled others available at the time. But there was one significant difference: beside the filament inside the bulb was a nickel plate. To that was attached a short wire that protruded through the top of the glass. The assistant explained that it was a Fleming valve. On December 9 that year, de Forest took out a patent on a "static valve for wireless telegraph systems." Five weeks later, he made another application for a similar tube and circuit; this time he ran wires from a small battery to both the filament and plate. This he called the "audion," and he claimed in a talk to a gathering of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in New York on October 26, 1906, that his tube was "a new receiver for wireless telegraphy."

All that de Forest had developed thus far bore a remarkable resemblance to the valve Fleming had described to the Royal Society in 1905. He had introduced the use of a battery on the plate as well as the filament circuit, but that was all. Nor was de Forest's change necessarily an improvement, for the small positive charge of electrons flowing from the filament to the plate was no match for the positive charge of electrons flowing to the plate from the battery. What came next, however, was de Forest's idea alone, and without question will endure as the inventors greatest insight.

Click here for my drawings, history, and explanation of the vacuum tube

On November 25, 1906, after further experiments and several false starts, de Forest ordered another tube from McCandless. The specifications called for three elements: a filament a plate, and, interposed between the two, as close to the filament as possible, another nickel wire. As was the case with the other wires, it too was drawn out through the side of the lamp. When this wire was positively charged, de Forest found it would attract the stream of positive electrons flowing from the filament, accelerate them, and send them toward the plate, and the more positive the charge, the greater the charge on the plate circuit.

Detail from the constantly amended patent on the audion. (Illustration not in the book.)

On the suggestions of John Grogan, one of McCandless's assistants, de Forest decided to bend the wire zigzag fashion in order to create a greater surface to accelerate the electrons flowing from the filament. To this de Forest gave the name "grid." Now he could regulate the flow of electrons from the filament to the plate and amplify them. Precisely how the filament, grid, and plate worked, he was not sure. The theories he did propose about their action were in fact incorrect. But the sounds coming from his earphones showed that his audion did work. With the simple addition of a plate to Fleming's tube, modem electronics was born.

An Excerpt, Part 2 of 3

Original URL: http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/fall98/riordan2.htm

DAWN OF AN AGE

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 company 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, nondescript 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.

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, transformers, 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-colored 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 cattle on the family homestead in Tonasket, 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 corner 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 softly 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 University 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 pursue a Ph.D. in physics.

In the fall of 1945, Bardeen took a job at Bell Labs, then winding down its wartime research program and gearing up for an expected postwar boom in electronics. He initially shared an office with Brattain, who had been working on semiconductors since the early 1930s, and soon became intrigued by these curious materials, whose electrical properties were just beginning to be understood. Poles apart temperamentally, the two men became fast friends, often playing a round of golf together at the local country club on weekends.

Shortly after lunch that damp December day, Bardeen joined Brattain in his laboratory. Outside, the rain had changed to snow, which was beginning to accumulate. Shockley arrived about ten minutes later, accompanied by his boss, acoustics expert Harvey Fletcher, and Bell's research director, Ralph Bown a tall, broad-shouldered man fond of expensive suits and fancy bow ties.

"The Brass," thought Bardeen a little contemptuously, using a term he had picked up from wartime work with the Navy. Certainly these two executives would appreciate the commercial promise of this device. But could they really understand what was going on inside that shiny slab of germanium? Shockley might be comfortable rubbing elbows and bantering with the higher-ups, but Bardeen would rather be working on the physics he loved.

After a few words of explanation, Brattain powered up his equipment. The others watched the luminous spot that was racing across the oscilloscope screen jump and fall abruptly as he switched the odd contraption in and out of the circuit using a toggle switch. From the height of the jump, they could easily tell it was boosting the input signal many times whenever it was included in the loop. And yet there wasn't a single vacuum tube in the entire circuit!

Then, borrowing a page from the Bell history books, Brattain spoke a few impromptu words into a microphone. They watched the sudden look of surprise on Bown's bespectacled face as he reacted to the sound of Brattain's gravelly voice booming in his ears through the headphones. Bown passed them to Fletcher, who shook his head in wonder shortly after putting them on.

For Bell Telephone Laboratories, it was an archetypal moment. More than seventy years earlier, a similar event had occurred in the attic of a boardinghouse in Boston, Massachusetts, when Alexander Graham Bell uttered the words, "Mr. Watson, come here. I want you."

1

DAWN OF AN AGE, continued, An Excerpt, Part 3 of 3

IN THE WEEKS that followed, however, Shockley was torn by conflicting emotions. The invention of the transistor, as Bardeen and Brattain's solid-state amplifier soon came to be called, had been a "magnificent Christmas present" for his group and especially for Bell Labs, which had staunchly supported their basic research program. But he was chagrined to have had no direct role in this crucial breakthrough. "My elation with the group's success was tempered by not being one of the inventors," he recalled many years later. "I experienced frustration that my personal efforts, started more than eight years before, had not resulted in a significant inventive contribution of my own."

Growing up in Palo Alto and Hollywood, the only son of a well-to-do mining engineer and his Stanford-educated wife, Bill Shockley had been raised to consider himself special a leader of men, not a follower. His interest in science was stimulated during his boyhood by a Stanford professor who lived in the neighborhood. It flowered at Cal Tech, where he majored in physics before heading east in 1932 to seek a Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There he dived headlong into the Wonderland world of quantum mechanics, where particles behave like waves and waves like particles, and began to explore how streams of electrons trickle through crystalline materials such as ordinary table salt. Four years later, when Bell Labs lifted its Depression-era freeze on new employees, the cocky young Californian was the first new physicist hired.

With the encouragement of Mervin Kelly, then Bell's research director, Shockley began seeking ways to fashion a rugged solid-state device to replace the balky, unreliable switches and amplifiers commonly used in phone equipment. His familiarity with the weird quantum world gave him a decided advantage in this quest. In late 1939 he thought he had come up with a good idea to stick a tiny bit of weathered copper screen inside a piece of semiconductor. Although skeptical, Brattain helped him build this crude device early the next year. It proved a complete failure.

Far better insight into the subtleties of solids was needed and much purer semiconductor materials, too. World War II interrupted Shockley's efforts, but wartime research set the stage for major breakthroughs in electronics and communications once the war ended. Stepping in as Bell Labs vice president, Kelly recognized these unique opportunities and organized a solid-state physics group, installing his ambitious protégé as its co-leader.

Soon after returning to the Labs in early 1945, Shockley came up with another design for a semiconductor amplifier. Again, it didn't work. And he couldn't understand why. Discouraged, he turned to other projects, leaving the conundrum to Bardeen and Brattain. In the course of their research, which took almost two years, they stumbled upon a different and successful way to make such an amplifier.

Their invention quickly spurred Shockley into a bout of feverish activity. Galled at being upstaged, he could think of little else besides semiconductors for over a month. Almost every moment of free time he spent on trying to design an even better solid-state amplifier, one that would be easier to manufacture and use. Instead of whooping it up with other scientists and engineers while attending two conferences in Chicago, he spent New Year's Eve cooped up in his hotel room with a pad and a few pencils, working into the early morning hours on yet another of his ideas.

By late January 1948 Shockley had figured out the important details of his own design, filling page after page of his lab notebook. His approach would use nothing but a small strip of semiconductor material silicon or germanium with three wires attached, one at each end and one in the middle. He eliminated the delicate "point contacts" of Bardeen and Brattain's unwieldy contraption (the edges of the slit gold foil wrapped around the plastic wedge). Those, he figured, would make manufacturing difficult and lead to quirky performance. Based on boundaries or "junctions" to be established within the semiconductor material itself, his amplifier should be much easier to mass-produce and far more reliable.

But it took more than two years before other Bell scientists perfected the techniques needed to grow germanium crystals with the right characteristics to act as transistors and amplify electrical signals. And not for a few more years could such "junction transistors" be produced in quantity. Meanwhile, Bell engineers plodded ahead, developing point-contact transistors based on Bardeen and Brattain's ungainly invention. By the middle of that decade, millions of dollars in new equipment based on this device was about to enter the telephone system.

Still, Shockley had faith that his junction approach would eventually win out. He had a brute confidence in the superiority of his ideas. And rarely did he miss an opportunity to tell Bardeen and Brattain, whose relationship with their abrasive boss rapidly soured. In a silent rage, Bardeen left Bell Labs in 1951 for an academic post at the University of Illinois. Brattain quietly got himself reassigned elsewhere within the labs, where he could pursue research on his own. The three men crossed paths again in Stockholm, where they shared the 1956 Nobel prize in physics for their invention of the transistor. The tension eased a bit after that but not much.

BY THE MID-1950S physicists and electrical engineers may have recognized the transistor's significance, but the general public was still almost completely oblivious. The millions of radios, television sets, and other electronic devices produced every year by such grayflannel giants of American industry as General Electric, Philco, RCA, and Zenith came in large, clunky boxes powered by balky vacuum tubes that took a minute or so to warm up before anything could happen. In 1954 the transistor was largely perceived as an expensive laboratory curiosity with only a few specialized applications such as hearing aids and military communications.

But that year things started to change dramatically. A small, innovative Dallas company began producing junction transistors for portable radios, which hit U.S. stores at $49.95. Texas Instruments curiously abandoned this market, only to see it cornered by a tiny, little-known Japanese company called Sony. Transistor radios you could carry around in your shirt pocket soon became a minor status symbol for teenagers in the suburbs sprawling across the American landscape. After Sony started manufacturing TV sets powered by transistors in the 1960s, U.S. leadership in consumer electronics began to wane.

Vast fortunes would eventually be made in an obscure valley south of San Francisco then filled with apricot orchards. In 1955 Shockley left Bell Labs for California, intent on making the millions he thought he deserved, founding the first semiconductor company in the valley. He lured top-notch scientists and engineers away from Bell and other companies, ambitious men like himself who soon jumped ship to start their own firms. What became famous around the world as Silicon Valley began with Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, the progenitor of hundreds of companies like it, many of them far more successful.

The transistor has indeed proved to be what Shockley so presciently called the "nerve cell" of the Information Age. Hardly a unit of electronic equipment can be made today without it. Many thousands and even millions of them are routinely packed with other microscopic specks onto slim crystalline slivers of silicon called microprocessors, better known as microchips. By 1961 transistors were the foundation of a billion-dollar semiconductor industry whose sales were doubling almost every year. Over three decades later, the computing power that had once required rooms full of bulky electronic equipment is now easily loaded into units that can sit on a desktop, be carried in a briefcase, or even rest in the palm of one's hand. Words, numbers, and images flash around the globe almost instantaneously via transistor-powered satellites, fiber-optic networks, cellular phones, and telefax machines. Through their landmark efforts, Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley had struck the first glowing sparks of a great technological fire that has raged through the rest of the century and shows little sign of abating. Cheap, portable, and reliable equipment based on transistors can now be found in almost every village and hamlet in the world. This tiny invention has made the world a far smaller and more intimate place than ever before.

NOBODY COULD HAVE forseen the coming revolution when Ralph Bown announced the new invention on June 30, 1948, at a press conference held in the aging Bell Labs headquarters on West Street, facing the Hudson River opposite the bustling Hoboken Ferry. "We have called it the Transistor," he began, slowly spelling out the name, "because it is a resistor or semiconductor device which can amplify electrical signals as they are transferred through it." Comparing it to the bulky vacuum tubes that served this purpose in virtually every electrical circuit of the day, he told reporters that the transistor could accomplish the very same feats and do them much better, wasting far less power.

But the press paid little attention to the small cylinder with two flimsy wires poking out of it that was being demonstrated by Bown and his staff that sweltering summer day. None of the reporters suspected that the physical process silently going on inside this innocuous-looking metal tube, hardly bigger than the rubber erasers on the ends of their pencils, would utterly transform their world.

Editors at the New York Times were intrigued enough to mention the breakthrough in the July 1 issue, but they buried the story on page 46 in "The News of Radio." After noting that Our Miss Brooks would replace the regular CBS Monday-evening program Radio Theatre that summer, they devoted a few paragraphs to the new amplifier.

"A device called a transistor, which has several applications in radio where a vacuum tube ordinarily is employed, was demonstrated for the first time yesterday at Bell Telephone Laboratories," began the piece, noting that it had been employed in a radio receiver, a telephone system, and a television set. "In the shape of a small metal cylinder about a half-inch long, the transistor contains no vacuum, grid, plate or glass envelope to keep the air away," the column continued. "Its action is instantaneous, there being no warm-up delay since no heat is developed as in a vacuum tube."

Perhaps too much other news was breaking that sultry Thursday morning. Turnstiles on the New York subway system, which until midnight had always droned to the dull clatter of nickels, now marched only to the music of dimes. Subway commuters responded with resignation. Idlewild Airport opened for business the previous day in the swampy meadowlands just east of Brooklyn, supplanting La Guardia as New York's principal destination for international flights. And the hated Red Sox had beaten the world-champion Yankees 7 to 3.

Earlier that week, the gathering clouds of the Cold War had darkened dramatically over Europe after Soviet occupation forces in eastern Germany refused to allow Allied convoys to carry any more supplies into West Berlin. The United States and Britain responded to this blockade with a massive airlift. Hundreds of transport planes brought the thousands of tons of food and fuel needed daily by the more than 2 million trapped citizens. All eyes were on Berlin. "The incessant roar of the planes that typical and terrible 20th Century sound, a voice of cold, mechanized anger filled every ear in the city," reported Time. An empire that soon encompassed nearly half the world's population seemed awfully menacing that week to a continent weary of war.

To almost everyone who knew about it, including its two inventors, the transistor was just a compact, efficient, rugged replacement for vacuum tubes. Neither Bardeen nor Brattain foresaw what a crucial role it was about to play in computers, although Shockley had an inkling. In the postwar years electronic digital computers, which could then be counted on the fingers of a single hand, occupied large rooms and required teams of watchful attendants to replace the burned-out elements among their thousands of overheated vacuum tubes. Only the armed forces, the federal government, and major corporations could afford to build and operate such gargantuan, power-hungry devices.

Five decades later the same computing power is easily crammed inside a pocket calculator costing around $10, thanks largely to microchips and the transistors on which they are based. For the amplifying action discovered at Bell Labs in 1947­1948 actually takes place in just a microscopic sliver of semiconductor material and in stark contrast to vacuum tubes produces almost no wasted heat. Thus the transistor has lent itself readily to the relentless miniaturization and the fantastic cost reductions that have put digital computers at almost everybody's fingertips. Without the transistor, the personal computer would have been inconceivable, and the Information Age it spawned could never have happened. Linked to a global communications network that has itself undergone a radical transformation due to transistors, computers are now revolutionizing the ways we obtain and share information. Whereas our parents learned about the world by reading newspapers and magazines or by listening to the baritone voice of Edward R. Murrow on their radios, we can now access far more information at the click of a mouse and from a far greater variety of sources. Or we witness earthshaking events like the fall of the Soviet Union amid the comfort of our living rooms, often the moment they occur and without interpretation.

While Russia is no longer the looming menace it was during the Cold War, nations that have embraced the new information technologies based on transistors and microchips have flourished. Japan and its retinue of developing East Asian countries increasingly set the world's communications standards, manufacturing much of the necessary equipment. Television signals penetrate an ever-growing fraction of the globe via satellite. Banks exchange money via rivers of ones and zeroes flashing through electronic networks all around the world. And boy meets girl over the Internet.

No doubt the birth of a revolutionary artifact often goes unnoticed amid the clamor of daily events. In half a century's time, the transistor, whose modest role is to amplify electrical signals, has redefined the meaning of power, which today is based as much upon the control and exchange of information as it is on iron or oil. The throbbing heart of this sweeping global transformation is the tiny solid-state amplifier invented by Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley. The crystal fire they ignited during those anxious postwar years has radically reshaped the world and the way its inhabitants now go about their daily lives.
MICHAEL RIORDAN AND LILLIAN HODDESON

Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor & the Birth of the Information Age by Michael Riordan
Link to Amazon

Work at WECO's Refurbishing Plant in the early 1970s, by Frank Harrell

Frank's site is here: http://nps-vip.net/

I worked for the C&P Telephone company in Northern Virginia in the early 1970s. (C&P stands for The Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company.) Specifically I worked within the Western Electric refurbishing plant near the Pentagon which is now a Costco, a large, warehouse type department store. We processed all the phone equipment that was removed from houses and businesses within the C&P area, that being the District of Columbia, Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, and Delaware.

The phones would be dumped on a conveyer and we had to pick each one up, check its type number and color, sort them to specific chutes, then match them to a computer punch card. They then went to Western Electric for cleaning and repair. Equipment other than the standard phones, were handled in separate areas. We swapped work positions around every week. We processed an average of 14,000 phone sets a day. Terrible job. Let me first talk about the building itself, and then the work we did there.

The building as it stands now is between Hayes Street and Fern Street in Arlington, Virginia. The site is about a half mile south of the Pentagon.

It is now a mall called Pentagon Mall, with stores such as Costco, Marshals, Borders, Linen 'n Things, Best Buy, and a bunch of small shops. While there today, we didn't go into Costco but looked in the door. It appears that the remodel did very little to the warehouse area except to remove equipment, paint and replace the lights. The ceiling and walls still look exactly as they do in my 1972 photos.

The photograph above is the back of the building which shows the old receiving dock where I worked. Most of the bays are now bricked up. The 5 bays to the far right were the loading bays. This entire area, about 1/4 of the building, is now the Costco store.

The photo below shows the South side of the building. This was the original employee parking lot. Today was New Years' Eve day and the parking was totally crazy.

The photograph below is of the North West corner. The part of the building to the right on this photo is what was the front of the old WECO plant.

Now, let me talk about the work I did at the plant. . . .

A metal tray was taken from the row above, 4 to 6 identical sets would be placed in a tray, a computer card from the bins on the left would be placed with each phone, and the full tray was placed on the conveyer below the slots, where it was checked by a great guy who couldn't speak English but caught every error, then on to the other side of the plant to be refurbished.

A different angle again of the chutes is seen below. In most cases we would wait until we had at least 4 of any given set, before placing them in the bins. These photos were shot during the lunch break so there were few sets in the chutes.

When we were moving along, it was about all 6 men could do to keep up with the flow. There were 3 men on each side of the chutes. Three on the upper side of the chutes where the phones were taken out of the shipping cases and run down its appropriate channel.

The computer cards, which can be seen more clearly in the photo above, were organized into the rotary bins closest to the areas where that type of set came down. I guess there must have been at least 400 or 500 different types of sets, when each color was taken into account. There was a different card for each type and each color located in the bins in numeric order. One card for each phone set. The computer cards were already punched for us.

Each phone color had a number which was attached to the end of the model number. It was never actually on the phone itself, just referred to when dealing with the model. I can't remember most of the numbers but I seem to remember black was indicated by a "3", white was "60" I believe red was "52", green "51" yellow "66" etc. Maybe some WE employee may remember the numbers. It is possible that the color numbers were only used within the WE plant, since I never ended up working outside that job I couldn't say for sure.

The only time that I can remember that we couldn't find a card for a set was an incident with a modular phone. That phone came through the line with what I now know as a RJ11 jack on it. No one had ever seen one before and we had no computer card for it. The supervisor had to take it to the head of the WE plant to find out what to do with it.

I was always curious about unusual phones and continually asked my supervisor what they did. Especially if the difference seemed to be internal and not obvious on the outside. One of your pages talks about the advent of loading coils. Some of the sets, almost always black rotary dial ones, had special networks to manage lines of varying lengths. My supervisor didn't know the particulars, but explained that they were being slowly removed from service and what ever the requirement was that called for the special network was being handled in the central switching offices. (this number is probably wrong but you would see a phone with a number like 524-26b or 582-12c, instead of 500, that would specify the special networks)

In the foreground below can be seen teletype machines, also slated for refurbishment, further back and on the right is the phone sorting area seen on the previous section

The oldest phone set I remember seeing in 1972 was a batch of the 1928 desk sets as shown below. I believe they were from West Virginia somewhere in the back mountain region. I remember asking which part of the state they came from when they arrived. I think there were about 50 or so of them.

Much more commonly we saw many Western Electric #302 sets coming from all over. I don't remember seeing any of the early die-cast zinc models, but most had the older bakelite handsets, and the majority had dials. These sets were broken down and the materials were recycled.

More photos here: http://atcaonline.com/phone/ (external link)

We saw many of the 3-coin pay phones. Back then they were still being refurbished and sent back out into the field. I remember being discussed by some of the guys. If they picked up a pay phone and heard coins in it, they would often slam the phone on the concrete floor, occasionally destroying the phone, to get the dime out. Thinking back on that, it actually showed just how tough those units were built. By the way, there's an entire web page devoted to restoring an old three slot at this address: http://www.navyrelics.com/tribute/233g_payphone_restoration.html (external link)

About every 2 weeks we would take a day to handle the Trimline phones. Because of their shape they didn't work well on the chutes. When I first started there, they were processing the Trimline phones by trying to coil the cords up around the set-base and place the combined set in the trays.

I made the suggestion that if the cords were removed, the separated handsets and bases could be rolled down the chutes. Apparently my supervisor liked the idea. I don't know what transpired in the head offices, but a few weeks later, the Trimline phones started coming in without any cords on them. I guess they had the installers remove them. The cords came in a large pallet bin and were sent directly to recycling. This reduced the time it took us from a full day every 2 weeks or so to less than 3 hours. It ended up backfiring for me though. The repetitive high-speed body twisting that resulted from the speed up ended up causing me back trouble years later.

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A little more about the telephone page on my site, http://nps-vip.net/tester/ That page is a description as to how to build a phone line tester for the hearing impaired. It includes a page describing phone wire color codes. My deaf friend started me on the line tester project several years ago. She was unable to tell what might be wrong with her phone so I got to thinking about how to help her. After building the prototype (the only one I had originally intended) she talked me into making the project into a web page. I built a second one for the photo shoot. It then took me almost 2 years before I actually had any web space to publish it on.
I don't know if anyone else has built the project from my instructions, but I do get a lot of hits from people searching for color codes. :-)

WONDERS OF RADIO

By Ellison Hawks, writing in the Popular Science Mechanical Encyclopedia, Popular Science Publishing Company, Inc., New York, 1941, p. 423 - 459.

The idea of communicating messages without wires is not a new one, for in the sixteenth century Baptista Porta, a Neapolitan philosopher, put forward a fantastic scheme based on the sympathy that was supposed to exist between needles touched by the same magnet or lodestone. By this system, he claimed, communication could easily be maintained between distant points, for every movement imparted to one of the needles would immediately induce similarly sympathetic movements in the other. In a book, Natural Magic, he did not hesitate to claim that with a long distant friend "even though he be confined by prison walls, we can communicate what we wish by means of two compass needles circumscribed with an alphabet." These wild statements about the power of "sympathetic needles" were repeated by later writers who did not trouble to test the idea, which is, of course, impracticable.

It is interesting to learn that although the great Kepler seems to have believed in the efficacy of the sympathetic telegraph, Galileo would have none of it. "You remind me," he makes Sagredo say, "of one who offered to sell me a secret art by which, through the attraction of a certain magnet needle, it would be possible to converse across a space of two or three thousand miles. And I said to him that I would willingly become the purchaser, provided only that I might first make a trial of the art, and that it would be sufficient for the purpose if I were to place myself in one corner of the room and he in the other. He replied that in so short a distance the action would scarcely be discernible, whereupon I dismissed the fellow, saying that it was not convenient for me just then to travel into Egypt or Muscovy, for the purpose of trying the experiment, but that if he chose to go there himself I would remain in Venice and attend to the rest."

A more rational and somewhat remarkable prophecy was made in 1665, by an ardent and keen-sighted scientist, Joseph Glanvill, F.R.S.: "I doubt not," he says, "but posterity will find many things, that are now but rumours, verified into practical realities.... To them that come after us it may be as ordinary to buy a pair of wings to fly into the remotest regions as now a pair of boots to ride a journey. And to confer at the distance of the Indies by sympathetic conveyances may be as usual to future times as to us in a literary correspondence . . . 'tis no despicable item that by some . . . way of magnetick efficiency it may hereafter with success be attempted...."

All three methods use the ground as part of the circuit. That it was possible to complete an electrical circuit through the ground appears to have first been discovered by Winkler, of Leipzig. In 1746 he discharged Leyden jars through an insulated wire laid along the bank of the River Pleiss, the waters of which formed the return half of the circuit. Later in the same year he successfully transmitted over a distance of two miles, using the ground as a return circuit. Subsequently, there were numerous other instances in which the ground return was employed, as in I747 when an Englishman, Dr. (afterwards Sir William) Watson transmitted an electric current over a single wire 2,800 ft. in length and followed this by transmitting over a distance of two miles, in each case using the ground as a return.

(page 423)

[Editor's note: I did the illustration below; it is not part of the original article but it shows its key points]

Three methods exist to communicate wirelessly: conduction, induction, and radiation. (Transmitting by optical means, be it the infrared of a television remote or the visible light of a laser (internal link), falls under radiation, since it also employs radiant energy.) Radiation is how nearly all wireless has been conducted since Marconi.

Click here for a selection from Weisman's RF & Wireless. Easy to read, affordable book on wireless basics. (12 pages, 72K in .pdf)

http://www.popsci.com

In I838 Dr. C. A. Steinheil, of Munich, made an accidental discovery of some importance. He endeavored to improve upon Sommering's tub-of water experiment by using the ground as a means of conduction, entirely dispensing with both wires. Steinheil was one of the greatest pioneers of the electric telegraph in Europe, and he endeavored to use as telegraphic conductors the two lines of a railway track between Nuremberg and Furth. As far as the original purpose was concerned, the experiment was a failure owing to the impossibility of obtaining a sufficiently good insulation between the two rails to enable the current to travel from one station to the other, there to be picked up by suitable apparatus.

When he failed in these experiments, however, Steinheil determined to use the ground instead of a second wire, having noticed its great conductibility in his endeavors to obtain perfect insulation of the two rails. By using the "earth battery," as it was called, for telegraphic purposes, he introduced a method that, universally adopted, effected a very considerable economy in both wire and labour.

Having succeeded so far in eliminating one of the wires and using the ground battery, he carried out further experiments and he is credited with the first intelligent suggestion of a wireless telegraph, based on his observation of galvanic excitation of the soil round his ground wires. It only depended, he decided, on the laws governing this excitation, whether it was possible to dispense with the return wire altogether.

The next step forward was made by S. F. B.Morse, whose successful experiments in connection with the telegraph we have already described. A few months after he had obtained his grant from the U.S. Government (in 1843) for the installation of his experimental telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore, he endeavored to arouse interest in his invention by giving a public demonstration of the fact that an electric current will travel as well along a cable laid through water as along an air line. On the night of October 18, 1842, he laid insulated wires between Governor's Island and Castle Garden, New York, a distance of about a mile.

[For more on Morse click here]

At daybreak on the following morning he prepared to give his demonstration and had transmitted three or four characters when communication was suddenly interrupted owing to one of several vessels lying along the line of the submerged cable raising the cable on her anchor. Not understanding what they had hauled on board, and finding no end to the cable, the sailors hauled about 200 ft. on deck, cut it off, and took it away with them!

With the jeers of the disappointed spectators ringing in his ears, Morse "immediately devised a plan for avoiding such an accident in the future, by so arranging my wires along the banks of the river as to cause the water itself to conduct the electricity across." He laid a wire along each bank, connecting one wire to the transmitting key and a battery and the other wire on the opposite bank, to a galvanometer, the ends of both wires being fastened to copper plates sunk in the river (Fig. I). The experiment was successful and later he was able to transmit over the Susquehanna River with complete success for a distance of nearly a mile.

Editor's note: Do you see what is happening in the illustration above? This is transmitting by conduction. Morse used the water of the river to conduct a signal. No wires in between the sending points or plates, just water to act as the transmission media. I suppose this should be possible today. T.F.

(page 424)

The amazing Mr. Edison. Wireless communicating patent using an electostatic based inductance scheme granted December 29, 1891. Patent Number 465,971. This illustration is not part of Hawks' article but is meant to help in understanding the points he makes later on.

http://www.popsci.com (external link)

(page 425)

http://www.popsci.com

Several similar trials were held (in I886) in different parts of England. Between Durham and Darlington, the ordinary working currents in one line were clearly heard in a telephone on another line, running parallel but some miles distant. Similar inductive effects were obtained on the east and west coasts between Newcastle and Gretna on lines even 40 miles apart.

In 1892 a royal commission was appointed to inquire into the practicability of electric communication between the shore and lighthouse and lightships. They authorized Preece to proceed with his proposed scheme, in order to test the theories he had formed as a result of his numerous experiments. The Bristol Channel was selected as being a suitable place for the experiment, for here are two islands, Flatholm and

(page 427)

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Steepholm, distant from Lavernock Point three and five miles respectively (Fig. 4). Communication was easily established over the shorter distance (3.3 miles), but between Lavernock and Steepholm (5.35 miles) conversation was found to be impossible; and Morse signals, although perceptible, were unreadable. In March 1898, Preece's system was permanently established between Lavernock Point and Flatholm, and was handed over to the British War Office. A few months later S. Evershed's relays were added to work a call-bell, making the system "complete and practical."

Although Preece's system gave great promise, its limitations were soon realized. It was found that, as the distance between the two wires increased, the length of the wires had to be increased also; and that it was necessary for the length of each wire roughly to be equal to the distance between the two. Thus, although quite successful for communication over short distances, this system was useless for long distances on account of the great lengths of wire necessary for its successful working.

(page 428)

Editor's note: The graphic below is not part of the original article but it describes an important point

An experiment in electromagnetic induction: Two coils of wire are wrapped around a nail. The coils are insulated from the nail itself by several pieces of paper, which you cannot see in the drawing. When the battery is connected current steadily flows in one direction and no sound is produced. Remove a lead from the battery and a clicking noise sounds from the receiver. Current in one wire has been induced to flow in the second wire. Only when the current is turned on or off do you get a change in the electromagnetic field and a click.

http://www.popsci.com

As Morse had expected, the water completed the circuit. Although this span was only 80 yards, the next year his assistants successfully transmitted messages across the Susquehanna River at Havre de Grace, Maryland, a distance of 1 mile. They learned that larger metal plates, more widely spaced, increased both transmission distance and signal quality.

Morse, however, became preoccupied with more pressing matters, namely the promotion of his basic telegraph system. In 1843, as he had predicted in the letter to his brother, his fortunes improved. He finally received an appropriation to build a line from Washington to Baltimore, and that effort culminated on May 24, 1844 when Morse tapped out the words: "What hath God wrought?" From then on, he began the rapid expansion of telegraph service throughout the United States.

Because this growth was largely over land, often following the right of way developed by railroads, there was no immediate need for Morse's wireless telegraph. He never bothered to apply for a patent. Meanwhile, improvements in cable design and insulating materials made his original idea of submarine telegraphy practical by 1866 when Cyrus Field completed the first transatlantic cable. Other electricians in Europe and America, however, continued to experiment with Morse's simple approach to wireless telegraphy until the early 20th century. And while its transmission range was severely limited compared to radiotelegraphy, the US Army Signal Corps continued to use a variant of Morse's wireless as a short-distance field telegraph through World War I.

Morse Code was longer lived. It persisted as an international language for distress calls until February 1, 1999 -- a full 167 years after the inventor conceived it.
[For information on the last commercial Morse transmission click here (external link) http://indigo.ie/~cguiney/endofmorse.html

Sources

Samuel F.B. Morse Papers, Library of Congress.

A History of Wireless Telegraphy. J.J. Fahie. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1899.

History of Radio Telegraphy and Telephony. G.G. Blake. London: Chapman and Hall, 1928.

Heroes of American Invention. L. Sprague de Camp. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1993.

The American Electro Magnetic Telegraph. Alfred Vail. Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1845.

(For more on Morse click here (internal link))

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