that. Those of us who took advance degrees were scheduled to go either into fundamental science research in universities or into the teaching profession. It so happened that an appealing story was told and also happened that I wanted to get married and needed some money, so here I am, and for 35 years now I have been an employee of the American Telephone & Telegraph Co., always in intimate association with its research and development work and in the main after the first 2 or 3 years, either in responsible charge either of a part of it or for more than half the period in completely responsible charge for the program of research and development work and the expenditures which the Bell System makes in the communications field, so that whatever judgment is passed on the research function of the Bell System is one which I will have to share in and share a large part of, whether it is good, bad, or indifferent. The only exception to that tour of duty of nearly 35 years now (and it wasn't only a minor exception) was the 3 or 4 years that I served as the operating vice president of the Western Electric Co., and while I had general charge of its research and development functions my primary duty was an operating job in those years.

But since about 1922 or 1923 I have been the chief executive officer in charge of that function of the Bell system's business. That you may have a proper background to get some of the answers I may give to questions, since a large part of this testimony, I judge, will at least touch on the patent side of research and development work, I might say that when I entered industrial life from academic circles I was completely opposed to the patent system, patents at least for that class of work. I had grown up in the atmosphere of pure science, and at that time, whatever it may be now, I think it is safe to say that the consensus of opinion of the leaders of science looked upon the patent system and patents as a thing which were well enough, that had their place with regard to mechanics and possibly to engineers and inventors, but had no place whatever in the purview of those who were trained in fundamental science. I know that that is the way my chief, Professor Michelson, felt. He thought that when I entered industrial life, which was a field where patents were a part, I was prostituting my training and my ideals.

I say that because during the years which have followed I have completely reversed the preconceived ideas I had as to the value and necessity of the patent system. I think scientists in general have changed; I doubt if the same atmosphere prevails now that did then, and also because in the process of the change I found myself changing my point of view. In order to know why I was doing that I made it somewhat of a hobby to learn a little something about the patent system, how it came to be, what society organized it for, what they expected to get out of it, and what price they expected to pay for what they got. Now, that is the sort of background of my history which may help you to appraise whatever I may say.

Mr. DIENNER. I think it would be very interesting at this time to have you tell us what you did find out, under your study of the patent system, as to its usefulness, and the way in which it accomplished its

purposes.

ORIGIN OF U. S. PATENT SYSTEM

Dr. JEWETT. Well, in the course of my examination, of course, I could not help but come back to the acts of Parliament at the time of James I. Of course, I had thought in my ignorance that the inclusion of the patent section in the Constitution and the acts of Congress which followed it was a thing generated by the fathers of the country. When I came to look into it, of course, I found that they were well versed, the colonial people, in the British thing, and the whole history of this patent business went back to that act of Parliament at the time of James I, when the iniquities which had grown up around the grant of royal patents for every sort of thing had become so obnoxious to the people that Parliament at one fell swoop wiped them all out. That was quite conceivable, but the thing that always struck me about it was that in that era of intense dislike which was willing to wipe out the thing that had grown up over hundreds of years, men were wise enough to see that there was one exception to that thing in which the State could well afford to grant certain rights to people who did certain kinds of things, and that was mainly in the field of those who created new and useful things.

They established that at that time and every patent system, so far as I know of course I am not an historian-which exists in the world is fathered in that act of the British Parliament back at the time of James I.

Now then, I think most people have a misconception as to what the patent system was set up to do and what patents are. In fact, some of the questions and answers which I heard here yesterday led me to feel that even some of the members of the committee may not have in mind what I conceive to be what a patent is. In the first place, some people have the idea that in the exclusive right which is given to the inventor of a new thing by the issuing agency, in our case the Patent Office, he is given a right to do something which he other vise didn't have the right to do. That is not at all, of course, the case. Anybody has a right to do anything if he thinks about it, unless he is excluded from doing it, and what the patent is is a right for a limited period of time to exclude others from the use of that thing, assuming it is a valid patent.

Now just what was it that the English Parliament sought to do when they established the first British patent system, and what was the situation which they were trying to correct? The thing they were trying to correct was to break down the walls of secrecy, by which process new ideas were kept secret by those who thought of them, and operated in their own behalf, and the reason they wanted to break it down was because any scheme of secrecy as a means of control is necessarily a limited and small thing. You can't have things secret if you have too many people involved in them. You just can't keep it a secret. And Parliament felt in the interests of the nation as a whole that anything that could be done to break down the walls of secrecy was a good thing.

The other thing that they were attempting to do was to act in behalf of the nation as a whole. They wanted to stimulate invention, they wanted to stimulate new ideas, new manufacture, new products, but they wanted to do it for the benefit of the nation. They weren't thinking particularly of the individual himself, but they could only

do it through the individual, and what they did was to offer what was in effect a bribe to the individual by being willing to agree in advance and to pledge the faith of the nation to inventors unknown, even unborn, that if they would do certain things, the nation pledged itself to do certain other things. And that certain other thing which they did was this: What they demanded of the inventor was that he publish forthwith and fully his invention; in other words, that he break down the walls of secrecy and give all and sundry notice of what it was he had done, and in turn for that and on behalf of the interests of the state, the state agreed to constitute his new thing, his brain child, as real property endowed with all the attributes of real property, principal among which was the right to exclude others from its use for a limited period of time, after which it became public property.

I think, as one looks over the history of the growth of industry in England, and particularly in this country and laterally in the other industrial countries, there can be no question that whatever may have been the deficiencies of that concept in its applications in different places at different times, whatever may be its deficiencies at the moment, the over-all effect of the thing as measured from the standpoint of the nation, of society, has been of inestimable value, and, so far as I can see from my observations of it, the fundamental conditions which obtained at the time of James I's Parliament have obtained continuously since, and obtain at the present time unless one is prepared to say which I am not-that we have so far explored and made use of the unknown of nature that there is no substantial future for development in the years ahead comparable to that which we have had in the past.

ORGANIZATION AND PURPOSE OF BELL LABORATORIES

Mr. DIENNER. Dr. Jewett, will you please tell us about your laboratory, the Bell Telephone Laboratory?

Dr. JEWETT. As I mentioned a few minutes ago, I was asked to go to the American Co. at about the same time, a year or so after Whitney and Coolidge went up to the General Electric. Of course, I stated that I thought the conditions which originated that request were almost identical with those which Coolidge testified to here yesterday as having been the genesis of the thing at the General Electric, and it seems quite obvious that was so. Whether at that time there

were conversations between the people who managed the General Electric Co. and those who managed the Telephone Co. and it was somewhat of a concerted action, of course I don't know and never will know.

The 35 years of course which I have been in the Telephone Co. are half the life of the industry since Alexander Graham Bell made his invention, and it is perfectly clear that at the time what has grown to be this great research organization was started back in 1903 or '04, the industry had outgrown its ability to progress wholly on the basis of random invention which was the basis of its new material in the very early days after Graham Bell, and had also outgrown the second stage in which inventive ability and genius was teamed up with engineering skills, skills of the trained engineer, and had reached a stage in which it was clear that some other kind of attack on many

problems had to be made. Roughly stated, the telephone developers of the early nineteen hundreds, at the break of the century, knew the things that they wanted to do and knew that it should be possible to do those things in the light of known knowledge or easily ascertainable knowledge, but they couldn't do them with the mere random inventive type of stuff, or even with that supplemented by the typical kind of engineering training that you had there; in other words, that they had to bring some way into the picture the same type of mind, trained mind, and the same type of techniques which had developed the fundamental knowledge which they knew had applicability but which they did not know how to apply, and I think that state of affairs pertained in many industries, it certainly pertained in all the electrical fields and most assuredly pertained in the telephone field.

Well, at the time when I went down to join the bunch at 125 Milk Street in Boston, there probably were two or three men who had been trained somewhat as I had been trained, as a fundamental scientist. Some of them, like myself, had had some engineering training. There was, of course, in the central organization of the A. T. & T. Co. and in the organization of the Western Electric Co. as a manufacturing subsidiary, and had been ever since the start, a lot of experimental laboratories, more or less like the laboratories Dr. Coolidge mentioned yesterday, but they were not research laboratories in the ordinary and present-day sense, so that in the 35 years this research and development function has grown in the Bell System from three or four people to many thousand, and of course you made the statement, and it has been made, that this laboratory of which I am the head is the largest industrial research laboratory in the world. Whether that statement is true or not, it is certainly one of the very largest laboratories, and it is unique so far as I know in quite a number of respects. In many respects, of course, it is exactly the same as any other research laboratory in the physical sciences. In other words, it is dealing with fundamental science knowledge in the fields of chemistry, physics, and what have you, in their applicability to useful purposes in a particular sense.

But it is unique in these respects, part of the uniqueness being connected with the uniqueness of the Bell system itself, the telephone business. In most industrial research laboratories the ultimate objective that is sought is the development of a physical thing which is sold to the general consuming public. Without exception, almost, except in our own case, that is the end of the road, and a good piece of work is done when a thoroughly satisfactory article at a thoroughly satisfactory price, a thing which will give satisfaction to the customer, is delivered.

The interest of the producer ceases and determines when the transaction is completed except insofar as he has an interest in the goodwill of his customer.

Now in the Eell system, while our industrial research laboratory operates physically just like any other industrial research laboratory, it has this distinction, that we make substantially nothing to sell. The end product of our work is physical things, but except to a very limited degree those things are things which are used by the operating companies of the Bell system, communications people. They never appear in trade, or practically never appear in trade.

Now at first sight that might appear to have very little bearing on the question of how we conduct our work. Actually it has a vital bearing in this, that since the Bell system is a completely integrated part and since for the last thirty-odd years since society everywhere in the world tried the experiment of running the telephone business on a competitive basis but gave it up everywhere, so that today there is no competition in telephony anywhere in the world in the ordinary competitive sense-since that time the fact that the Bell system is a completely integrated affair in which from the inception of an idea through its development, its manufacture, its installation, its operation, to the end of its life when it goes on the junk heap the whole thing is under a common command, that integration brings in a type of attack in the research laboratory which is fundamentally different from the attack which is made, which we wouldn't make on exactly the same problem if our end product was to be sold in general commerce, because being part of an integrated system the thing that we are really interested in is that this particular thing which is put into service shall have given the service for which it was intended throughout its life until it goes on the junk heap, in the best possible fashion at the least possible total cost. That results more frequently than not in that the first cost of the thing which is produced and put into service may be higher than the first cost would be if it was sold in commerce and be equally good at the start.

Take an example; take this kind of an example. It costs about somewhere over a dollar, 1 presume, for a maintenance man to go to visit your house to clear up trouble, most trouble on transmitters; I don't know what the figures are, but it certainly would cost at least that much on the average, and a telephone transmitter I suppose should last on the average about 10 years. Well, now, if you can afford during the life of that thing, by spending a dollar on the first cost of the transmitter, to save two or three visits of a maintenance man, you can afford to put in, in an integrated system, more money on your research and development in your first cost phase than you could afford to put in if you were selling that thing in a competitive market and you were interested in giving a perfectly good article but didn't care anything about the maintenance cost, the other fellow is going to bear that, so that has a bearing on how we handle our problems.

I mentioned this sort of thing in the hearing, to one of the members of the committee some time back, and he suggested that that difference which results from a difference in environment was a thing which might be of interest to the committee in appraising this sort of thing. And it was suggested that I cite the case in question. Well, I am perfectly willing to do it because it is a rather interesting case and what I am going to say is no reflection on anybody else. Vacuum tubes you will probably talk more about that later-as we all know, have become in the last couple of decades a very important article in the whole electrical thing. Everyone who has a radio set has a vacuum tube; they are extremely important in the telephone business. The average vacuum tube, I presume, of good quality, which is used, would be considered very good quality, would last nearly 1,000 hours of operation and it would, we will say, consume an ampere of current in its filament to heat the filament up.