Vviewpoints
DOI: 10.1145/1941487.1941500
Law and technology
Bell Labs and
Centralized Innovation

In earLy 1935, a man named Clarence Hickman had a secret machine, about six feet tall, standing in his office. Hickman was an engineer at Bell Labs, and his invention was, at the time, a device without equal on earth, way ahead of its time. Here’s how it worked: in the event you called and Hickman was out, the machine would beep and a recording device would come on allowing the caller to leave a message.

What was truly interesting about Hickman’s answering machine was not just the idea of a machine that answered calls, but rather, what was in its guts. For inside Hickman’s machine was something new to the world: magnetic recording tape. Recall that before magnetic storage there were few low-cost means to store sound other than by pressing a record or making a piano roll. Over the long run, magnetic recording technology would not just herald audiocassettes and videotapes, but when used with the silicon chip, make computer storage a reality. Magnetic recording technology must be counted, in fact, as one of the most important inventions of the 20th century. For, from the 1980s onward, firms from Microsoft to Google—and by implication all the world—would become utterly dependent on magnetic storage, otherwise referred to as the hard disk.

Yet, there is something different about this story—the answering machine would not appear in American homes until the 1980s. What happened in the meantime, as we shall see, sheds

light on central questions of innova-
tion in the 20th century that remain
central in the 21st century. The history
of the answering machine forces us to
confront the costs and benefits of mo-
nopoly in the information industries.
It is also a question of growing impor-
tance a technological age increasingly
dominated by large firms like Google,
Microsoft, and Facebook.

Bell Labs

That Bell Labs played a major role in inventing magnetic recording tape