ECS Classics: Making the Phone System More Reliable: Battery Research at Bell Labs

Abstract

Underlying the evolution of the telecommunications network and the communications system of AT&T, research played a key role by bringing together the evolving technical needs and opportunities with experimental science and applications. Research in electrochemistry is an example of the work done at Bell Laboratories that was informed by real work problems while contributing to our basic knowledge of materials and processing. As Albert M. Clogston, Executive Director-Research, Physics, and Academic Affairs Division, Bell Laboratories, November, 1981 wrote in the volume of A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System, “the mission of Bell Labs [was] to supply the technology the Bell System need[ed] to do its job in the long term as well as in the short term.”1 Some context is needed as the telecommunications landscape has changed so dramatically from the system that developed following the invention of the telephone. Soon after the invention of a working telephone by Alexander Graham Bell, a large number of companies formed to offer phone services across the U.S. The Census of 1880 showed 148 telephone companies. Alexander Graham Bell and two investors, Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders, formed the Bell Telephone Company, which in few years became the American Bell Telephone Company, which also acquired interest in a manufacturing unit, the Western Electric Company. The enterprise became collectively known as the Bell System. The American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) was incorporated on March 3, 1885 as a wholly owned subsidiary of American Bell. AT&T acquired a controlling interest in Western Electric, a key supplier of telephone equipment, in 1882. Eventually, many of the companies providing telephone service in the U.S. were acquired into the AT&T network, which came to be operated as a regulated monopoly. As AT&T built its telecommunications network, essentially a large analog telephony system in the first decades, brand new technologies were invented that we take for granted and are widely commercially available today. As large segments of communications network were deployed, attention turned increasingly more to exploration of promising fundamental areas of science. In 1925 4,000 scientists and engineers were dedicated fully to research in the newly created Bell Telephone Laboratories. Among the technologies that came out of Bell Labs research (and, of course, research at other industrial, governmental, and academic research organizations) were electroplating and related coating technologies, thin-film material, fundamental corrosion science, basic battery research, and an array of related fundamental research. Electrochemical processes were widely used in the manufacture of much of the equipment used in the Bell System. Indeed, much of the technology being utilized in the Bell System was based on the physics and chemistry of materials. Additionally, electrochemical processes, especially corrosion and tarnishing, were important degradation mechanisms for the equipment making up the system. Further, backup energy systems based on battery technology provided the reliability that the Bell System advertised to its customers and its regulators. Research on Batteries That Provided Reliability to the Bell System