Creative Tension (Part 2):
From Ellison's perspective, his antimony glass was the direct result of the kind of independent, exploratory work he loves most, the kind of work he has acquired the credibility to pursue, the kind of work a setting like Corning makes possible -- and the kind of work Corning is unusually positioned to exploit.
How does this kind of R&D work? "I wonder about something," Ellison says. "I see someone who could use a material with a particular attribute, and I think, 'Let me see if I can make a material with that attribute.' Or I make something with interesting attributes -- and then I wonder if someone could use it."
Antimony-silicate glass falls into the first category -- an invention aimed at a specific problem. Although fiber-optic cables are made of impossibly clear glass, the glass is not so completely transparent that light will travel through it indefinitely without dimming and fuzzing. Light flashed into the best optical fibers fades after about 80 miles and needs to be refreshed -- brightened, sharpened, cleaned up, and zapped on its way again. Quite simply, the signals need to be amplified.
Amplification is a necessary evil, and it used to be done by converting the light back to electronic signals, amplifying those, and converting the restored signals back to light to continue their journey. ( Involved as it all sounds, amplification happens so quickly that phone conversations proceed without any hiccups. ) These days, the job of amplification is done much more efficiently and cheaply using lasers and special "amplifier fibers." Certain kinds of light, when pumped into certain kinds of glass fiber, actually amplify the signals in the fiber. Light, then, can be used to amplify and focus other light.
Amplifier fiber is used in tiny quantities compared to the millions of miles of fiber-optic cable laid across the country: Tiny loops of amplifier fiber, like very fine fishing wire, do the job. But amplifiers are vital, and they are a lucrative business.
And what kind of glass does an amazing job of refreshing fiber-optic signals? Adam Ellison's new antimony-silicate fiber. "It blows away everything else in terms of performance. The bandwidth it will amplify exceeds anything known. It's the best material we've found," says Ellison.
Even when his bosses didn't think it was worth pursuing, and even when antimony-silicate glass proved difficult to make into fiber, Ellison persevered. Corning's culture encourages people to champion their ideas; at least formally, scientists are "required" to spend 10% of their time pursuing slightly crazy ideas. ( Most Corning R&D employees chuckle at the thought of having half a day a week free for unhurried exploration. ) There's even a Corning phrase for the experiments such projects involve: "Friday afternoon experiments," things done in the last couple of hours of the workweek.
One whole genomics-technology business is being built on an idea that at one point was killed by the head of research, but which was pursued nonetheless through Friday afternoon experiments. And antimony-silicate glass could prove vital in the frenzied world of optical networking. "Corning has had three inventions that totally changed the world," says Ellison, who, like most of his colleagues, is acutely tuned to Corning's history. "How many companies have done that?
"Here, people say, 'We could revolutionize the world if we did this.' They don't say, 'We could make $100 million if we did this.' "
Equally important is the fact that Corning has 149 years of experience turning ideas into manufacturable products. "We know how to make it happen," says Ellison.
Indeed, Corning's manufacturing mastery is as vital to its success as its R&D is, and it inspires a certain awe and humility among the company's scientists.
Nick Borrelli is a colleague of Ellison as well as a fellow in Echeverr?a's group. Fellow is the highest scientific rank there is at Corning. Borrelli has a career of five-dozen patents and a record of inventions that has made the company tens of millions of dollars, and is himself pursuing such arcane notions as the ultimate optical fiber: one not with a glass core, but with a hollow core, so that light can streak along in a vacuum.
"We know how to handle glass at Corning like no one in history," says Borrelli. "I'm not smart enough to have an idea that Corning is not smart enough to be able to make."
Miracles of Glass ( II )
A single piece of optical fiber -- pulled glass -- is about the size of a strand of hair. Information flows through the piece of glass thread in a simple way -- as digital Morse code: flashes of light and no light.
The light is sent into the fiber with a tiny laser, whose important parts are each the size of a grain of rice. The laser pulses away, sending coded information into the fiber.
So far, this is not really any more difficult to envision than the old signal-corps sailors, standing on the deck of a Navy ship, flashing away in Morse code with a big light to another ship on the horizon. But here's where it gets truly amazing.
One laser, flashing light into one fiber, can send 130,000 simultaneous phone conversations down the fiber. That single channel carries that amount of information -- not just the words of all of those conversations, but also the tone, the volume, and the emotion, not to mention the phone number -- by flashing on and off 10 billion times a second.
Through a marvelously ingenious effort at packaging, single strands of fiber now routinely carry not just one channel of light, but 40 channels. That is, one thin strand of optical fiber can receive and transmit light from 40 lasers at the same time. Each of those lasers emits a slightly different color light, so the fiber can carry them without confusing them. A single strand of fiber can carry more than 5 million simultaneous phone conversations ( or emails, Web pages, or corporate-data streams ).
When a fiber is carrying 40 channels of light, it is sending 400 billion distinct flashes of light -- on! off on! off -- a second. How many is 400 billion pulses? To live for 400 billion seconds, you'd have to live to be 12,684 years old.
Four-hundred billion flashes a second, through a single thread.
The Creative Mind-Set: The Yenta of Sullivan Park
Dana Bookbinder, who earned a PhD from MIT in 1982, has a personality that is equal parts Robin Williams and Barbra Streisand. He likes doing "chemistry magic" shows for kids, he is constantly playing whatever audience he has for a groaning laugh, and he routinely circles Sullivan Park dispensing impossibly rich chocolate truffles that he has risen at 5 AM to make. He can also tell you -- chemically speaking -- why chocolate is so appealing. "It's caffeine without a methyl group attached."
Like Ellison, Bookbinder is a hands-on bench chemist, a man who likes to "mix stuff up in the lab, see it with my own eyes. Why is it behaving that way? I make a joke about myself: I think like an atom. If I were an atom, and I looked around, what would I see? What would I want to bond with?"
Bookbinder has a wide-ranging intellectual appetite. While at Corning, he has worked on both the U.S. Olympic bobsled and the performance of Geoff Bodine's race cars. His cheerful gabbiness and eagerness to explain complicated science in simple terms can obscure the fact that the work he does is well beyond the reach of ordinary people.
When he was at GE Plastics, Bookbinder helped invent the form of Lexan plastic that makes compact discs cheap and easy to mass-produce. ( "My mother tells people I invented the CD -- I wish." ) At Corning, just last year, he had a flash of insight that allowed the company's fiber factories to increase their productivity by a significant percentage -- enough to show up in the company's per-share earnings a couple of quarters later -- at a time when every Corning fiber factory was running at 100% of capacity, with orders waiting to be filled. ( Technically, Bookbinder is not even part of the fiber-optic research groups; he's assigned to the biochemistry core-technology group. )
Over the past few years, working for the company that invented Pyrex, Bookbinder invented a new kind of plastic labware that is accelerating the drug-discovery process at pharmaceutical companies.
And yet, it is as much Bookbinder's gregariousness as his scientific insight that serves Corning so well. Bookbinder is the yenta of Sullivan Park. He is a tireless gossip who arrives at Sullivan Park around 8:00 or 8:15 every morning, but he rarely reaches his office until after 9:30, because he's chatting with people as he wanders around. He knows what dozens of his colleagues are working on, have worked on, and wish that they were working on.
Far from being an idle pastime or simple nosiness, Bookbinder-as-yenta is a vital part of the Sullivan Park R&D operation, a one-man knowledge-exchange system of unusual capacity, insight, and weak jokes.
So he bumped into a guy one day doing work on a certain kind of filter made of thin layers of material laid down on high-quality glass. "I said, 'How are you? What problems are you working on?' " The guy did have a problem: When Corning went to cut the painstakingly prepared glass sandwiches into filters, the glass tended to shatter, scattering small shards everywhere.
"They were taking this perfect thing, putting a diamond saw to it, and ruining it," says Bookbinder. As it happened, he knew of a fluid that binds to glass, but that doesn't stick to anything else. He suggested that if the scientist used that fluid while cutting, it would keep the glass from flying into shards.
And how did he know about that fluid? Well, he happened to be talking to another scientist not so long ago . . .
Bookbinder got on an elevator with an acquaintance one day, asked his trademark question -- "What's your hardest problem?" -- and ended up getting off with the scientist to help him bang out a solution and provide some contacts. Often, Bookbinder gets as much help from these apparently casual conversations as he gives.
How did last year's dramatic breakthrough for the company's optical-fiber factories happen? "Well," says Bookbinder, "a friend and I were shooting the breeze, talking about work. I had some chemistry thing I was showing him. I was saying, 'What can we do with it?' " Six months later, the factories had implemented the change that resulted from that conversation.
Bookbinder's meandering curiosity is not a personal quality that Corning has always appreciated. He was one of the first midcareer scientists to be hired at Sullivan Park. ( He and his wife, Andrea, who is now a chemical engineer at Sullivan Park, had been at GE Plastics for nine years. ) "Frankly, the experience was not particularly pleasurable for the first couple years," says Bookbinder. "I have a very aggressive personality, a very assertive personality, and they didn't know what to do with me. They were treating me like a classic new hire -- a young scientist who didn't really know much."
Bookbinder says that in nine years at Corning, he's only had one worthwhile direct supervisor -- his current one. "The thing I value most is my freedom," he says. "I'm very cooperative. But if someone tells me that what I'm doing has no value, that I'm working on the wrong things -- and we've got 10 patents and product going out the door -- well, I'm going to keep right on doing what I'm doing."
Partly because of the larger culture at Corning, partly because of the senior management at Sullivan Park, and partly because of Bookbinder's own personal temperament and goals, he didn't really worry about what his immediate bosses thought. "Dana was the earliest midcareer hire we did," says David Morse, who was once one of Bookbinder's senior managers. "We needed to learn to hire people like that -- to preserve what's good at Corning and maximize what's new. When Dana came here, I said, 'This is what I see as your potential, here's how we manage your career to do that, and here's why that will be fun.' "
For the most part these days, says Bookbinder, "I can work on things that I think are important without being needled about it. They trust me, and they know that I won't embarrass them, wasting a lot of money and effort. If a project isn't working, I tell them. If I'm out of ideas, if I can't find the right person, I'll tell them. They know I will go figure stuff out that will make money and create jobs.
"This company has a 140-year history of inventors. This company realizes that invention is its whole lifeblood. I can see through a bad boss or two. There are a lot of neat people here. And I have a tremendous amount of fun at what I do."
Indeed, this year Bookbinder received Corning's Stookey Award for outstanding exploratory research, a career honor named to commemorate one of the company's distinguished researchers. Dana Bookbinder is 43 years old.
Miracles of Glass ( III )
Sullivan Park is 1.3 million square feet of lab, factory, and office space -- about the size of a large suburban shopping mall. The space has been doubled in the past five years, to accommodate a doubling of research funds and staff as Corning refreshes its commitment to innovation.
The halls of Sullivan Park actually smell like a laboratory -- with a faint chemical tang -- and parts of the place are crowded with people wearing lab coats, shouldering past each other.
The facility has a wide range of capacities -- the ability to make glass; to make fiber; to make optical devices; to do molecular, even quantum, analysis of almost any substance. It is a sometimes-jarring mix of refined science and industrial muscle. There are clean rooms where researchers wear bunny suits; there are places where forklifts and bucket trucks are parked in the halls.
And there are signs everywhere that this is quite serious, sometimes dangerous, business. Sullivan Park has four separate emergency systems, each with its own color code and alarm pulls: fire ( red ), medical ( blue ), hazardous materials ( yellow ), and vacuum ( green ). Emergency medical teams are in place, and there are depots of paramedic supplies at various points around the building. Stretchers are bolted to the walls, as are cardiac defibrillators.
Scientists Are People Too
Adam Ellison's khakis are sprinkled with pin-sized holes, burn marks where liquid glass, thousands of degrees hot, has spattered his pants. He roams the halls of Sullivan Park at a lope -- he says he once clocked a typical day of racing between labs at about three miles -- a pair of protective goggles slung around his neck. Ellison sounds a little bit like the Cookie Monster, from Sesame Street: He speaks with a perpetual croak, because one of his vocal chords is paralyzed. "It's a problem at Corning," he says wryly, "because if I can't shout, it reduces my ability to argue for my point of view."
A common layman's notion about science is that, as a profession, it might somehow be above personalities, or pettiness, or even substantive disputes. Got a disagreement? Do an experiment. If science is about facts, what's there to argue about?
Plenty, actually. To start, there are the usual questions of what to spend money on, which projects are most important, and which ideas are most promising. Day-to-day bench science may ultimately reach conclusions about things, but arriving at conclusions is a process filled with trial and error. Which approach is quickest? Which is most likely to produce results? Scientists at Sullivan Park spend large chunks of their time not in the lab, but in meetings, trying to sort out such questions.
And the intersection of modern science and modern technology is a surprisingly elusive, shifting crossroad. Scientists at Corning have been studying glass for a century, and each year, more than 1,000 people at Sullivan Park alone produce a huge body of new research. But Corning, like many companies, doesn't quite understand how its products do everything that they do, or why. Bookbinder just recently solved some mysterious and unnerving behavior in the company's optical fiber by discovering that it contains an ingredient -- a contaminant -- that no one had ever suspected was there. How much of the "dirt" is in the fiber? So little that Bookbinder had to infer its presence logically. Sullivan Park's millions of dollars' worth of high-powered analysis equipment couldn't detect it, because it is in the parts-per-trillion: the equivalent of 12 inches of the distance from the earth to the sun.
One of the secrets to managing creativity, at least scientific creativity, turns out to be that, like most other kinds of management, it's ultimately all about people. "The downside to any project here," says Ellison, "is almost invariably a human thing. The challenge is to corral all of these egos and make sure that they don't stomp all over each other."
Human relations -- teamwork, ability to take criticism, ability to mentor, ability to entertain other points of view -- is a very large part of the researchers' performance reviews. "If I were technically brilliant, but a jerk," says Ellison, "I wouldn't last too long here. I'm an extrovert. People often say that your greatest asset can also be your greatest weakness. Being an extrovert is my greatest asset -- and my greatest weakness.
"And that very point was in my last performance review -- that the way for me to enhance my performance here at Corning was to be more cautious about how people react to me. To give them time to speak their minds. I suspect that's the most common kind of issue in discussing people's performance -- not, 'You need to learn more about optical physics.' "
The other challenge of managing creativity -- whether you're dealing with people who write Hallmark greeting cards or people at Sullivan Park -- is deciding how to measure and reward productivity. "I regard research as a low-probability enterprise," says Ellison. "I melt something, I get all excited about it, but I don't think I'm going to be shipping a product anytime soon. I gird myself for disappointment every day, because I know that only 1%, or maybe 3%, of my effort will ever pay off." Credibility, which comes slowly, is won by having good ideas, playing them out, helping colleagues, and eventually coming up with something useful.
"Huge numbers of ideas wind up going nowhere," says Ellison. "Once in a while you have one that has a big impact -- a breakthrough that dwarfs what's been spent on you. So our reward structure has to be different."
In fact, what makes Ellison so happy at Corning has little to do with pay or benefits, and a lot to do with the two senior technicians who help him do his research, and with the new high-purity melting rooms that Corning is building, at a cost of $3 million, so that he can do more experiments.
"I would hate to be competing against me," says Ellison. "At Argonne, I was so desperate for a technician that I offered to pay for one out of my own pocket. Here, not long after I came, I was assigned a second full-time technician -- a man with 30 years' experience, who has forgotten more about making glass than I will ever learn. He has tripled my research capability.
"In four years here, I've done eight times the work I did for my PhD thesis. Intellectually, I gallivant the world. Professionally, the quality of science I've done here exceeds that of anything I've done before. The stakes are higher, and I'm much, much more motivated to understand."
Ellison pauses. "I certianly have no want of resources. That, in fact, is the reward."
Miracles of Glass ( IV )
One of the glasses that Corning makes -- a UV polarizing glass -- is so specialized that an entire year's production would fit in a single briefcase. Retail cost? $40 million. Corning made the 200-inch mirror for the Hale Telescope atop Mt. Palomar, the glass for the mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope, and the window glass for every manned American spacecraft from Mercury to the shuttle.
During the early heyday of the railroads, Corning solved a vexing, dangerous problem, which was to design signal-lantern glass that wouldn't shatter, despite being hot on the inside and covered with ice or snow on the outside.
Corning has also had some singular failures, which it keeps close track of. The company developed an extremely fire-resistant glass-polymer material and tried to sell it to the airlines for use as an airplane interior. It suffered from two problems: It was much heavier than what the weight-sensitive airlines were already using, and it was ugly. That product -- which is called Corten -- remains on the shelf, waiting for a market.
And for years, Corning bet that the best foundation for computer disk drives was a glass ceramic. Corning even built a factory to manufacture glass substrates for computer disk drives. The problem was, they couldn't convince anyone else. In 1995, Corning finally shut down the glass disk-drive business.
The Right People On The Right Projects
A manager changed Doug Allan's life -- altering not just the arc of his career, but the way he thinks about himself. "What difference has Lina Echeverr?a made in my life? All the difference in the world," says Allan, 44, a research associate who has a PhD in theoretical physics from MIT. "She helped me grow up. She utterly changed my attitude about what it means to contribute to this lab."
Not that Allan was a novice when he ended up in Echeverr?a's glass-research group -- at least not a scientific novice. He had been at Corning a decade, working one-on-one with a Corning fellow, developing techniques for quantum-mechanical modeling. Basically, Allan was trying to develop equations to predict and explain the behavior of all kinds of materials based on their molecular structure. |
