Comment by ants_everywhere | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ants_everywhere | Hacker News Reader

ants_everywhere

It's interesting to note that Bell Labs started doing its most famous work around the same time quantum electrodynamics was hitting its stride, Von Neumann was doing his work in computer science, Eniac was being built, and the Manhattan project was going on. This was around 1945.

Richard Hamming worked on the Manhattan Project, and John Tukey developed fast Fourier transforms (FFT) in service of the US nuclear program. John Von Neumann shows up as a hidden presence, working with Tukey when Tukey coined the term "bit", and informing Claude Shannon that the mathematical quantity he was working on was a special case of the concept of entropy.

There are periods of history like this where major breakthroughs (quantum mechanics and also what we now call computer science) enable new technologies (like physically realizable Turing machines) and those technologies are suddenly in high demand (because of WWII and then the threat nuclear war). Suddenly there are lots of new ideas, insane amounts of money, and the survival of humanity requires getting things done.

The other interesting thing to me is that Bell had experience with communication at scale due to their telephone networks. And a lot of early computer hardware and software concepts echo designs from the telegraphy days. Think of things like UART and the progression from telegraphy to teleprinters to keyboards. Concepts like Clos Networks from the 1930s are still used in modern data centers today. So having all these large communication problems at scale fed into what we now think of as computer science but really predated computers.

So you may not get the same mileage asking the right questions as Bell Labs did. The environment they were working in was pretty remarkable. We may be getting there eventually with AI, and perhaps climate change will be a pressing enough problem the way nuclear war was.

> The environment they were working in was pretty remarkable.

Yes. The heyday of big corporate research labs was roughly from WWII until the mid-1980s. There was a big open space for pushing things that seemed possible all the way through to commercial products. From synthetic rubber to transistors, the basics had been done but there was plenty of development ahead. There were lots of things which were possible but hadn't been done yet. Sometimes it was too early, and only a non cost effective demo resulted. Sometimes there was a big payoff. Overall, corporate R&D had a positive payoff in that era.

I was lucky enough to visit or deal with many of the big corporate labs of that era. They were quite varied in outlook. The Bell Labs people were telco guys; their approach to networking fit the Bell System centralized model. The PARC people got personal computing and local area networking working, but somehow were obsessed with discrete-event simulation as an application. They didn't foresee how it would all be used. The SRI International people were too into abstraction, and kind of hand-wavey. I once tried using string substitution to remove "virtual" and "abstract" from one of their documents, and it got better. The IBM guys had the coolest location, a glass box on a hill overlooking a park. IBM happened to exit the disk drive business the day I visited. That place had invented the disk drive. Their day was over. The Ford Scientific Research Lab people were theoreticians who were also car guys. The back side of the building had a long, long row of garage spaces with tools and lifts, and everybody had a car to which they were doing something. Their in-car fiber-optic network was forty years too early.

Common factors?

- Steady funding. Not many ups and downs.

- A profitable parent company with a stable business model.

- Good support. Unlike academia, where grad students tried to do machining, badly, the corporate labs had competent people to build stuff.

- Not too rigorous cost accounting. I was once told by a manager of a major lab that "your accounting system is too good", because it kept people on defined tasks.

- A focus on good demos. Production was the responsibility of others. R&D did not ship products.

An interesting knock-on affect of the importance of rubber was the Chemical Rubber Corporation being the publisher of a de facto handbook, the _CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics_:

https://www.goodreads.com/work/editions/937703-crc-handbook-...

which I have found quite useful for its overview of trigonometry and so forth when machining.

Could you expand on the "Not too rigorous cost accounting"

Not OP, but my take:

Goodheart’s law states: “ When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”

If your accounting is too fine grained, there becomes an inescapable draw to point at a metric and declare that a goal.

Once that happens, engineering tasks can be come extremely well defined to the point of acting like tunnel vision.

Instead of finding improvements or innovations generally, the focus is entirely on moving a specific metric.

You see this issue in highly metric driven orgs as well.

Bell Labs was involved in the MIT Radiation Lab, which was a rival to the Manhattan Project in importance to the US war effort. They developed Radar and Radar control systems, in collaboration with the British.

One thing people don't realize is that we had anti-submarine aircraft that would fly themselves on autopilot using sea-scan radar to attack submarines, radar-guided anti-aircraft batteries that would automatically shoot down aircraft (the only thing the humans were doing is loading the shells), proximity-detecting shells that would explode when they got near a target, and many other amazingly high-tech weapons during WWII. Most of them came out of the Rad Lab and a few other places.

Solid-state electronics using semiconductors and masers were both explored at the Rad Lab but it was obvious that they would not be useful for creating weapons so they were set aside, but they were also taken back to institutions like bell for development post-war.

This is a story that really needs a “Richard Rhodes - The making of electronic warfare” treatment like the Manhattan project got. I work in radar (and formerly in nuclear research) and have been stitching together a historical picture of the developments of US radar technology, but it is incoherent (pun intended) at best.

I don't think the UK side of making radar into products is very well documented either, there is some on the research done by TRE [1] but less on what was done in industry.

My grandfather designed and was in charge of production of the Chain Home transmitters at Metrovick [2], he worked on centimetric systems after this as there is a family story of him sleeping with one of the prototype Cavity Magnetrons under his pillow to keep it safe from air raids.

He also built the transmitter for the first AWACS, a Wellington bomber, and helped fit it into the aircraft, but this is presented as just a TRE project.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Research_Es... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan-Vickers

Indeed. And with the wheel of history turning, the organizational structure and political maneuvering that it took to invest in these newfangled modes of warfare, is also important to understand.

Once the Rad Lab got involved, the UK focused on more theoretical or foundational aspects of the technology and let the Rad Lab develop the actual weapons systems.

The anti-submarine radar was a good example: the British developed the sea-scan radar, but testing showed it was very difficult for a bomber crew to use it to actually get the plane on-target so the Rad Lab developed the radar-driven autopilot and integrated it with the B-24s.

I think the H2S radar was developed entirely by the British with limited US/Rad Lab involvement though.

Amazing story about your grandfather! Actually the cavity magnetron played a key role in starting the Rad Lab. The US was still neutral at this point and Churchill decided to "gift" one of the prototypes as well as some scientists to explain how it works to the US in hopes that the US would create radar sets. On the way over the scientists decided to give the crew of the convoy ship a physics lecture, but they couldn't talk about what they worked on so they decided to talk about something that could not possibly be relevant to the war: nuclear fission.

The UK had longer wavelength radar on aircraft before the US entered the war, the biplane attack planes flying off carriers looked old-fashioned but they could find their targets at night and land safely again.

To circle back to the subject of the thread, after WWII my grandfather was in charge of the research lab at Metrovick, his final job before retirement was to close it down.

> enable new technologies

Precisely. Such as:

> the threat nuclear war

One would not happen without the other. Invention is neutral. Humanity puts it to good or bad uses.

> and the survival of humanity requires getting things done.

Well, that's what they tell themselves, looking back on their works, at least.

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