Comment by balsam
14 years ago
Guess who. Ok, when it was still in NY.
"I went to Princeton to do graduate work, and in the spring I went once again to the Bell Labs in New York to apply for a summer job. I loved to tour the Bell Labs. Bill Shockley the guy who invented transistors, would show me around. I remember somebody’s room where they had marked a window: The George Washington Bridge was being built, and these guys in the lab were watching its progress. They had plotted the original curve when the main cable was first put up, and they could measure the small differences as the bridge was being suspended from it, as the curve turned into a parabola. It was just the kind of thing I would like to be able to think of doing. I admired those guys; I was always hoping I could work with them one day."
The fact that they had Shockley tour-guiding Richard Feynman shows that Bell Labs was more than just a big pile of patient capital.
Richard Feynman. An essay about his work on computing machines - http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine...