Ian M. Ross, a President at Bell Labs, Dies at 85
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Ian M. Ross, who helped perfect the transistor and calculate whether the moons surface could support a spaceships weight, and then went on to lead Bell Laboratories, the legendary fount of technological marvels and Nobel Prize winners, died on March 10 at his home in New Smyrna Beach, Fla. He was 85.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, his wife, Christina, said.
For much of the 20th century Bell Labs was among the worlds largest research institutions. Its mission was to help AT&T, the telephone monopoly and its corporate parent, cope with everything from digital communication to squirrels chewing phone lines. Its thousands of scientists and engineers fostered discoveries like the transistor, the laser and information theory, earning seven Nobel Prizes and 29,000 patents.
Dr. Ross was Bell Labs president when its mission changed radically in 1984, after AT&T had spun off its local phone companies to settle a federal antitrust suit. The loss of these so-called Baby Bells subsidiaries like New York Telephone and Southern Bell opened the door for AT&T to hurl its economic and technological might into new, unregulated businesses to compete with companies like I.B.M.
Bell Labs was the glamorous vanguard of this drive to go beyond communications into all phases of information technology. Preaching urgency, Dr. Ross nudged his army of scientists to align their sometimes spectacularly esoteric schemes and dreams with market needs, going so far as to dispatch some of them to accompany AT&T sales employees on their rounds.
But he refused to give specific instructions to the 10 percent of Bell employees doing basic research, an enterprise that, among other things, yielded proof that the universe started with a Big Bang.
Its a foolish thing to tell a research person what the problem is youll get the answer to that problem and miss a brilliant discovery in the process, he said.
In the three years after AT&Ts breakup, the labs wizards never paused, conjuring wonders like an undersea fiber-optic cable to a superfast computer algorithm for solving complex problems.
In 1996, five years after Dr. Ross retired, AT&T split into three companies, one of which was its old manufacturing arm, renamed Lucent Technologies. Lucent took most of Bell Labs personnel.
Lucent at first performed well, increasing the labs budget and staff. Then the markets for both its shares and products dipped, and in 2006 Lucent merged with Alcatel, a French company. Two years later, Alcatel-Lucent announced that Bell Labs was pulling out of basic science to focus on more immediately marketable fields.
SBC Communications, a former Baby Bell, bought AT&Ts bones (not including Bell Labs) in 2005 and took its name. Ian Munro Ross was born on Aug. 15, 1927, in Southport, England, and joined Bell in 1952 after earning a doctorate in mechanical sciences from the University of Cambridge. William Shockley, who led the team that invented the transistor in 1947, hired him. In a 2009 oral history interview, Dr. Ross said he had intended to stay for no more than a year but gave up that plan after finding the intellectual buzz there exhilarating.
An early assignment was to organize a symposium to tell other companies everything Bell had learned about making transistors, the lightning-fast switches that underpin modern electronics. The fee to attend the symposium was only $25,000, as a down payment on a 5 percent licensing charge. Dr. Ross said the relatively small fee reflected AT&Ts hope that the companies would develop things AT&T could use. Thus did Texas Instruments, Fairchild and Sony get a jump-start on a multibillion-dollar field.
Dr. Rosss early years at Bell were devoted to guiding teams working to improve the transistor. One effort involved making advances in field effect transistors, which became a mainstay of integrated circuits, the term for a set of electronic circuits on a small plate, or chip, of semiconductor material.
Another team developed epitaxy, the growing of specialized silicon crystals to make super-thin semiconductor wafers. The wafers allowed for greater speed and memory and led to a new generation of computers, microprocessors and switching systems.
In the oral history, Dr. Ross said of epitaxy: You know, the reaction, I think, in the industry was a sigh of relief that you could hear from coast to coast. And quite a number of cries, Why didnt I think of that?
Dr. Ross next ran two of Bells semiconductor laboratories and oversaw electronics on Telstar, the first communications satellite. In 1964, he was named managing director of Bellcomm, a Bell systems unit formed solely to plan Apollo moon missions.
Bellcomms tasks included determining that the lunar surface was almost certainly not composed of dust so powdery that a landing vehicle would just keep sinking. NASA said moon missions would not have succeeded without Bellcomms guidance.
After returning to Bell Labs, Dr. Ross was named president in 1979. He was AT&Ts first witness in defending itself against federal charges of antitrust violations in 1981. He called the Bell system interactive and interdependent, but conceded that it had withheld information from competitors.
Dr. Ross belonged to the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Academy of Engineering, and won many industry and professional awards.
He is survived by his wife of 57 years, the former Christina Leinberg; his son, Tim; his daughters, Nancy Ross and Stina Ross; and two grandchildren.
Dr. Ross was described as a quiet man, but he could not help bragging or at least expressing wonderment about the stunning electronic achievements he had helped foster. If we had had the same progress in the aircraft industry, you and I could be flying between London and New York in 500,000-seat planes and the fare would be about 25 cents, he once said.
