It took me a long time to realize that Bell Labs was cool. You see, my dad worked at Bell Labs, and he has not done a single cool thing in his life except create me and bring a telescope to my third grade class. Nothing he was involved with could ever be cool, especially after the standard set by his grandfather who is allegedly on a patent for the television.
It turns out I was partially right. The Bell Labs everyone talks about is the research division at Murray Hill. They’re the ones that invented transistors and solar cells. My dad was in the applied division at Holmdel, where he did things like design slide rulers so salesmen could estimate costs.
[Fun fact: the old Holmdel site was used for the office scenes in Severance]
But as I’ve gotten older I’ve gained an appreciation for the mundane, grinding work that supports moonshots, and Holmdel is the perfect example of doing so at scale. So I sat down with my dad to learn about what he did for Bell Labs and how the applied division operated.
I expect the most interesting bit of this for other people is Bell Labs’ One Year On Campus program, in which they paid new-grad employees to earn a master’s degree on the topic of Bell’s choosing. I would have loved to do a full post on OYOC, but it’s barely mentioned online and my only sources are 3 participants with the same degree. If you were a manager who administered OYOC or at least used it for a degree in something besides Operations Research, I’d love to talk to you ([email protected]).
And now, the interview
Elizabeth: How did you get started at Bell Labs?
Craig: In 1970 I was about to graduate from Brown with a ScB in Applied Math. I had planned to go straight to graduate school, and been accepted, but I thought I might as well interview with Bell Labs when they came to campus. That was when I first heard of the One Year On Campus program, where Bell Labs would send you to school on roughly 60% salary and pay for your tuition and books, to get a Masters degree. Essentially, you got a generous fellowship and didn’t have to work as a teaching or research assistant, so it was a great deal. I got to go to Cornell where I already wanted to go, in the major I wanted, operations research.
Over 130 people signed up for the One Year On Campus program in 1970. That was considerably more than Bell Labs had planned on; there was a mild recession and so more people accepted than they had planned. They didn’t retract any job offers, but the next year’s One Year On Campus class was much smaller, so I was lucky.
The last stage in applying was taking a physical at the local phone operating company. Besides the usual checks, you had to look into a device that had two lighted eyepieces. I looked in and recognized that I was seeing a cage in my left eye and a lion in my right eye. But I also figured out this was a binocular vision test and I was supposed to combine the two images and see the lion in the cage, so that’s what I said I saw. It’s unclear if Bell Labs cared about this, or this was the standard phone company test for someone who might be driving a phone truck and needed to judge distances. Next time I went to an eye doctor, I asked about this; after some tests, he said I had functional but non-standard depth perception.
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