Gotta see each other

Physical proximity, in [Merwin] Kelly's view, was everything. People had to be near one another. phone calls alone wouldn't do. Kelly had even gone so far as to create "branch laboratories" at Western Electric factories so that Bell Labs scientists could get more closely  involved in the transition of their work from development to manufacture.

Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (New York: Penguin, 2012), p. 151