The Genius of Bell Labs' Bill Baker

William O. Baker, who guided research at Bell Telephone Laboratories during its most prolific era of discovery, played a legendary role in developing and deploying critical espionage and surveillance technologies during the Cold War, and shaped fundamental policies for the support of US science and engineering, died at 90 in a New Jersey nursing home last October. Under Baker, Bell Labs made possible today's proliferation of optical fiber and cell phone communications. All of that was the result of research in solid state physics, materials science, computing science, the behavioral sciences, and communications theory. Baker's ability to manage researchers while advancing their careers was low-key but renowned. Most of all, however, he perceived research management as regulating a system of connections between ideas, people and the ultimate laboratory goal of application. Baker said discoveries that led to such innovations as the transistor, the solar cell, laser superconductors, polymer carbon deposition techniques, among others of his era, were absolutely basic to systems innovation.