In 1931 a scientist at the fledgling Bell Laboratories named Karl Jansky was assigned to study the causes of static on long-distance short-wave communications, following the company’s interest in exploiting radio waves for a transatlantic telephone service. Jansky spent several months recording radio signals from all directions with a small antenna mounted on a turntable that could rotate and locate the direction of any radio signal it received. Colleagues dubbed it “Jansky’s merry-go-round”.
Much of the static was due to thunderstorms, but Jansky also detected a faint hissing signal, the cause for which was unknown. Initially Jansky thought the signal was coming from the Sun, since its intensity rose and fell once a day. But then he realized that the signal repeated not every 24 hours, but every 23 hours and 56 minutes. Luckily, he casually mentioned the case to an astronomer colleague, for whom the explanation was immediately clear: the four-minute variation was evidence of sidereal time — time determined by the apparent daily motions of the stars. Along with data showing that the signal’s source originated in the constellation Sagittarius, Jansky concluded that the signals were extraterrestrial — the radio waves were being emitted by galaxies at the centre of the Milky Way. It was the dawn of radio astronomy.
Jansky’s finding was the kind of serendipitous discovery that typified Bell Labs during the “golden age” of industrial physics research, when staff scientists were free to indulge their curiosity and pursue innovative fundamental research without worrying about whether their work had any practical applications. At its peak in the 1970s, the labs’ owners AT&T invested about $2bn per year in research and development. Technical managers gave their scientists broad latitude with minimal interference or micromanagement.
“It was truly a pursuit of basic knowledge. They hired brilliant people, regardless of whether their research made sense for the telephone company,” says T “Venky” Venkatesan, who spent 17 years, first at Bell Labs and then at Bellcore, before moving to the University of Maryland in 1990 and founding his own company, Neocera, which makes SQUID-based devices. He recalls colleagues working on problems as diverse as CCD arrays for space-based imaging and solar-neutrino physics, and even being chided on occasion for suggesting that their work might have practical applications. “Such a thing would be unthinkable in a true corporate environment today,” he says.
In the October special 20th anniversary issue of Physics World, Jennifer Ouellette finds out how industrial physics is faring in the 21st century.
To read the full version of this article — and the rest of the October issue of Physics World — please subscribe to our print edition. Members of the Institute of Physics can read all articles for free by accessing our digital edition.