The Bifurcated Career of Inventor Arthur D. Hall III

Friday, July 17, 2015

The newly acquired papers of systems engineer Arthur David Hall III (1924-2006) document the many potential slips that lie between invention and innovation and the importance of synergies in the innovative endeavor.

Hall was an electronics and systems engineer who spent the first part of his career (1949-1966) in the famed innovation factory of Bell Telephone Laboratories in northern New Jersey, where he helped develop the Picturephone and worked on cable television and systems for educational television and authored a pioneering textbook, A Methodology for Systems Engineering. At some point, however, Hall developed a strong dislike for the highly structured bureaucracy of Bell Labs and working for the regulated monopoly that was A.T. & T. His animus against Ma Bell was so great that he wrote voluminous reports as an expert consultant for the government in the antitrust suit that eventually broke up the Bell System and testified as an expert witness in other trials, a fair number of which were against A.T. & T.

In the second part of his career, Hall operated an independent consulting business and taught systems methodology and public policy issues relating to telecommunications, at Penn’s Annenberg School of Communications. This allowed Hall the time to develop what he hoped would be his crowning achievement, automating and improving the efficiency of agriculture through a system that he patented as “Autofarm” in 1977. “Autofarm” was in some ways a precursor of today’s “green” concerns with sustainability, insofar as it aimed to conserve, use or recycle as much as possible and use plants as natural environmental filters for air and water. At the same time, it was infused with the ecological enthusiasm and dreams of cybernetic utopias that characterized the 1970s, and the idea that small computers could somehow recreate a Jeffersonian idyll of efficient small farmers.

The papers show Hall scrambling in vain to secure any kind of federal or foreign government grant to bring “Autofarm” to fruition. He was not helped by retreating to his own farm in Port Deposit, MD, and spending more and more time in rural isolation. His antipathy to big business also cut him loose from the reality checks that teamwork and budgets provide, and his ideas grew more and more fanciful. He fumed on paper as peer reviewers rejected his texts and his publisher pulped his books as unsalable. He left the mainstream to spin around in eddies.

The contrast found in the papers between the two halves of Hall’s career support the accepted importance of synergy, the bringing together of talented but complementary individuals in places like Bell Labs or the Experimental Station, in carrying invention through to innovation and the contrary dangers of dreaming in relative isolation. There is a current “Autofarm” system, which uses new technologies unavailable to Hall, but it was brought to fruition in the synergistic hothouse of Silicon Valley, and is designed for the needs of modern agribusiness.

Chris Baer is the Assistant Curator in the Manuscripts and Archives department at Hagley.

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