This has not been a scientist’s war; it has been a war in which all have had a part. The scientists, burying their old professional competition in the demand of a common cause, have shared greatly and learned much.
—Vannevar Bush
The Bell Labs headquarters in Manhattan’s West Village were a scientific smorgasbord: chemical labs, vast production rooms, and “a warren of testing labs for phones, cables, switches, cords, coils, and a nearly uncountable assortment of other essential parts.” And now, with a host of new wartime projects under way and hundreds of new faces streaming through the office, including many in military uniforms, the thirteen stories on the Hudson’s edge felt especially chaotic. Even as several hundred Labs employees departed for active-duty service in the wake of Pearl Harbor, Bell’s in-house workforce swelled: 4,600 employees became over 9,000 in only a matter of a few years. More than 1,000 research projects were launched, each one a small piece of the war machine. The tempo picked up accordingly; “a six-day workweek became the norm,” Gertner writes.
Bell Labs wasn’t alone in feeling the pressures of the war. Conflict overseas placed crushing new demands on much of the nation’s scientific elite and the institutions that housed them. As Fred Kaplan explained in his history of wartime science, “It was a war in which the talents of scientists were exploited to an unprecedented, almost extravagant degree.” There were urgent questions that needed answers, and the scientifically literate were uniquely equipped to answer them. Kaplan cataloged just a few:
How many tons of explosive force must a bomb release to create a certain amount of damage to certain types of targets? In what sorts of formation should bombers fly? Should an airplane be heavily armored or should it be stripped of defenses so it can fly faster? At what depths should an anti-submarine weapon dropped from an airplane explode? How many anti-aircraft guns should be placed around a critical target? In short, precisely how should these new weapons be used to produce the greatest military payoff?
A generation of physicists and mathematicians was unleashed on puzzles like these.
One of the most insightful surveys of wartime mathematics comes from J. Barkley Rosser, a University of Wisconsin professor who interviewed some 200 mathematicians who, like him, had been pressed into national service. Rosser concluded that mathematicians acted as a kind of accelerant, helpful in speeding up research and development that would otherwise have been painfully manual and slow.
The attitude of many with the problems they were asked to solve was that the given problem was not really mathematics but, since an answer was needed, urgently and quickly, they got on with it. . . . Without a person with competence to supply an answer by mathematics, the person with the problem would have had to resort to some scheme of experimental trial and error. This could be very expensive. Worse still, it could be very time-consuming, and everybody wished to get the War over as quickly as possible. So though mathematicians turned up their noses at most of the problems brought to them, they did so privately, and labored enthusiastically to produce answers.
And so hundreds of the world’s top mathematical minds put their personal research aside, swallowed various degrees of pride, and gathered at the outposts of Los Alamos, Bletchley Park, Tuxedo Park—and Bell Labs, where wartime contracts brought a fresh-from-fellowship Claude Shannon into contact with the latest in military technology and thought.
For men like Vannevar Bush, James Conant, John von Neumann, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and others, the war lifted the veil on their work. They were invited into the councils of power, asked to advise presidents, and tasked with steering millions of dollars of men and matériel. Many of these men had made modest names for themselves in the worlds of science and engineering, but in the arena of wartime politics, their work would receive wide public recognition.
Shannon, too, might have entered this elite group—but he chose not to. “He couldn’t care less about what was happening in Europe,” his girlfriend at the time remembered. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Shannon displayed no ambitions for the high-wire world of government. He made no special effort to earn assignments related to the war effort, nor did he go out of his way to play up his fire control research. This wasn’t, as it might have been for some of his less-sought-after contemporaries, for lack of access. With Vannevar Bush as a trusted mentor and a resume fat with fellowships and prestigious institutions, Shannon could have navigated his way to the high government post of his choosing.
But he didn’t. If anything, his reaction to the war work was quite the opposite: the whole atmosphere left a bitter taste. The secrecy, the intensity, the drudgery, the obligatory teamwork—all of it seems to have gotten to him in a deeply personal way. Indeed, one of the few accounts available to us, from Claude’s girlfriend, suggests that he found himself largely bored and frustrated by wartime projects, and that the only outlet for his private research came on his own time, late at night. “He said he hated it, and then he felt very guilty about being tired out in the morning and getting there very late. . . . I took him by the hand and sometimes I walked him to work—that made him feel better.” It’s telling that Shannon was reluctant, even decades later, to talk about this period in any kind of depth, even to family and friends. In a later interview, he would simply say, with a touch of disappointment in his words, that “those were busy times during the war and immediately afterwards and [my research] was not considered first priority work.” This was true, it appears, even at Bell Labs, famously open-minded though it may have been.
There was something else, too: as Rosser suggested, the math problems brought forth by the war were hardly math at all—or, at least, they were beneath anyone considered worth working on them. The defense establishment had, in a sense, overinvested in brainpower. In Rosser’s words, one of his colleagues
insisted to his dying day . . . that he never did an iota of mathematics during the War. True enough, the problems were mostly very pedestrian stuff, as mathematics. I was never required to appeal to the Gödel incompleteness theorem, or use the ergodic theorem, or any other key results in that league. One time the tedium was relieved when I had to do something with orthogonal polynomials, and I was glad to get out the Szegoő tome and bone up a bit. But mostly I was working out how fast our rockets would go, and where. On a good day, some problem would be up to the level of a junior course in mathematics.
Call it an extreme case of mathematical snobbery, but we can imagine Shannon sharing the sentiment, even if he wasn’t willing to write it down for posterity. Shannon, fresh from the tony confines of Princeton and MIT and the exciting problems that had consumed his young career, may well have considered it a step backward to calculate where, when, and how large airborne objects went boom.
Yet in his fortunate life, surely one of Shannon’s great strokes of luck was that he found his way to full-time work at Bell Labs not long before the formal American entry into the war. Although he couldn’t have known it then, his military research would prove to be more than just a way of avoiding combat. His principal projects—secrecy systems and cryptography—would introduce him to what cutting-edge computer technology could achieve. Even if he came to all of it reluctantly, he was exposed to it nonetheless. Only later would he hint that it was in the war’s technologies that he began to see the broad outlines of the technological progress to come—progress that he, in his own way, would help bring to pass.