AT&T mechanical switch reliability crisis and transistor development

And they say — I've been listening to this all my professional career — that we need to do more science, because doing more science will bring us great new things like the transistor. Well, it turns out the guys who won the Nobel Prize, Bardeen, Shockley, and Brattain at Bell Labs, developed the transistor. But they were doing it because they wanted a highly reliable switch. Everybody says, oh, this came out of basic research. No. It came out of the fact that in the old days — you see it on the old movies, you see the switchboard and operators making the connections. Then they got to the point where they had switches, and just down the street from me is a great big AT&T building — it just be full of switches in the old days. Today they could put it all on a little laptop to do all that same switching.