Among the giants: Mervin J. Kelly: Manager and motivator: The director of Bell Laboratories during an exciting 23-year period is credited with asking the right questions and finding the best people to answer them

Electronics history is often recorded as a panorama of dramatic inventions - the computer, the transistor, the integrated circuit, and so on - and it is sometimes easy to forget that brilliant human beings created these inventions. It is even easier to forget that there were others who first spotted promise in the young inventors, hired them, pointed them in promising directions, organized them into teams, and then marshaled the resources without which their creativity might well have been for naught.