2016-4-7

A new age makes large demands. At Bell Labs, it required the efforts of tens of thousands of scientists and engineers over many decades—millions of “man-hours,” in the parlance of AT&T, which made a habit of calculating its employees’ toil to a degree that made its workers proud while also keeping the U.S. government (which closely monitored the company’s business practices and long-distance phone monopoly) at bay.

为了满足新时代人们对通讯的大量的要求，根据美国电话电报公司(AT&T)报告，成千上万的科学家和工程师在贝尔实验室的努力在数十年，等价于近百万“工时”的开发历程,这使得计算员工辛劳的习惯在一定程度上让员工自豪的同时也让美国政府(密切关注公司的业务实践和长途电话垄断)。

For reasons that are conceptual as well as practical, this book does not focus on those tens of thousands of Bell Laboratories workers. 

无论从概念上还是实际细节上，这本书不对那些成千上万的贝尔实验室工人做详细的描述。

Instead, it looks primarily at the lives of a select and representative few: Mervin Kelly, Jim Fisk, William Shockley, Claude Shannon, John Pierce, and William Baker. Some of these names are notorious—Shockley, for instance, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 and in his later years steadfastly pursued a scientific link between race and intelligence.

文中讲选择其中具有鲜活代表的人物进行讲述:默文·凯利,吉姆•Fisk威廉·肖克利克劳德·香农,约翰•皮尔斯和威廉·贝克、notorious-Shockley,例如,1956年获得了诺贝尔物理学奖,晚年坚决推崇科学种族与智力的关系。

Others, such as Shannon, are familiar to those within a certain area of interest (in Shannon’s case, mathematics and artificial intelligence) while remaining largely unknown to the general public. Pierce, a nearly forgotten figure, was the father of satellite communications and an instigator of more ideas than can be properly accounted for here. Kelly, Fisk, and Baker were presidents of the Labs, and served as stewards during the institution’s golden age. 

其他人,如香农,熟悉里面的某一个感兴趣的领域(在香农的情况下,数学和人工智能),而很大程度上是未知的公众。皮尔斯,一个几乎被遗忘的人物,是卫星通信的父亲和一个煽动者的更多的想法可以在这里正确。凯利,国库,贝克总统的实验室,并担任干事期间该机构的黄金时代。

All these men knew one another, and some were extremely close. With the exception of Mervin Kelly, the eldest of the group, they were sometimes considered members of a band of Bell Labs revolutionaries known as the Young Turks. What bound them was a shared belief in the nearly sacred mission of Bell Laboratories and the importance of technological innovation.

所有这些人都知道彼此,有些关系非常亲近。除了默文·凯利,集团的老大,他们有时认为是贝尔实验室的一个乐队的成员革命者被称为“少壮派”。绑定是一个共享的信念什么近神圣使命的贝尔实验室和技术创新的重要性。

The men preferred to think they worked not in a laboratory but in what Kelly once called “an institute of creative technology.” This description aimed to inform the world that the line between the art and science of what Bell scientists did wasn’t always distinct. 

这些男人们更倾向于认为他们不是在一个实验室工作但在凯利曾经所谓的“创新科技的一个研究所。“这描述旨在告诉世界,艺术和科学之间的界线贝尔科学家所做的并不总是不同的。

Moreover, while many of Kelly’s colleagues might have been eccentrics, few were dreamers in the less flattering sense of the word. They were paid for their imaginative abilities. But they were also paid for working within a culture, and within an institution, where the very point of new ideas was to make them into new things.

此外,虽然许多凯利的同事可能是怪人,很少做梦的感觉不那么光彩。他们支付他们的想象能力。但他们也支付工作在一个文化,和在一个机构,新思想的出发点是使成新的东西。