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Good morning, and welcome to the Action Digest.

While much of the internet spent this week "monitoring the situation," we respectfully opted out.

We're more interested in finding situations we have control over and shaping them to our advantage.

Each to their own ;-)

P.s. More action awaits you in our archives, including how Steve Jobs cultivated great taste, the personality trait shared by 1381 millionaires, and why when you’re launching something new, you need social dandelions.

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Unprecedented goals require unprecedented people

In 1909, two AT&T executives walked through the ruins of San Francisco.

Frank Jewett and his boss John Carty were there to figure out how to rebuild the city's telephone network, three years after the 1906 earthquake-fire combo that leveled most of the city, and killed around three thousand people.

They had been sent to restore what was lost, but somewhere among the wreckage, their conversation turned from what had been destroyed, to what had never been built.

The Panama-Pacific International Exposition was coming to San Francisco in 1914—a world's fair celebrating the opening of the Panama Canal and, pointedly, the city's recovery from the earthquake.

What if, by the time it opened, a New Yorker could pick up a telephone and speak with someone standing on the other side of the country?

The idea was nuts. 

In the thirty-three years since the telephone was invented, the furthest any voice had travelled over a wire was from New York to Chicago. It was about 900 miles, barely a third of the way across the country. Every mile of copper weakened the signal. Mechanical amplifiers along the route could boost it back up, but each one added its own distortion. Chain too many together and the voice became a smear of noise.

By all accounts, Chicago was the wall that physics had built.

Yet Jewett and Carty somehow dreamed of tripling that reach in just five years.

For weeks, the pair argued the possibility late into the night, past midnight, and then later still. Jewett explained the circles they kept running in:

"Did we know how to develop such a repeater? No. Why not? Science hadn't yet shown us the way. Did we have any reason to think that she would? Yes. In time? Possibly. What must we do to make 'possibly' into 'probably' in two years? And so on night after night without end almost."

Eventually, they committed, and the task of making it actually happen landed on Jewett's desk. But that desk was not an obviously qualified one. 

AT&T was dominated by engineers at the time, for they were the people who made things. They were the heirs of Edison: tinkerers who worked by trying thousands of combinations until something clicked. The industrial boom of the era had been built on their ingenuity.

Jewett was not an engineer. He had trained as a physicist, with a PhD from Chicago, and was now a manager. He could read a room, charm a skeptic, and think in abstractions, but was not someone who could sit down at a bench and solve the repeater problem himself.

But this is where Jewett's status as an outsider came in handy. After a few months of working the problem from inside AT&T, he realized no amount of engineering talent could solve it. He had a simple intuition that everyone else had missed: engineers had taken the phone line as far as the science of the day could carry it. To go further, they needed the science of tomorrow. 

By the fall of 1910, he was on a train to Chicago, where he went straight to his oldest friend—Robert Millikan, the physicist he had lived with in a boardinghouse during his own graduate school years. 

He walked into Millikan's office and came straight to the point:

"Mr. John J. Carty, my chief, and the other higher-ups in the Bell System, have decided that by 1914, when the San Francisco Fair is to be held, we must be in position, if possible, to telephone from New York to San Francisco."

Then came the ask:

"Let us have one or two, or even three, of the best of the young men who are taking their doctorates with you and are intimately familiar with your field. Let us take them into our laboratory in New York and assign to them the sole task of developing a telephone repeater."

Millikan agreed to help. His first pick was Harvey Fletcher, the graduate student who had helped him run the oil-drop experiment that measured the charge of the electron. 

But Fletcher said no. 

He had a teaching post waiting at Brigham Young in Utah, and he took it. The safer, more familiar road.

Millikan's second pick was a twenty-seven-year-old from rural Connecticut who had almost not made it through his own PhD.

Harold Arnold had started his doctorate at Chicago under the Nobel laureate who had measured the speed of light. Arnold couldn't keep up. At one point he went to Millikan and told him, in so many words, "I will probably have to commit suicide, as I cannot meet Michelson's demands." Millikan took him on as his own student and saved his career.

A few months later, this near-failed physicist was on a train to New York, about to take on a problem no engineer in the country had been able to crack. An improbable mission now rested on the shoulders of an even more improbable man.

Shortly after his arrival, Arnold was asked to inspect a new piece of tech: the “audion”.

It was a small glass tube that could take a weak voice signal and amplify it.

It barely worked.

When the tube ran, a faint blue glow appeared inside it. The glow, its inventor insisted, was essential to its operation. But Arnold saw differently. The blue glow was ionised gas, and the gas was exactly what was destroying the tube's performance.

He didn't argue with the inventor. He went back to the lab and built a version with a thousand times less air inside, and the result was astonishing. The tube's output jumped from tiny fractions of a watt to hundreds.

On 18 October 1913, Arnold built the first true amplifying vacuum tube—a device that could take a weak voice signal and make it strong again without distortion, over and over, at stations spaced across a continent.

For years, the repeater problem had stumped the best engineers at AT&T. A physicist with no background in telephony saw the answer in seconds.

On 17 June 1914, AT&T completed the transcontinental line. Four copper wires strung across 130,000 wooden poles, from New York to the Pacific. 

As a viral launch strategy, Alexander Graham Bell was stationed at a phone in New York and his old assistant Thomas Watson was stationed at a phone in San Francisco.

"Mr. Watson, come here, I want you," Bell said—the same words he had spoken to the same man forty years earlier, at the moment the telephone was first born.

"It would take me a week to get there now," Watson joked.

Four decades earlier, the first words ever spoken over a telephone had travelled between two men in the same building. Now they travelled three thousand miles, and Watson's reply arrived before he could have taken a single step.

Every spring, for the next five years, Jewett wrote a letter to Harvey Fletcher—the first-pick physicist who had rejected him. In 1916, Fletcher finally left Brigham Young and joined him. A year later he hired another young Millikan student, Mervin Kelly, who would one day lead Bell Laboratories through its golden age.

Harold Arnold, meanwhile, was named Bell Labs' first director of research in 1925.

Jewett’s unconventional recruiting philosophy built the institution that, over the next half-century, would invent the transistor, the laser, the solar cell, the communications satellite, and the foundations of the information age.

Three lessons to highlight.

First, a crisis is an opportunity to be ten times bolder.

Jewett and Carty travelled to San Francisco to restore what had been lost. They left having committed to building something that had never existed. When everything around you is already broken, the cost of a wildly ambitious goal is often no higher than the cost of a modest one.

Second, the stranger your mission, the more unconventional your partners must be.

If the thing you're attempting has never been done, every default about who belongs on the team is a default you may have to break. The conventional hire is the conventional outcome. Jewett picked people his entire industry considered unhireable and built the twentieth century with them.

Third, move your thinking to where it's needed, not where it was trained.

Jewett lacked the technical expertise to solve the problem he was assigned, and Arnold had no business entering the telecom industry. But the skills we build inside a field are almost never confined to it. What they'd learned as physicists travelled into a domain that had no idea it needed them. When a bold opportunity shows up in your life, your instinct may be to ask whether you belong. That is usually the wrong question. The right one is whether you suspect you'd bring a unique edge they don't yet have.

Final Calls To Action

• Want to understand the implications of recent advances in tech, culture, and product design? If so, Scott Belsky's monthly analysis is essential reading. In his latest April edition, Scott explores what happens when we can remember everything (and why we might not want to), the three waves of agentic commerce coming for how we buy, and why change management may be the ultimate moat in the AI era.

• As our digital productivity systems become more sophisticated, the craving for analog tools only grows. The Action Method (recently featured in Lifehacker) lets you check your to-do list without accidentally opening an email or a Slack message. Just you, a pen, some premium 80lb Via Vellum Cool White paper, and the quiet space to actually get things done.

• Curious to dive deeper on the story in today’s edition? We recommend reading The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner.

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