Strange People … But Very Smart – THE VOICE IN THE MACHINE

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THE VOICE IN THE MACHINE

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August 20, 2026

Strange People … But Very Smart

What the people of New Jersey knew about Bell Labs that some of us had to learn from the inside.

Why am I writing this? I am aware of the trap. I look back at the place where I was a long time ago and remember a golden age that, examined closely, turns out to have been ordinary, or at least less fantastic than memory paints. I have worked in and visited many laboratories over the course of my career, most of them excellent, with amazing people, some of whom are still among my most loved friends. But as honest and objective as I can be, none of those places ever gave me the feeling of magic that Bell Labs did. Perhaps that was because I was much younger. Perhaps because I had just moved to a new country, where everything was big and strange to my eyes. Perhaps there really was magic in that place, and I was lucky enough to arrive while the magic was still there, or as we say for beauty, also magic is in the eye of the beholder. I have never quite answered this question, and I am not sure I want to.

Let’s rewind the reel to one late afternoon in February 1988, when I landed at JFK in the middle of one of those North-East Coast snowstorms that make you wonder, while you are still in the air, whether the plane will ever find a landing strip in the milky fog and snow, and manage to land. I had seven suitcases holding everything my family thought we would need for a year, and probably a little more. My wife and our son, two and a half years old, would join me, from Italy, the place where I was born, grew up, and studied, a week later. I had barely seven days to find somewhere to live, buy a car, and take care of a hundred other things I did not yet know existed.

Aaron Rosenberg, the Bell Labs researcher who had invited me to spend a year as a visiting scientist, came to collect me at the airport. Americans, in general, are not so solicitous. America is a country of pioneers, and the unspoken understanding is that if you can manage on your own, good, and if you cannot, you would have done better to stay home. But Aaron was a man in his fifties, kind and understated, erudite across a remarkable range of fields, music, history, biology, and of course his own, voice recognition and verification, and with what I came to think of as a European soul. He had braved the snowstorm to pick me up. "This is going to be the worst part of your trip," he told me as he loaded the suitcases into his classic wood-paneled station wagon, and we set off while the snow was still falling in a white curtain lit by oncoming headlights. He drove me to dinner at his house in New Jersey before dropping me at the hotel in Murray Hill, a short walk from the laboratories.

We crossed the Verrazzano Bridge, which pulled an involuntary wow out of me, then Staten Island, the Goethals Bridge, and suddenly we were in the suburban world of New Jersey, when the snow stopped and the sky opened, clear and full of stars. It was the first time I had seen suburban America. On earlier trips I had visited New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, but never the suburbs, and my first impression, that crisp winter evening, was that I had landed in an enormous campground: low wooden houses scattered among the trees, their windows glowing faintly in the dark, and a sense of quietness after the crazy turnpike traffic. Aaron took me home, where his wife Judith, motherly and warm, had made dinner for me, and then to the hotel where I would stay for a few days, or at least until I would find a permanent accommodation. Everything would begin the next morning.

There is a small detail I have never quite lived down. The day after I arrived with my seven suitcases, I did the count again and found only six. I had left one at the airport. But by then I had so much else to think about that I decided the missing suitcase could wait.

During that first week, while I was looking for somewhere to live, I heard for the first time something I would go on hearing for years. When landlords asked where I would be working and I answered Bell Labs, they would smile and say, without fail, "Ah, Bell Labs. Strange people, but very smart." The woman who would become my landlady said it too. Miss Keller was a retired chemist who lived alone in Springfield. The apartment she rented me was just above hers, on the second floor, in a condominium of small buildings spread across a green. She was missing several fingers on each hand, and on the right she wore a kind of polished steel pincer, connected by cables to her forearm, that opened and closed as she moved it. It frightened my son a little, but she was cheerful and kind, and always enjoyed a...