Bell Labs Memoirs: Voices of Innovation

BELL LABS MEMOIRS: VOICES OF INNOVATION The innovative spirit and creative energy of Bell Laboratories during the directorship of William Baker are described by twelve people who worked there. Through the first-hand accounts of: John Pierce, father of communications satellites; Manfred Schroeder, speech encoding; Walter Brown, developer of silicon semiconductors; Carol Maclennan, computers and the Ulysses spacecraft; Alan Chynoweth, materials research, David Dorsi, expert glassblower; Edward Zajac, submarine cables and economics research; Edwin Chandross, optical memories and organic materials (inventor of the now ubiquitous light stick); Italo Quinto, chauffer to William Baker; Mohan Sondhi, inventor of the adaptive echo canceller; William Keefauver, Bell Labs’ general patent attorney; and lastly, William Baker himself, the culture of Bell Labs comes to life.
The research done at Bell Labs led to many devices and techniques that helped build our present world. Acoustic cameras, adaptive predictive coding, block diagram compilers, cryptography, diamond crystal research, digital communication, echo research, inverse filtering, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), magnetic bubble memories, microwaves, organic field effect transistors, pulse code modulation, synthetic speech, transistors, traveling-wave tubes, and vocoders are among the topics recalled by the contributors to this book.