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ACM
Transactions on
Accessible
Computing

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This quarterly publication is a quarterly journal that publishes refereed articles addressing issues of computing as it impacts the lives of people with disabilities. The journal will be of particular interest to SIGACCESS members and delegrates to its affiliated conference (i.e., ASSETS), as well as other international accessibility conferences.

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www.acm.org/taccess
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is, to any historian of technology, no surprise. Founded in 1925 for the specific purpose of improving telephony, Bell Labs made good on their mission (saving AT&T billions with inventions as simple as plastic insulation for telephone wires) and then some. By the 1920s the laboratories had effectively developed a mind of their own, carrying their work beyond better telephones and into basic research to become the world’s preeminent corpo-rate-sponsored scientific body. It was a scientific Valhalla, hiring definitely the right men (and later women) they may find and leaving them relatively free to pursue what interested them.

When scientists are given such freedom, they are able to do amazing things; Bell’s scientists did cutting-edge work in fields as diverse as quantum physics and data theory. It was a Bell Labs employee named Clinton Davisson who would win a Nobel Prize in 1937 for demonstrating the wave nature of matter, an insight more typically credited to Einstein than to a telephone company employee. In total, Bell would collect seven Nobel Prizes, more than any other corporate laboratory, including one awarded in 1956 for its most renowned invention—the transistor—which made the computer possible. Other Bell Labs creations, while obscure to the general public, are certainly dear to Communications readers, including Unix and the C programming language.

In short, Bell Labs was a superb

the story of Bell
Labs is, in many
ways, the strongest
case in support of
the near-inevitable
monopolies
that emerge in
the information
industries.

force for good. It is the kind of thing, in fact, that gives monopoly a good name. In current-era usage, the word “monopoly” is a scary concept, one that few would dare endorse publicly. But AT&T was, in its time, a proud monopolist, and even a critic is forced to admit a system run by a beneficent monopolist had its advantages. While to some degree Bell Labs served AT&T’s interests, it was also run, in part, out of a kind of noblesse oblige. For in a corporate setting, it is often difficult to imagine how funding theoretical quantum physics research can be of any immediate benefit to shareholder value. More to the point, it is very difficult to imagine a phone company today hiring someone to be their quantum physicist, without rules and with no boss.

The story of Bell Labs is, in many ways, the strongest case in support of the near-inevitable monopolies that emerge in the information industries. Yet, despite all of the undeniable glory of Bell Labs, when you look carefully at the history there emerge little cracks inside the resplendent façade of corporatism for the public good. For however many its breakthroughs, there was a technique through which the institution was very different from a research university. For when the interests of AT&T were at odds with the advancement of information, there was no doubt as to which good prevailed. And so, interspersed between Bell Labs’ public triumphs were its secret discoveries, the skeletons within the imperial closet of AT&T. And here we clearly see the long-term costs of industrial rule by a single firm.

Let’s return to Hickman’s magnetic tape and the answering machine. In the U.S. and in most of the world, answering machines were not widely sold until the 1980s—almost 50 years after Hickman’s invention. Why not? Well, soon after Hickman had demonstrated his invention, AT&T ordered its Labs to cease all research into magnetic tape. In fact, Hickman is virtually unknown to history: his research was so effectively suppressed and concealed that it came to light only in the 1990s, when a historian named Mark Clark found Hickman’s laboratory notebook in the Bell archives. Magnetic tape would come to