James Fisk on developing solid state physics work at Bell Labs.

Fisk:

I was moved out of electronics over here and at that time one of the main jobs that I felt that we had was to set up a team of people, in the solid state area, whose objective would be to really understand the fundamentals. Not to develop this or that, or even to focus on any one thing, although Shockley’s principle idea had always been, I’ve got to find a way to make an amplifier. But he was equally interested in really understanding the fundamentals. And he and I worked together because we had this kind of relationship (pointing to organization chart of '46) and had worked together a great deal for a long time. But we both felt that in order to develop the fundamental understanding, for whatever purpose, whether it was magnetism or what became ultimately a transistor, or whether it was diodes or anything in this general area, that we would have to do two things: get the very best theoretical talent that we could lay hands on, and that turned out to be John Bardeen; and, secondly, to put together a team that represented the various disciplines, both theory and experiment, and not only physics in the normal sense but the preparation of materials, and metallurgy, chemistry, and the whole broad range of disciplines that seemed to us would be essential, but then to focus on fundamentals. And I think those two basic decisions of setting up that kind of a team covering a spectrum of disciplines and bringing in the strongest theoretical people we could find anywhere in the world, were very basic and were made very consciously at that time and have — I suspect dominated the evolution of solid state physics here, since that time.