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The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
Illustrated in B/W. A sweeping, atmospheric history of Bell Labs that highlights its unparalleled role as an incubator of innovation and birthplace of the century's most influential technologies.
432 pages, Hardcover
First published April 13, 2012
About the author
Jon Gertner
2 books115 followersIn addition to writing books, I’m a longtime contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. My journalism and book reviews have also appeared in Wired, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. My magazine and newspaper stories mainly address contemporary issues in science, technology, and business. My books, however, focus on historical episodes that have had a significant but underappreciated influence. To put it slightly differently: In my longer projects, I’m trying to pay close attention to certain aspects of our past so we can better understand the present, and perhaps the future.
My first book, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (Penguin Press, 2012) chronicles a generation of scientists working at the 20th Century’s greatest laboratory and explores the importance of technological innovation. The Ice at the End of the World, (Random House, 2019) details 150 years of exploration and investigation on the Greenland ice sheet, beginning in the 1880s. A story about the process of scientific discovery, the book aims to tell how the work in Greenland, aided by an evolving array of technological tools, has led us to a profound understanding of our current climate crisis.
My next book for Random House will examine NASA’s long-running Voyager mission—its engineering, scientific observations, and legacy. The book will likewise explore the larger ideas, as well as the underlying principles, of long-term projects and durability.
To read more about me, and find links to some of my magazine journalism, you can go to: http://jongertner.net/articles/
My first book, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (Penguin Press, 2012) chronicles a generation of scientists working at the 20th Century’s greatest laboratory and explores the importance of technological innovation. The Ice at the End of the World, (Random House, 2019) details 150 years of exploration and investigation on the Greenland ice sheet, beginning in the 1880s. A story about the process of scientific discovery, the book aims to tell how the work in Greenland, aided by an evolving array of technological tools, has led us to a profound understanding of our current climate crisis.
My next book for Random House will examine NASA’s long-running Voyager mission—its engineering, scientific observations, and legacy. The book will likewise explore the larger ideas, as well as the underlying principles, of long-term projects and durability.
To read more about me, and find links to some of my magazine journalism, you can go to: http://jongertner.net/articles/
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December 29, 2015
The Idea Factory is a fascinating book for anyone interesting in the process of innovation. The book follows the particular example of Bell Labs, which at its peak in ~1940-70 was a 1000+ PhD behemoth conducting full-stack research/development/deployment in communications, with decades of runway enabled by its parent company’s (AT&T) massive government-regulated monopoly. Through conscious top down design/strategy the lab was able to sustain a golden age of innovation: it developed a vast array of transformative technologies including transistors, photovoltaics, digital transmissions, fiber optics, radio astronomy, CCDs, lasers, UNIX, C, and even supported a range of pure research results such as Shannon’s information theory.
For me, the core question evoked by the book is the following: What is the best approach to fostering innovation? Universities are one particular model (though they are not full stack). Private institutions or prizes are another. The model studied in detail in this book is the singular (and arguably not easily reproducible) example of the Bell Labs model: a massive industrial research lab living comfortably within a huge government-regulated monopoly. The core idea was to pack thousands of researchers into one physical location, give them a vertical as a constraint (communications in this case), and otherwise set them loose. This quantity of talent at one physical location was (and still is) historically unprecedented.
Many aspects of the lab were explicitly designed top down with the goal of supporting innovation in mind. For instance, the physical space was arranged along a large corridor so that chemists, physicists, mathematicians and electrical engineers, with focus on both theory/applications were forced to mingle in serendipitous interactions. As another example, the labs created courses to diffuse the knowledge through the organization, effectively creating a small college. Another benefit of the organizational structure was the so called “going to the person who wrote the book” - the idea being that among so many people there was an expert for everything, so everyone had instant access to the best people in any particular vertical of interest.
However, among so many benefits of the organization structure, the Bell Labs model came with its own set of problems. On one hand, AT&T was a massive monopoly ensuring the continued existence of Bell Labs, but this was a double-edged sword because the executives had to constantly fight pressure from the government who repeatedly tried to break up the monopoly. The need to stay on the good side of government introduced a whole layer of complexities and compromises and constrained the research. For instance, as part of a settlement AT&T had to agree to stay out of the quickly emerging computing business. Additionally, they had to work on several projects that were not necessarily related to AT&T’s profits, but pleased various government incentives or justified the lab’s existence as beneficial to the wider society. Also, their patents had to be released and licensed at low prices. Therefore, innovations developed at AT&T’s Bell Labs through a long and expensive process formed the basis of several companies that would build on this work and later compete with AT&T.
For reasons not made entirely clear (only few unconvincing hints are given), the Bell Labs started to slowly die down near the end of 1970’s. For instance, they missed the development of the Integrated Circuit, which instead came from startups in the nascent Silicon Valley such as Texas Instruments and Fairchild semiconductors (these companies were often staffed by ex-Bell Labs employees). An argument could be made that perhaps Silicon Valley came up with a better (or faster) model of innovation, based around smaller competing units instead of one large, monolithic lab whose continued existence does not necessarily depend on the speed of its research. Eventually, the lab was severely downsized as a result of the monopolistic breakup of the Bell System in 1982. With it came the end of an era, concluding one of the most interesting large-scale experiments on innovation.
A lot of these topics are very nicely covered in the book, but if I had to pick on something it would be that the book missed a chance to zoom out and provide a more concrete analysis of pros/cons of different funding models of innovation from the historical perspective. Bell Labs is just one experiment, but we have data from many other forms of institutions, and these were not explicitly compared or contrasted.
Unsorted additional interesting points:
- Not all Bell Labs projects along the way were successful. For example, AT&T made a large bet on a picture phone, for which technology existed already back in 1960s. However, despite market research indicating that people wanted a picture phone, the actual product was a decisive flop. It turned out that people were content (and even preferred) non-visual communication over the phone, and it also turned out that people don’t really know what they want if you survey them, especially when it has something to do with a new, not yet existing product (Steve Jobs knows something about this too). Indeed, I have FaceTime on my iPhone but rarely ever use it. In fact, I rarely ever conduct ordinary phone calls too, preferring instead a simple, asynchronous chat. Sometimes technology offers a solution to a problem that isn’t.
- The book drew an interesting distinction between two types of innovations: one is a “if I don’t do this someone else will within the next few years”, for ideas that are “in the air”, and it’s mostly a race to who does it first (the transistor is argued by its inventors to be of this form). On the other end of the spectrum are innovations that present a much larger and less anticipated leap (Shannon’s information theory being an example). It seems that in practice one is mostly rewarded for being first without regard to this distinction, which might sometimes unfortunately incentivize work on the first type of problems. For example, the Bell Labs scientists still got the Nobel Prize for the transistor, even though they practically rushed it to publication in fear of being scooped by one university research lab that was suspected to be on the verge of discovering it as well.
- Many ideas about what the future might look like are not necessarily wrong, just early. The book highlights several examples of people struggling with this dilemma, e.g. with the example of satellites in space used for communications. Although this point, along with its common analogy of catching a wave during surfing is widely appreciated.
- Another insight offered by the book was the image of progress looking somewhat like a staircase, but the steps are relatively small and involve small leaps and myriads of small innovations and improvements. Therefore, zooming out innovation across many disciplines looks mostly like a smooth line, and the edges of the stairs are only visible on short time scales.
- Another distinction drawn by the book is between “invention” and “innovation”. The former is about the act of coming up with a new, novel idea. Meanwhile the latter is taking that idea and scaling it into a marketable, mass producible product (which can in fact be quite a lot more complex and time demanding). Usually these two pieces are done by different institutions, but Bell Labs was careful to draw the distinction since they were involved with the full vertical stack, from theory on the bottom to marketable products at the end.
- I enjoyed seeing the transistor as a very nice example of creative destruction at work. The transistor deprecated almost two decades of research on perfecting vacuum tubes. To the credit of AT&T’s executives, they encouraged its development despite the imminent cannibalization of much of their vacuum tube business. An amusing case study of the reverse (and wrong) strategy is Kodak, who pioneered the creation of the digital camera but failed to invest due to their fear of eating into their traditional (and profitable) business of selling chemicals for film.
- Another fun (though brief) anecdote was Bell Labs’ large-scale experiment on productivity of its employees. They looked at a number of possible predictors for a productive employee (measured by number of filed patents), and discovered that most variables showed relatively unconvincing correlations. Amusingly, the one that showed strongest correlation was that the most successful employees had lunches with Harry Nyquist. The running theory was that Nyquist was a great person to talk to for his talent of asking very good questions.
There are many (too many!) other fun anecdotes and thoughts along the way, which I cannot hope to serialize here. In summary, a great book not only for its content, but also for the wider thoughts it elicits and teases. I have to read this again at some point.
For me, the core question evoked by the book is the following: What is the best approach to fostering innovation? Universities are one particular model (though they are not full stack). Private institutions or prizes are another. The model studied in detail in this book is the singular (and arguably not easily reproducible) example of the Bell Labs model: a massive industrial research lab living comfortably within a huge government-regulated monopoly. The core idea was to pack thousands of researchers into one physical location, give them a vertical as a constraint (communications in this case), and otherwise set them loose. This quantity of talent at one physical location was (and still is) historically unprecedented.
Many aspects of the lab were explicitly designed top down with the goal of supporting innovation in mind. For instance, the physical space was arranged along a large corridor so that chemists, physicists, mathematicians and electrical engineers, with focus on both theory/applications were forced to mingle in serendipitous interactions. As another example, the labs created courses to diffuse the knowledge through the organization, effectively creating a small college. Another benefit of the organizational structure was the so called “going to the person who wrote the book” - the idea being that among so many people there was an expert for everything, so everyone had instant access to the best people in any particular vertical of interest.
However, among so many benefits of the organization structure, the Bell Labs model came with its own set of problems. On one hand, AT&T was a massive monopoly ensuring the continued existence of Bell Labs, but this was a double-edged sword because the executives had to constantly fight pressure from the government who repeatedly tried to break up the monopoly. The need to stay on the good side of government introduced a whole layer of complexities and compromises and constrained the research. For instance, as part of a settlement AT&T had to agree to stay out of the quickly emerging computing business. Additionally, they had to work on several projects that were not necessarily related to AT&T’s profits, but pleased various government incentives or justified the lab’s existence as beneficial to the wider society. Also, their patents had to be released and licensed at low prices. Therefore, innovations developed at AT&T’s Bell Labs through a long and expensive process formed the basis of several companies that would build on this work and later compete with AT&T.
For reasons not made entirely clear (only few unconvincing hints are given), the Bell Labs started to slowly die down near the end of 1970’s. For instance, they missed the development of the Integrated Circuit, which instead came from startups in the nascent Silicon Valley such as Texas Instruments and Fairchild semiconductors (these companies were often staffed by ex-Bell Labs employees). An argument could be made that perhaps Silicon Valley came up with a better (or faster) model of innovation, based around smaller competing units instead of one large, monolithic lab whose continued existence does not necessarily depend on the speed of its research. Eventually, the lab was severely downsized as a result of the monopolistic breakup of the Bell System in 1982. With it came the end of an era, concluding one of the most interesting large-scale experiments on innovation.
A lot of these topics are very nicely covered in the book, but if I had to pick on something it would be that the book missed a chance to zoom out and provide a more concrete analysis of pros/cons of different funding models of innovation from the historical perspective. Bell Labs is just one experiment, but we have data from many other forms of institutions, and these were not explicitly compared or contrasted.
Unsorted additional interesting points:
- Not all Bell Labs projects along the way were successful. For example, AT&T made a large bet on a picture phone, for which technology existed already back in 1960s. However, despite market research indicating that people wanted a picture phone, the actual product was a decisive flop. It turned out that people were content (and even preferred) non-visual communication over the phone, and it also turned out that people don’t really know what they want if you survey them, especially when it has something to do with a new, not yet existing product (Steve Jobs knows something about this too). Indeed, I have FaceTime on my iPhone but rarely ever use it. In fact, I rarely ever conduct ordinary phone calls too, preferring instead a simple, asynchronous chat. Sometimes technology offers a solution to a problem that isn’t.
- The book drew an interesting distinction between two types of innovations: one is a “if I don’t do this someone else will within the next few years”, for ideas that are “in the air”, and it’s mostly a race to who does it first (the transistor is argued by its inventors to be of this form). On the other end of the spectrum are innovations that present a much larger and less anticipated leap (Shannon’s information theory being an example). It seems that in practice one is mostly rewarded for being first without regard to this distinction, which might sometimes unfortunately incentivize work on the first type of problems. For example, the Bell Labs scientists still got the Nobel Prize for the transistor, even though they practically rushed it to publication in fear of being scooped by one university research lab that was suspected to be on the verge of discovering it as well.
- Many ideas about what the future might look like are not necessarily wrong, just early. The book highlights several examples of people struggling with this dilemma, e.g. with the example of satellites in space used for communications. Although this point, along with its common analogy of catching a wave during surfing is widely appreciated.
- Another insight offered by the book was the image of progress looking somewhat like a staircase, but the steps are relatively small and involve small leaps and myriads of small innovations and improvements. Therefore, zooming out innovation across many disciplines looks mostly like a smooth line, and the edges of the stairs are only visible on short time scales.
- Another distinction drawn by the book is between “invention” and “innovation”. The former is about the act of coming up with a new, novel idea. Meanwhile the latter is taking that idea and scaling it into a marketable, mass producible product (which can in fact be quite a lot more complex and time demanding). Usually these two pieces are done by different institutions, but Bell Labs was careful to draw the distinction since they were involved with the full vertical stack, from theory on the bottom to marketable products at the end.
- I enjoyed seeing the transistor as a very nice example of creative destruction at work. The transistor deprecated almost two decades of research on perfecting vacuum tubes. To the credit of AT&T’s executives, they encouraged its development despite the imminent cannibalization of much of their vacuum tube business. An amusing case study of the reverse (and wrong) strategy is Kodak, who pioneered the creation of the digital camera but failed to invest due to their fear of eating into their traditional (and profitable) business of selling chemicals for film.
- Another fun (though brief) anecdote was Bell Labs’ large-scale experiment on productivity of its employees. They looked at a number of possible predictors for a productive employee (measured by number of filed patents), and discovered that most variables showed relatively unconvincing correlations. Amusingly, the one that showed strongest correlation was that the most successful employees had lunches with Harry Nyquist. The running theory was that Nyquist was a great person to talk to for his talent of asking very good questions.
There are many (too many!) other fun anecdotes and thoughts along the way, which I cannot hope to serialize here. In summary, a great book not only for its content, but also for the wider thoughts it elicits and teases. I have to read this again at some point.
May 10, 2012
Bell Labs was probably the most important scientific institution of the 20th century. Check out this list: transistors, semiconductors, microwave towers, digital transmission, satellites, radio astronomy, information theory, quality control, fiber optics, undersea cabling, CCDs, cell phones, video phones, pulse code modulation, lasers, Unix, and the C programming language. Every single one of those inventions, discoveries, technologies, or scientific fields was either birthed or midwived at Bell Labs, which at the height of its reputation counted 1,200 PhD holders among 15,000 employees. Seven Nobel Prize-winners worked and researched there, more than at most universities. It was a research laboratory without peer, freed from the short-term pressures of quarterly bottom lines. Instead of research being limited to direct applicability to existing products, Bell Labs scientists created new products, entire industries, and much of the modern world. Nowadays, Bell Labs exists as a shell of its former self, having been repeatedly merged and spun off like drops of quicksilver. Having worked for both Alcatel-Lucent and AT&T, I was interested to read the story of Bell Labs, both for my own curiosity and because its path from greatness to irrelevance says a lot about America.
There are three main layers of story told in this book, and each will appeal to a certain type of reader. The first is about a few of the more famous of the personalities at the Labs, like Shockley or Shannon, and their work; the second is about the history of AT&T as a company; and the third is about the way that the Labs were affected by the changes in the country around it. For the first layer, Gertner wisely focuses on the most prominent of the scientists while still trying to provide a sense of the scale of the Labs and how their work fit into the Labs' mission as a whole. For example, he tells the story of William Shockley, who shared the 1965 Physics Nobel Prize with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain for his work on the transistor. Both the early creative parts and the later stagnant, racist parts of Shockley's life story are told in brief but dense pages, and the reader is given a great deal of insight onto how collaborative scientific research actually works, as well as a decent outline of the technical differences between the point-contact transistor that Bardeen and Brattain invented, and Shockley's superior junction transistor. Shockley's attempts to one-up his own teammates to grab more credit for the invention of the transistor are nothing new, of course, and it says a lot about the quality of people at Bell Labs that people like Bardeen were able to not only cope with the kind of erratic behavior that Shockley brought there, but to rebound and win a second Nobel Physics Prize. Picking the right people was a big factor in the Labs' success, and as the parts recounting the idiosyncratic ways that the various recruits chose to use their travel money to hitchhike or wander to the Labs show, sometimes the right people are the ones with complementary quirks. Even the famous building in Murray Hill was designed to encourage interaction between all kinds of people, so that random encounters with colleagues from any department might spark an unusual insight. On a side note, it's interesting how many of the people profiled came from tiny rural towns; the Labs were a great magnet for talent, helping to turn obscure nobodies from tiny towns and universities into powerhouse researchers and raising the games of people who were already brilliant.
This process of rising in the ranks is integral to the second layer of the history. For most of its existence AT&T had a tripod-like structure, with manufacturer Western Electric producing equipment, AT&T Long Lines raising money through its near-total monopoly on lucrative long distance service, and Bell Labs spending money through long-term research. Many of the most important people in this history of the company spent most or all of their professional career at the company, and while this strategy has the well-known side effects of managerial inbreeding and risks of stagnation, the flip side is the potential for remarkable stability, which was essential for the multi-decade planning horizons that the company operated on. Indeed at times the company's solidity resembled a kind of priesthood or alchemist's guild, conducting experiments and conjuring forth wonders without regard for their creations' abilities to make profits or, just as often, to threaten core portions of AT&T's business model. To return to the example of the transistor, Gertner ably relates how research on it (and the related work on semiconductors in general) immediately obsoleted decades worth of expensive work on vacuum tubes. This might have worried some companies (think of Kodak and its ruinous reluctance to embrace digital technology at the expense of its core business), yet AT&T congratulated its team and immediately began to integrate this new invention into its network and system.
Even better, and this is where the third layer of the book comes into play, it provided samples of its creations to companies like Fairchild and Texas Instruments, who promptly made the billions that AT&T did not. I found this to be the most interesting aspect of the Labs' story, because by acting more as a public research laboratory than as part of a private company Bell Labs hurt AT&T as much as it helped them. Partially this unusual arrangement was due to onerous restrictions placed on AT&T by the federal government; forbidden to it were entire extremely lucrative industries, chiefly data processing, communication between computers, and the actual selling of phones and terminals (the company got around this by "leasing" its equipment to customers and vigorously suing people who attempted to attach other devices to its networks). In some ways AT&T was one of the most dominant monopolies ever to exist, to the extent that even famous corporate titans like Standard Oil paled in comparison, yet by locking AT&T out of so many fields the government ended up cultivating a curious sort of public spirit and creative independence at Bell Labs that seems very foreign to companies today.
What's the best way to fund innovation? Public grants to universities? Private sponsorship? Prizes? To some extent each has its merits, and it's possible to argue that even if AT&T hadn't sponsored all that research itself that several smaller companies might have done the work instead. After all, enough physicists headed back into the private sector at the end of WW2 that it would have been unusual for technology to stagnate without the helping hand of Ma Bell. Yet something about the concentration of all that talent makes even the titanic efforts of companies like Xerox, Microsoft, or Google seem slight. Maybe there just isn't a replacement for throwing billions of dollars at hundreds of PhDs, and if the government isn't willing to do it in these times of austerity and recession, who will? Even Bell Labs felt the impact of the Great Depression to some extent, and it was protected by one of the mightiest companies on Earth with a legal monopoly on communication; who could have taken its place then, and who would take its place now? Gertner suggests that the only modern analog of an organization like Bell Labs would be the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and that only a serious project to to tackle the problems of clean energy would be close to the kinds of challenges the Labs faced, yet good luck proposing to fund those projects commensurately; you would have better luck proposing sending people to Mars.
It's a curious fact that even as society has gotten richer in recent years, it's felt like innovation has slowed in all but a few gadget-focused areas. Perhaps this is just an illusion thrown up by our ever-increasing expectations of what The Future owes to us, but I do genuinely think that the pace of improvements in some fields has slowed or plateaued. Has progress simply gotten harder, or do those pictures of the abandoned Bell Labs Holmdel facility, and news articles about Alcatel-Lucent's defunding of basic research spending mean that in some way America has made deliberate choices to retreat inwards, and to dream smaller dreams than generations past? In the words of John Pierce, leader of the Bell Labs team that developed the communications satellite Telstar, "It is clear that we build for the day and not for the ages, and what we build has a community and functional rather than an individual character." There's simply no replacement for the talented individuals, the generous environment they need to work in, and the confident exploratory spirit towards science that characterized Bell Labs at its best. The world is a worse place for its passing.
There are three main layers of story told in this book, and each will appeal to a certain type of reader. The first is about a few of the more famous of the personalities at the Labs, like Shockley or Shannon, and their work; the second is about the history of AT&T as a company; and the third is about the way that the Labs were affected by the changes in the country around it. For the first layer, Gertner wisely focuses on the most prominent of the scientists while still trying to provide a sense of the scale of the Labs and how their work fit into the Labs' mission as a whole. For example, he tells the story of William Shockley, who shared the 1965 Physics Nobel Prize with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain for his work on the transistor. Both the early creative parts and the later stagnant, racist parts of Shockley's life story are told in brief but dense pages, and the reader is given a great deal of insight onto how collaborative scientific research actually works, as well as a decent outline of the technical differences between the point-contact transistor that Bardeen and Brattain invented, and Shockley's superior junction transistor. Shockley's attempts to one-up his own teammates to grab more credit for the invention of the transistor are nothing new, of course, and it says a lot about the quality of people at Bell Labs that people like Bardeen were able to not only cope with the kind of erratic behavior that Shockley brought there, but to rebound and win a second Nobel Physics Prize. Picking the right people was a big factor in the Labs' success, and as the parts recounting the idiosyncratic ways that the various recruits chose to use their travel money to hitchhike or wander to the Labs show, sometimes the right people are the ones with complementary quirks. Even the famous building in Murray Hill was designed to encourage interaction between all kinds of people, so that random encounters with colleagues from any department might spark an unusual insight. On a side note, it's interesting how many of the people profiled came from tiny rural towns; the Labs were a great magnet for talent, helping to turn obscure nobodies from tiny towns and universities into powerhouse researchers and raising the games of people who were already brilliant.
This process of rising in the ranks is integral to the second layer of the history. For most of its existence AT&T had a tripod-like structure, with manufacturer Western Electric producing equipment, AT&T Long Lines raising money through its near-total monopoly on lucrative long distance service, and Bell Labs spending money through long-term research. Many of the most important people in this history of the company spent most or all of their professional career at the company, and while this strategy has the well-known side effects of managerial inbreeding and risks of stagnation, the flip side is the potential for remarkable stability, which was essential for the multi-decade planning horizons that the company operated on. Indeed at times the company's solidity resembled a kind of priesthood or alchemist's guild, conducting experiments and conjuring forth wonders without regard for their creations' abilities to make profits or, just as often, to threaten core portions of AT&T's business model. To return to the example of the transistor, Gertner ably relates how research on it (and the related work on semiconductors in general) immediately obsoleted decades worth of expensive work on vacuum tubes. This might have worried some companies (think of Kodak and its ruinous reluctance to embrace digital technology at the expense of its core business), yet AT&T congratulated its team and immediately began to integrate this new invention into its network and system.
Even better, and this is where the third layer of the book comes into play, it provided samples of its creations to companies like Fairchild and Texas Instruments, who promptly made the billions that AT&T did not. I found this to be the most interesting aspect of the Labs' story, because by acting more as a public research laboratory than as part of a private company Bell Labs hurt AT&T as much as it helped them. Partially this unusual arrangement was due to onerous restrictions placed on AT&T by the federal government; forbidden to it were entire extremely lucrative industries, chiefly data processing, communication between computers, and the actual selling of phones and terminals (the company got around this by "leasing" its equipment to customers and vigorously suing people who attempted to attach other devices to its networks). In some ways AT&T was one of the most dominant monopolies ever to exist, to the extent that even famous corporate titans like Standard Oil paled in comparison, yet by locking AT&T out of so many fields the government ended up cultivating a curious sort of public spirit and creative independence at Bell Labs that seems very foreign to companies today.
What's the best way to fund innovation? Public grants to universities? Private sponsorship? Prizes? To some extent each has its merits, and it's possible to argue that even if AT&T hadn't sponsored all that research itself that several smaller companies might have done the work instead. After all, enough physicists headed back into the private sector at the end of WW2 that it would have been unusual for technology to stagnate without the helping hand of Ma Bell. Yet something about the concentration of all that talent makes even the titanic efforts of companies like Xerox, Microsoft, or Google seem slight. Maybe there just isn't a replacement for throwing billions of dollars at hundreds of PhDs, and if the government isn't willing to do it in these times of austerity and recession, who will? Even Bell Labs felt the impact of the Great Depression to some extent, and it was protected by one of the mightiest companies on Earth with a legal monopoly on communication; who could have taken its place then, and who would take its place now? Gertner suggests that the only modern analog of an organization like Bell Labs would be the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and that only a serious project to to tackle the problems of clean energy would be close to the kinds of challenges the Labs faced, yet good luck proposing to fund those projects commensurately; you would have better luck proposing sending people to Mars.
It's a curious fact that even as society has gotten richer in recent years, it's felt like innovation has slowed in all but a few gadget-focused areas. Perhaps this is just an illusion thrown up by our ever-increasing expectations of what The Future owes to us, but I do genuinely think that the pace of improvements in some fields has slowed or plateaued. Has progress simply gotten harder, or do those pictures of the abandoned Bell Labs Holmdel facility, and news articles about Alcatel-Lucent's defunding of basic research spending mean that in some way America has made deliberate choices to retreat inwards, and to dream smaller dreams than generations past? In the words of John Pierce, leader of the Bell Labs team that developed the communications satellite Telstar, "It is clear that we build for the day and not for the ages, and what we build has a community and functional rather than an individual character." There's simply no replacement for the talented individuals, the generous environment they need to work in, and the confident exploratory spirit towards science that characterized Bell Labs at its best. The world is a worse place for its passing.
May 4, 2012
3 stars for a general audience, 4 stars for an audience interested in the history of technology.
The book did a very good job of describing an almost magical place and time, and almost caused me to mourn the demise of the old monopolistic phone company, which certainly is a large part of the reason so much could happen when and where it did.
I didn't know much about this era, and was interested in the personalities that made the transistor a reality, and that started looking into information science years before anyone else even conceived of the necessity.
I appreciated how the book wove the personalities and the science of the discoveries with the business and the politics of the monopoly. I think the most interesting part was at the end, where Jon Gertner analyzed the conditions that supported such an environment, and speculated on how such a place could happen today, and the aspects that exist in modern companies.
Personally, I was hoping for more of the computer history, more insight into the development of Unix. The book never promised this, and so it's my own fault I was disappointed in this aspect.
However, even for the areas the book did cover, it never brought all this to life. The events never popped off the page or lead me into new ways of thinking.
I'd recommend The Idea Factory to anyone that is curious about the history of technology, but it isn't the book I'd suggest to stoke that interest in someone.
The book did a very good job of describing an almost magical place and time, and almost caused me to mourn the demise of the old monopolistic phone company, which certainly is a large part of the reason so much could happen when and where it did.
I didn't know much about this era, and was interested in the personalities that made the transistor a reality, and that started looking into information science years before anyone else even conceived of the necessity.
I appreciated how the book wove the personalities and the science of the discoveries with the business and the politics of the monopoly. I think the most interesting part was at the end, where Jon Gertner analyzed the conditions that supported such an environment, and speculated on how such a place could happen today, and the aspects that exist in modern companies.
Personally, I was hoping for more of the computer history, more insight into the development of Unix. The book never promised this, and so it's my own fault I was disappointed in this aspect.
However, even for the areas the book did cover, it never brought all this to life. The events never popped off the page or lead me into new ways of thinking.
I'd recommend The Idea Factory to anyone that is curious about the history of technology, but it isn't the book I'd suggest to stoke that interest in someone.
January 20, 2020
A friend of ours, at the helm of a leading-edge R&D team within a tech giant, first recommended this book to us. As he prepared for his role, this book provided useful examples of how to do innovation well within a large company. For those of us looking for ways to generate creativity and innovation in our teams, turning back to be inspired by the glory years of Bell Labs (1920s-1980s) is highly beneficial. They brought us the transistor, the solar cell, the foundation of modern operating systems, and much more.
April 22, 2013
A really lovely history of Bell Labs and its incredible impact on the world. Gertner does a fantastic job of synthesizing existing historical accounts, while also unearthing his own wholly original findings through interviews and dives into the AT&T archives.
I found the book particularly interesting since my job is all about managing technical staff who are trying to identify worthwhile problems and new ways of looking at them. I don't mean to compare our modest efforts to those of the people who invented the transistor, of course. But it was reassuring to have many of my engineer's intuitions about what makes for successful research environments--adequate resources, plenty of freedom, good people, a focus on the questions themselves and a healthy tension between theory and application--validated by the management theories captured in this book.
It's clear that Gertner has favorites among the cast of characters orbiting Bell Labs, but that's okay; so do I. His charming and moving account of Claude Shannon is particularly affecting, I thought. And it's hard to read this and not emerge a John Pierce fan. The treatment of Bill Shockley, by contrast, is relentlessly negative, though Gertner makes a strong case for this being wholly deserved.
My only other window into the Bell system is Tim Wu's book, which is notably unmentioned here, despite being published more than a year earlier than The Idea Factory. I assume this has something to do with publication lead times, something to do with Wu's book being an analysis that rehashes the same histories Gertner mined, and something to do with its less charitable perspective on AT&T and its monopolistic activities. Still, an interesting omission.
Anyway, this is highly recommended for anyone inspired by digital technology or information theory. I think this will finally nudge me into reading the Gleick book (as well as Fortune's Formula, about Shannon's efforts to beat Vegas and the stock market -- that one, in particular sounds fantastic to me).
I found the book particularly interesting since my job is all about managing technical staff who are trying to identify worthwhile problems and new ways of looking at them. I don't mean to compare our modest efforts to those of the people who invented the transistor, of course. But it was reassuring to have many of my engineer's intuitions about what makes for successful research environments--adequate resources, plenty of freedom, good people, a focus on the questions themselves and a healthy tension between theory and application--validated by the management theories captured in this book.
It's clear that Gertner has favorites among the cast of characters orbiting Bell Labs, but that's okay; so do I. His charming and moving account of Claude Shannon is particularly affecting, I thought. And it's hard to read this and not emerge a John Pierce fan. The treatment of Bill Shockley, by contrast, is relentlessly negative, though Gertner makes a strong case for this being wholly deserved.
My only other window into the Bell system is Tim Wu's book, which is notably unmentioned here, despite being published more than a year earlier than The Idea Factory. I assume this has something to do with publication lead times, something to do with Wu's book being an analysis that rehashes the same histories Gertner mined, and something to do with its less charitable perspective on AT&T and its monopolistic activities. Still, an interesting omission.
Anyway, this is highly recommended for anyone inspired by digital technology or information theory. I think this will finally nudge me into reading the Gleick book (as well as Fortune's Formula, about Shannon's efforts to beat Vegas and the stock market -- that one, in particular sounds fantastic to me).
May 7, 2019
The idea factory is about innovation management. It explores the history of Bell Labs from the 1920’ to the 1980’. Jon Gartner, the author of the book, answers one, the most important question of our era – what causes innovation? The book is an insightful and appealing record of the years of discovery at the Labs and core milestones in the history of technology that was achieved.
Bell Labs was the R&D department at AT&T which was a completely different organisation back then. It was the telephone monopoly in control of between 80 and 90 percent of the telephone service in the United States. AT&T ran the long distance service and owned either pieces or entire parts of local operating companies around the country. It was the biggest company in the world at the time. It employed the most people. Finally, it was the most valuable company. It was a true colossus at the time.Throughout those years of innovation, more than a dozen Bell Labs’ employees won seven Noble prizes. Jon Gartner takes us through the journey and shows how collective effort and collective thinking was accomplished in innovation management process. To have a full scale of this issue just keep in mind that the organisation was a behemoth which, at its peak, was employing more than a thousand PhDs.
In the beginning, the book focuses on how the transistor was invented, but then on it moves to semiconductors, microwave towers, digital transmission, satellites... (if you like to read my full review please visit my blog: https://leadersarereaders.blog/the-id...)
Bell Labs was the R&D department at AT&T which was a completely different organisation back then. It was the telephone monopoly in control of between 80 and 90 percent of the telephone service in the United States. AT&T ran the long distance service and owned either pieces or entire parts of local operating companies around the country. It was the biggest company in the world at the time. It employed the most people. Finally, it was the most valuable company. It was a true colossus at the time.Throughout those years of innovation, more than a dozen Bell Labs’ employees won seven Noble prizes. Jon Gartner takes us through the journey and shows how collective effort and collective thinking was accomplished in innovation management process. To have a full scale of this issue just keep in mind that the organisation was a behemoth which, at its peak, was employing more than a thousand PhDs.
In the beginning, the book focuses on how the transistor was invented, but then on it moves to semiconductors, microwave towers, digital transmission, satellites... (if you like to read my full review please visit my blog: https://leadersarereaders.blog/the-id...)
July 8, 2023
I read this book on an island with no WiFi off the coast of another island off the coast of Tanzania. And this was the last book on my e-reader I hadn’t read.
I tell you this because this book is long and dense. If I had any distractions, or any other books to read, I would not have finished this. It’s the kind of book that if you put it down for a few days you are not picking back up. But it’s also really good and I’m glad I endured.
It’s meticulously researched, often too much so. Do we need to know the name of the Dutch architect who built the Bell Lab’s Vice President’s house in 1768? We do not! It does, however, provide some lessons on how most of the foundational inventions that define the Information Age came to fruition and a credible alternative to the short-termist hyper capitalism of Silicon Valley.
I tell you this because this book is long and dense. If I had any distractions, or any other books to read, I would not have finished this. It’s the kind of book that if you put it down for a few days you are not picking back up. But it’s also really good and I’m glad I endured.
It’s meticulously researched, often too much so. Do we need to know the name of the Dutch architect who built the Bell Lab’s Vice President’s house in 1768? We do not! It does, however, provide some lessons on how most of the foundational inventions that define the Information Age came to fruition and a credible alternative to the short-termist hyper capitalism of Silicon Valley.
November 10, 2019
What a wonderful account of the most important industrial labs in history: far-ranging telephone networks, transistors, amplifiers, information theory, error-correcting codes, satellites, C, Unix, fiber optic cables, and many more inventions that completely shaped the 20th and 21st century. It has almost everything: scientific depth, vivid accounts of the peculiar characters, and how the culture became such a stronghold for innovation. The only thing that felt was missing was a better account on Bell Labs' demise, as well as what happened when ideas were integrated into the greater AT&T.
April 6, 2017
Before Silicon Valley, Bell Labs Was America's Hub of Innovation
Ask yourself why the United States of America has remained the dominant economic and military power on the planet for nearly a century now. Is it the superior universal public education system we used to brag about? Is it the wealth of our natural resources: millions of acres of rich, arable land and bountiful mineral and petroleum wealth? Is it the peculiar American ability to build and manage efficient large enterprises? Is it the size and the demographic richness of our population, constantly renewed by the influx of resourceful people from other lands and cultures?
Jingoistic rhetoric aside, it’s most likely that your list of reasons — even, possibly, your only reason — is “American know-how,” the homegrown phrase that points to what seems an unusual national talent for creative thinking and innovation. In fact, it’s difficult to overlook the disproportionate presence of the United States on the lists of Nobel Prizewinners, industrial patents, and other markers of forward thinking in science and engineering throughout much of the 20th Century.
In The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner examines one period and one place where the evidence of American know-how was most pronounced: the time from the end of World War II to the late 1970s in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where AT&T’s Bell Laboratories was headquartered. There, an extraordinary assemblage of brilliant scientists and engineers, guided by a succession of equally brilliant managers, invented or developed into practical form the fundamental advances in science and technology that have shaped the world we live in today: the transistor, the laser, quality assurance methods, communications satellites, mobile telephony, digital photography, fiber-optic communications, and a number of much less well-known but equally important technological advances as well as a long list of innovations in weaponry and spy technology that many of us would prefer not to know about. (In fact, the relationship of Bell Labs to the Pentagon, especially its National Security Agency, remained close throughout the period studied in this book.)
It’s difficult to exaggerate the impact of the work at Murray Hill and its outlying sites following World War II. The transistor — the brainchild of three Bell scientists, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley — is frequently cited as the single most important invention of the century. Certainly, the transistor lies at the heart of all things digital today. Even more fundamental to the world we inhabit is the information theory of Claude Shannon, who explained how computers might communicate with one another long before anything resembling today’s computers existed.
As Gertner explains in great detail, most of Bell Labs’ work was carried out in service of the growing AT&T telephone network. (If you’re young enough to confuse that AT&T with today’s business of the same name, be advised that AT&T was America’s government-regulated telephone monopoly from the 1920s through the 1970s.) Those familiar with the network called it the biggest and most complex machine in the world. “The system’s problems and needs were so vast that it was hard to know where to begin explaining them,” Gertner writes. “The system required that teams of chemists spend their entire lives trying to invent new, cheaper sheathing so that phone cables would not be permeated by rain and ice; the system required that other teams of chemists spend their lives working to improve the insulation that lay between the sheathing and the phone wires themselves. Engineers schooled in electronics, meanwhile, studied echoes, delays, distortion, feedback, and a host of other problems in the hope of inventing strategies, or new circuits, to somehow circumvent them.”
Gertner makes absolutely clear, however, that “this book does not focus on those tens of thousands of Bell Laboratories workers. Instead, it looks primarily at the lives of a select and representative few,” chiefly scientist-managers Mervin Kelly, Jim Fisk, and William Baker and scientists John Pierce and William Shockley. Every one of these individuals was exceptional, and Gertner does an excellent job giving us glimpses of their eccentricities and missteps as well as their extraordinary lives and character and their accomplishments.
I can fault this exhaustive study in only one way: it’s exhausting, expecially in its concluding chapters, where Gertner spends far too many pages dwelling on the eulogies offered up by the managers who ran Bell Labs when it was alive and well, before the break-up of the old AT&T that was consummated in 1983.
(From www.malwarwickonbooks.com)
Ask yourself why the United States of America has remained the dominant economic and military power on the planet for nearly a century now. Is it the superior universal public education system we used to brag about? Is it the wealth of our natural resources: millions of acres of rich, arable land and bountiful mineral and petroleum wealth? Is it the peculiar American ability to build and manage efficient large enterprises? Is it the size and the demographic richness of our population, constantly renewed by the influx of resourceful people from other lands and cultures?
Jingoistic rhetoric aside, it’s most likely that your list of reasons — even, possibly, your only reason — is “American know-how,” the homegrown phrase that points to what seems an unusual national talent for creative thinking and innovation. In fact, it’s difficult to overlook the disproportionate presence of the United States on the lists of Nobel Prizewinners, industrial patents, and other markers of forward thinking in science and engineering throughout much of the 20th Century.
In The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner examines one period and one place where the evidence of American know-how was most pronounced: the time from the end of World War II to the late 1970s in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where AT&T’s Bell Laboratories was headquartered. There, an extraordinary assemblage of brilliant scientists and engineers, guided by a succession of equally brilliant managers, invented or developed into practical form the fundamental advances in science and technology that have shaped the world we live in today: the transistor, the laser, quality assurance methods, communications satellites, mobile telephony, digital photography, fiber-optic communications, and a number of much less well-known but equally important technological advances as well as a long list of innovations in weaponry and spy technology that many of us would prefer not to know about. (In fact, the relationship of Bell Labs to the Pentagon, especially its National Security Agency, remained close throughout the period studied in this book.)
It’s difficult to exaggerate the impact of the work at Murray Hill and its outlying sites following World War II. The transistor — the brainchild of three Bell scientists, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley — is frequently cited as the single most important invention of the century. Certainly, the transistor lies at the heart of all things digital today. Even more fundamental to the world we inhabit is the information theory of Claude Shannon, who explained how computers might communicate with one another long before anything resembling today’s computers existed.
As Gertner explains in great detail, most of Bell Labs’ work was carried out in service of the growing AT&T telephone network. (If you’re young enough to confuse that AT&T with today’s business of the same name, be advised that AT&T was America’s government-regulated telephone monopoly from the 1920s through the 1970s.) Those familiar with the network called it the biggest and most complex machine in the world. “The system’s problems and needs were so vast that it was hard to know where to begin explaining them,” Gertner writes. “The system required that teams of chemists spend their entire lives trying to invent new, cheaper sheathing so that phone cables would not be permeated by rain and ice; the system required that other teams of chemists spend their lives working to improve the insulation that lay between the sheathing and the phone wires themselves. Engineers schooled in electronics, meanwhile, studied echoes, delays, distortion, feedback, and a host of other problems in the hope of inventing strategies, or new circuits, to somehow circumvent them.”
Gertner makes absolutely clear, however, that “this book does not focus on those tens of thousands of Bell Laboratories workers. Instead, it looks primarily at the lives of a select and representative few,” chiefly scientist-managers Mervin Kelly, Jim Fisk, and William Baker and scientists John Pierce and William Shockley. Every one of these individuals was exceptional, and Gertner does an excellent job giving us glimpses of their eccentricities and missteps as well as their extraordinary lives and character and their accomplishments.
I can fault this exhaustive study in only one way: it’s exhausting, expecially in its concluding chapters, where Gertner spends far too many pages dwelling on the eulogies offered up by the managers who ran Bell Labs when it was alive and well, before the break-up of the old AT&T that was consummated in 1983.
(From www.malwarwickonbooks.com)
April 18, 2015
Overall, a very worthy book to read. A few comments:
+ It provides a good historical overview of how Bell Labs came to be, from its inception through its golden age to its decline. It really is a complete picture.
+ It explains really well how Bell Labs was a cog within a much bigger system, and that while we focus and celebrate the bright minds who worked in pure research, their work might not have been as impactful without the other less celebrated, very important cogs within the system. The author also makes very interesting parallels with how Silicon Valley works, in that regard.
+ Great chapters around the creation of the transistor that depict really well how pure sciences, applied sciences, and adequate management worked together to transform an intellectual curiosity into a great innovation.
+ The book gave me a much greater appreciation of the number of innovations that came out of Bell Labs. It seriously made me wonder what the world would look like if Bell Labs had not existed, which is really inspiring.
- The author did not recount events in a chronological order, which sometimes made it confusing. It also caused the narrative to be a little bit stale since it felt like a patchwork of interesting facts and anecdotes put together, as opposed to a well constructed series of events.
- I was hoping to get more in-depth information on the innovations that came out of Bell Labs. Many of them were just barely mentioned, and the focus was rather on the people behind them.
- This book benefits from being read in conjunction to watching this 1h lecture by Steve Blanks on the history of Silicon Valley (http://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo). While Bell Labs was certainly important, there were other great scientific works being carried out elsewhere on the same topics at the same time, and this lecture takes away some of the bias in the book.
+ It provides a good historical overview of how Bell Labs came to be, from its inception through its golden age to its decline. It really is a complete picture.
+ It explains really well how Bell Labs was a cog within a much bigger system, and that while we focus and celebrate the bright minds who worked in pure research, their work might not have been as impactful without the other less celebrated, very important cogs within the system. The author also makes very interesting parallels with how Silicon Valley works, in that regard.
+ Great chapters around the creation of the transistor that depict really well how pure sciences, applied sciences, and adequate management worked together to transform an intellectual curiosity into a great innovation.
+ The book gave me a much greater appreciation of the number of innovations that came out of Bell Labs. It seriously made me wonder what the world would look like if Bell Labs had not existed, which is really inspiring.
- The author did not recount events in a chronological order, which sometimes made it confusing. It also caused the narrative to be a little bit stale since it felt like a patchwork of interesting facts and anecdotes put together, as opposed to a well constructed series of events.
- I was hoping to get more in-depth information on the innovations that came out of Bell Labs. Many of them were just barely mentioned, and the focus was rather on the people behind them.
- This book benefits from being read in conjunction to watching this 1h lecture by Steve Blanks on the history of Silicon Valley (http://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo). While Bell Labs was certainly important, there were other great scientific works being carried out elsewhere on the same topics at the same time, and this lecture takes away some of the bias in the book.
December 18, 2014
Okay, so this review is going to be biased. I'm telling you straight forward. I've always had a fascination with the idea of Bell Labs, and admittedly, have been ennamoured with the place for years. I now work at Alcatel-Lucent (owner of Bell Labs) so I sort of achieved my goal in life. Anyway, I felt the book was a very very good review more of the people's lives who worked at Bell Labs, rather than actually focusing on the individual inventions. They glossed over a lot of big inventions such as the creation of UNIX. And the C programming language. Instead focusing on mannerisms and traits of the people who worked there. I don't mind obviously learning and reading about the great pillars of creative thought, but there are so many presented in this book.
This book is also a fun read due to the fact that I live in New Jersey, so it was like a who's who of townships, that received recognition. (even my own tiny hometown was mentioned). I enjoyed reading this, but I can see how anyone without a love of innovation, science, bell labs, at&t and such interests would be bored to tears.
I just wish they would have expanded on certain parts, especially the rivalry between AT&T and MCI.
My own score is a 3/5, but I can see anyone not interested in this may give it a 2/5.
This book is also a fun read due to the fact that I live in New Jersey, so it was like a who's who of townships, that received recognition. (even my own tiny hometown was mentioned). I enjoyed reading this, but I can see how anyone without a love of innovation, science, bell labs, at&t and such interests would be bored to tears.
I just wish they would have expanded on certain parts, especially the rivalry between AT&T and MCI.
My own score is a 3/5, but I can see anyone not interested in this may give it a 2/5.
September 22, 2017
Jon Gertner’s “The Idea Factory” is a mild corrective to the commonly found anguished certainty that America’s days of innovative scientific greatness are behind us. In its exploration of the might and works of Bell Labs, this book reminds us that genius requires the right cultural environment to flourish, and it addresses whether collective or individual genius is the mainspring of scientific advancement. Ultimately, Gertner’s account gives the obvious answer—scientific advancement stands on a three-legged stool, dependent on all of the broader culture, muscular group effort, and heroic individuals. Ayn Rand would not agree, but then, what did she ever actually accomplish?
Today’s AT&T is the successor to the business created by Alexander Graham Bell in 1882. Before its breakup in the 1970s, the entire web of companies under the AT&T umbrella was called the “Bell System.” It included various regional telephone companies, later called the “Baby Bells”; Western Electric, which manufactured telephone related equipment; and, crucially for this book and for AT&T, Bell Telephone Laboratories, officially created in 1925. Being a monopoly always offered both benefits and problems for AT&T—from early on, the company had an intermittently uneasy relationship with sectors of the federal government that opposed its monopolistic power and deemed it a threat to both competition and broader society. For the most part, though, AT&T blunted these attacks with a strategy that emphasized cheaper and better customer service over time, which required continuously advancing the frontier of technology (thus the creation of Bell Labs); the free distribution of intellectual property; and a very close relationship with the government during World War II and the Cold War.
The early years of Bell Labs were driven by Mervin Kelly, who spent his entire career there, from 1918, until becoming Director from 1951 through 1959. Kelly was responsible for much of the hiring and structure that made the efflorescence of Bell Labs possible. Although he was himself a vacuum tube expert, his real genius was organization. The goal of his organizational work was to ensure the overall success of AT&T—to improve the “system” until it was “universal, economic and efficient.” Today we are used to both universal service and to a wide smorgasbord of other cheap and excellent communication methods, but offering low-cost, good, universal telephone service was a radical goal in the early 20th Century. Kelly was fully aware of the magnitude of the task, but also had little doubt that AT&T could achieve it.
Because Bell Labs was designed to advance the goals of the telephone system, all scientific work was ultimately done to address specific operational needs. At the same time, scientific work was encouraged that might not solve an operational problem immediately, or succeed at all, as long as it had, or might offer, some promise of relevancy to the overall goal of the system. Naturally, fixing one operational problem often not only improved service, but created, or revealed, another operational problem, the solution for which might involve an entirely new and different line of thinking, continuing the need to make advancements. Kelly viewed this practical need driving scientific research as a huge advantage—his men, as Gertner says, “had the great advantage of working to improve a system where there were always problems, always needs.” Unlike today’s tech magnates, Kelly’s goal was not to “break things” or “disrupt” existing structures, and it most definitely was not to enrich himself or those who worked with him (although he did well enough to have a nice house). This was a more public-spirited time with a much more collectivist, in the good way, ethos.
Among Kelly’s hires were Jim Fisk (instrumental in the development of radar and Kelly’s successor as Director of Bell Labs); William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen (the driving forces behind the invention of the transistor—Bardeen is the only person to have received two Nobel Prizes in physics); and Claude Shannon. Shannon was the developer of modern information theory, an utterly original set of ideas, including the reduction of communication “noise” through checksums, and also the author of a crucial 1945 mathematical treatise on cryptography. He additionally created a wide range of silly-yet-impressive inventions, including a calculator using Roman numerals, named THROBAC, which gives you a flavor of the Bell Labs environment. Through the 1920s and 1930s Kelly hired the best men, by offering both high salaries and prestige, moved them to New York, and put them in an environment of creative ferment. All Bell Labs scientific work was focused on experiment, but over time, as technology evolved, the tinkering aspects, such as endless methodical experiments to determine the best methods for cable sheathing, were supplemented by more theoretical physics, such as Shockley’s research and writing a classic work, “Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors”, exploring the physics of solid state materials.
Kelly also oversaw the move of Bell Labs from its original crammed offices in New York City to much larger quarters at Murray Hill in New Jersey. For both Kelly and Fisk, physical proximity of people was key. The New York offices provided such proximity by stuffing everyone in one building, but the new Murray Hill building was deliberately designed for collaboration. Office and lab space could be shrunk or expanded with movable walls. Kelly forbade any scientist to close his door and required that even the most senior be willing at any time to entertain walk-in questions from others. Men working together had their labs and offices separated, so that they constantly had to walk a long way down the corridors, bumping into people and having unplanned, fruitful conversations. Throwing together scientists working in disparate technical areas ultimately proved critically important to the success of Bell Labs, in ways great and small. For example, Shockley worked in close physical proximity to several scientists whose focus was the apparently unrelated area of creating ultra-pure elements of various types, work that proved critical to the creation of the transistor, both for its physical material and for understanding the theoretical underpinnings of semiconductors. (I suppose this creative ferment is what the modern fad for open office layouts is supposed to accomplish, but I suspect that you have to have geniuses working for your company—otherwise, you just have created inefficiency and wasted time.)
Gertner covers the origin of Bell Labs and the war years; then he spends quite a bit of time on what is almost certainly the most important invention generated by Bell Labs, the transistor. Kelly and Fisk immediately realized the economic importance of the transistor, even though they could not foresee its ultimate role in modern society. Their focus was improving their system; transistors could replace vacuum tubes (and other devices, too), but were vastly cheaper and better. But they also saw that the transistor would have many additional applications, and they knew that many of those applications were not visible to them. AT&T’s ownership of Western Electric allowed the company to move transistors to mass production rapidly (a running theme of the book is the handoff of pure science to AT&T’s development/manufacturing teams, which got less glory but were necessary to every success of Bell Labs). Critically, even before the transistor was perfected, Bell Labs shipped samples for experimental use to any scientist who asked, and ultimately shared the intellectual property with the entire world (both on principle and to insulate themselves from attack as a monopoly). Gertner also covers other postwar work, from development of the Nike anti-missile system, to solar cells (which only came into wide use after the decline of Bell Labs), to fiber optics, which were critical to the ultimate development of the perfected telephone system, though the materials science mostly came from Corning. (Fiber optics helped underwater transmission, although transatlantic cables were first, amazingly, done with copper, using vacuum tubes as the amplifiers/repeaters.) Failures such as the Picturephone, a classic example of groupthink, also get their due. And, finally, Gertner covers the forced breakup of AT&T and the demise, for all practical purposes, of Bell Labs (although it still exists, legally, now as a subsidiary of Nokia). Probably its demise was inevitable, both because times changes, and because its guiding principal, improvement of the system, both was largely achieved and its importance largely eroded by other methods of communication.
Almost all of the men profiled in this book (and they are all men) came from small town America, flyover country, with parents who were farmers, clerks, and housewives. Mervin Kelly came from Gallatin, Missouri; his father ran a hardware store. Claude Shannon came from Gaylord, Michigan; his father was a probate court judge. Brattain came from rural Washington State. Shockley came from Palo Alto—long before Palo Alto is what it is today. Thornton Fry, Bell Labs’s mathematical genius, came from Findlay, Ohio, the son of a poor carpenter. John Pierce (instrumental in satellite communication and the mind behind Echo, a huge metallized balloon in low-earth orbit used to test satellite communications concepts) grew up in Iowa. Yet these men became the giants that shaped the modern world. While many toiled in obscurity, many were widely recognized as geniuses at the time, both by the scientific community and by the popular media—more than one appeared on the cover of Time.
This ascension of small-town Americans to positions of national prominence based on their intellect seems, at least in my impression, to happen much less nowadays. Why? First, I suspect the structures for identifying and elevating the promising in early and mid-20th Century America were better. As with the medieval church, local teachers could identify the promising, recommend them to others up the chain, and make it possible for them to both receive an education commensurate with their talents and find appropriate employment. Nobody, then, talked about “privilege,” believed in leveling egalitarianism, or wasted time on educational topics of no social value, such as Latino studies or the fantasy that the Constitution is at all based on the governance of the Iroquois Confederacy (something my eighth-grader today told me was being taught to him at his very expensive, and not progressive, school, an idea roughly equivalent to believing that the Sun is an egg for a monstrous alien). Instead, both teachers and students focused on advancement. For example, Cal Fuller, a Bell Labs chemist critical to semiconductor development, came from a poor family in Chicago. But his high school physics teacher knew that “the University of Chicago offered exams to high school students in science and math. She also knew that for those who passed, the university provided full tuition for the first year and, if you were among the top twenty-five students in your class at the university, for the following three years.” So she tutored Fuller nights for free and insisted Fuller pursue the scholarship, which he did, then going to graduate school “by working the four-o’clock-to-midnight shift at the ‘Chicago Tribune’.” With today’s teachers torn between shrill demands to use gender-inclusive pronouns and to teach what’s going to be on the next dumb federally mandated test, this sort of thing must happen much less today.
Second, to the extent the intelligent and capable are identified, they rarely focus on the hard sciences. They are skimmed off into fields requiring far less hard training and offering far greater monetary rewards, yet which are largely destroyers of social capital, notably finance and law. Water flows on the path of least resistance, and why should our talented young be any different? Third, top colleges are now dominated by the children of our elite, who tend to marry each other much more than in the past, live on the coasts, and send their children to the same top colleges. They do this not so much to get an education as to get a credential that will allow them to pass the necessary filters and get jobs maintaining their position in the elite—which, for the most part, does not include those with jobs in hard science. In the hard sciences, therefore, most students today are Chinese or Indian, who take their knowledge home and advance their societies. For all these reasons (and perhaps others), even though our population is larger today, we appear to have fewer home-grown geniuses, and they are less prominent. Whether that means less absolute scientific advancement is less clear—maybe scientific breakthroughs are less obvious to the average person than they were decades ago, because earlier advances have made today’s advances more specialized and harder for the layman to understand. I suspect that if we had the old system we’d have a lot more advancement, though.
Bell Labs scientists not only worked closely together; they frequently socialized together, although many had odd, difficult or intensely private personalities that made such socializing probably less than glittering. Their work efforts were, as Gertner says, “group efforts, a compilation of the ideas and inventions of individuals bound together with common purposes and complementary talents.” It could not really be otherwise, given that their overall goal was improving the telephone system. But at root, all critical breakthroughs were individual breakthroughs—as Kelly said, “With all the needed emphasis on leadership, organization and teamwork, the individual has remained supreme—of paramount importance. It is in the mind of a single person that creative ideas and concepts are born.” Surrounding all this, of course, was a forward-looking, optimistic America, focused on individual and societal progress without a morbid fear of risk or cost. Viewing old “Twilight Zone” episodes, for example, will give you a sense of how America thought, and it is very different than the way America thinks today. It was the combination of these things—group effort, individual effort, and the national culture—that enabled the achievements of Bell Labs.
Gertner ends with an excellent question. “Regrettably, the language that describes innovations often fails to distinguish between an innovative consumer product and an innovation that represents a leap in human knowledge and a new foundation for industry. . . . [A]re we will living off the dividends from ideas that were nurtured, and risks that were taken, a half century ago?” Probably the answer is “yes.” I think that the existence and accomplishments of Bell Labs are in many ways a reproach to the extreme libertarian model that has taken hold of much of United States industry today. You don’t have to be a syndicalist or a Chestertonian Distributist to see that a model of close cooperation between a technology-focused company and the government, with the scientific results shared with all other comers for a nominal fee, rather than locked up by patents and legions of lawyers, accompanied by an ethos of public benefit (and lacking the parasitism of the “diversity and inclusion” crowd), is in many ways superior to the social utility-reducing quest for monopoly beloved by such men as Peter Thiel. It is not the case that everything that is not purely libertarian is crony capitalist. In fact, much of what is proudly libertarian is actually totally crony capitalist (see, e.g., Musk, Elon). Of course, the glory days of Bell Labs was a unique time, with easier, cheaper breakthroughs; a completely different government and ruling class; and World War II and the threat of global Communism—but then, every time is unique. Maybe, or probably, the exact same setup wouldn’t yield the same dividends today, but this book still has important lessons for us, among them that a search for a system that *will* yield such dividends is very worthwhile.
Today’s AT&T is the successor to the business created by Alexander Graham Bell in 1882. Before its breakup in the 1970s, the entire web of companies under the AT&T umbrella was called the “Bell System.” It included various regional telephone companies, later called the “Baby Bells”; Western Electric, which manufactured telephone related equipment; and, crucially for this book and for AT&T, Bell Telephone Laboratories, officially created in 1925. Being a monopoly always offered both benefits and problems for AT&T—from early on, the company had an intermittently uneasy relationship with sectors of the federal government that opposed its monopolistic power and deemed it a threat to both competition and broader society. For the most part, though, AT&T blunted these attacks with a strategy that emphasized cheaper and better customer service over time, which required continuously advancing the frontier of technology (thus the creation of Bell Labs); the free distribution of intellectual property; and a very close relationship with the government during World War II and the Cold War.
The early years of Bell Labs were driven by Mervin Kelly, who spent his entire career there, from 1918, until becoming Director from 1951 through 1959. Kelly was responsible for much of the hiring and structure that made the efflorescence of Bell Labs possible. Although he was himself a vacuum tube expert, his real genius was organization. The goal of his organizational work was to ensure the overall success of AT&T—to improve the “system” until it was “universal, economic and efficient.” Today we are used to both universal service and to a wide smorgasbord of other cheap and excellent communication methods, but offering low-cost, good, universal telephone service was a radical goal in the early 20th Century. Kelly was fully aware of the magnitude of the task, but also had little doubt that AT&T could achieve it.
Because Bell Labs was designed to advance the goals of the telephone system, all scientific work was ultimately done to address specific operational needs. At the same time, scientific work was encouraged that might not solve an operational problem immediately, or succeed at all, as long as it had, or might offer, some promise of relevancy to the overall goal of the system. Naturally, fixing one operational problem often not only improved service, but created, or revealed, another operational problem, the solution for which might involve an entirely new and different line of thinking, continuing the need to make advancements. Kelly viewed this practical need driving scientific research as a huge advantage—his men, as Gertner says, “had the great advantage of working to improve a system where there were always problems, always needs.” Unlike today’s tech magnates, Kelly’s goal was not to “break things” or “disrupt” existing structures, and it most definitely was not to enrich himself or those who worked with him (although he did well enough to have a nice house). This was a more public-spirited time with a much more collectivist, in the good way, ethos.
Among Kelly’s hires were Jim Fisk (instrumental in the development of radar and Kelly’s successor as Director of Bell Labs); William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen (the driving forces behind the invention of the transistor—Bardeen is the only person to have received two Nobel Prizes in physics); and Claude Shannon. Shannon was the developer of modern information theory, an utterly original set of ideas, including the reduction of communication “noise” through checksums, and also the author of a crucial 1945 mathematical treatise on cryptography. He additionally created a wide range of silly-yet-impressive inventions, including a calculator using Roman numerals, named THROBAC, which gives you a flavor of the Bell Labs environment. Through the 1920s and 1930s Kelly hired the best men, by offering both high salaries and prestige, moved them to New York, and put them in an environment of creative ferment. All Bell Labs scientific work was focused on experiment, but over time, as technology evolved, the tinkering aspects, such as endless methodical experiments to determine the best methods for cable sheathing, were supplemented by more theoretical physics, such as Shockley’s research and writing a classic work, “Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors”, exploring the physics of solid state materials.
Kelly also oversaw the move of Bell Labs from its original crammed offices in New York City to much larger quarters at Murray Hill in New Jersey. For both Kelly and Fisk, physical proximity of people was key. The New York offices provided such proximity by stuffing everyone in one building, but the new Murray Hill building was deliberately designed for collaboration. Office and lab space could be shrunk or expanded with movable walls. Kelly forbade any scientist to close his door and required that even the most senior be willing at any time to entertain walk-in questions from others. Men working together had their labs and offices separated, so that they constantly had to walk a long way down the corridors, bumping into people and having unplanned, fruitful conversations. Throwing together scientists working in disparate technical areas ultimately proved critically important to the success of Bell Labs, in ways great and small. For example, Shockley worked in close physical proximity to several scientists whose focus was the apparently unrelated area of creating ultra-pure elements of various types, work that proved critical to the creation of the transistor, both for its physical material and for understanding the theoretical underpinnings of semiconductors. (I suppose this creative ferment is what the modern fad for open office layouts is supposed to accomplish, but I suspect that you have to have geniuses working for your company—otherwise, you just have created inefficiency and wasted time.)
Gertner covers the origin of Bell Labs and the war years; then he spends quite a bit of time on what is almost certainly the most important invention generated by Bell Labs, the transistor. Kelly and Fisk immediately realized the economic importance of the transistor, even though they could not foresee its ultimate role in modern society. Their focus was improving their system; transistors could replace vacuum tubes (and other devices, too), but were vastly cheaper and better. But they also saw that the transistor would have many additional applications, and they knew that many of those applications were not visible to them. AT&T’s ownership of Western Electric allowed the company to move transistors to mass production rapidly (a running theme of the book is the handoff of pure science to AT&T’s development/manufacturing teams, which got less glory but were necessary to every success of Bell Labs). Critically, even before the transistor was perfected, Bell Labs shipped samples for experimental use to any scientist who asked, and ultimately shared the intellectual property with the entire world (both on principle and to insulate themselves from attack as a monopoly). Gertner also covers other postwar work, from development of the Nike anti-missile system, to solar cells (which only came into wide use after the decline of Bell Labs), to fiber optics, which were critical to the ultimate development of the perfected telephone system, though the materials science mostly came from Corning. (Fiber optics helped underwater transmission, although transatlantic cables were first, amazingly, done with copper, using vacuum tubes as the amplifiers/repeaters.) Failures such as the Picturephone, a classic example of groupthink, also get their due. And, finally, Gertner covers the forced breakup of AT&T and the demise, for all practical purposes, of Bell Labs (although it still exists, legally, now as a subsidiary of Nokia). Probably its demise was inevitable, both because times changes, and because its guiding principal, improvement of the system, both was largely achieved and its importance largely eroded by other methods of communication.
Almost all of the men profiled in this book (and they are all men) came from small town America, flyover country, with parents who were farmers, clerks, and housewives. Mervin Kelly came from Gallatin, Missouri; his father ran a hardware store. Claude Shannon came from Gaylord, Michigan; his father was a probate court judge. Brattain came from rural Washington State. Shockley came from Palo Alto—long before Palo Alto is what it is today. Thornton Fry, Bell Labs’s mathematical genius, came from Findlay, Ohio, the son of a poor carpenter. John Pierce (instrumental in satellite communication and the mind behind Echo, a huge metallized balloon in low-earth orbit used to test satellite communications concepts) grew up in Iowa. Yet these men became the giants that shaped the modern world. While many toiled in obscurity, many were widely recognized as geniuses at the time, both by the scientific community and by the popular media—more than one appeared on the cover of Time.
This ascension of small-town Americans to positions of national prominence based on their intellect seems, at least in my impression, to happen much less nowadays. Why? First, I suspect the structures for identifying and elevating the promising in early and mid-20th Century America were better. As with the medieval church, local teachers could identify the promising, recommend them to others up the chain, and make it possible for them to both receive an education commensurate with their talents and find appropriate employment. Nobody, then, talked about “privilege,” believed in leveling egalitarianism, or wasted time on educational topics of no social value, such as Latino studies or the fantasy that the Constitution is at all based on the governance of the Iroquois Confederacy (something my eighth-grader today told me was being taught to him at his very expensive, and not progressive, school, an idea roughly equivalent to believing that the Sun is an egg for a monstrous alien). Instead, both teachers and students focused on advancement. For example, Cal Fuller, a Bell Labs chemist critical to semiconductor development, came from a poor family in Chicago. But his high school physics teacher knew that “the University of Chicago offered exams to high school students in science and math. She also knew that for those who passed, the university provided full tuition for the first year and, if you were among the top twenty-five students in your class at the university, for the following three years.” So she tutored Fuller nights for free and insisted Fuller pursue the scholarship, which he did, then going to graduate school “by working the four-o’clock-to-midnight shift at the ‘Chicago Tribune’.” With today’s teachers torn between shrill demands to use gender-inclusive pronouns and to teach what’s going to be on the next dumb federally mandated test, this sort of thing must happen much less today.
Second, to the extent the intelligent and capable are identified, they rarely focus on the hard sciences. They are skimmed off into fields requiring far less hard training and offering far greater monetary rewards, yet which are largely destroyers of social capital, notably finance and law. Water flows on the path of least resistance, and why should our talented young be any different? Third, top colleges are now dominated by the children of our elite, who tend to marry each other much more than in the past, live on the coasts, and send their children to the same top colleges. They do this not so much to get an education as to get a credential that will allow them to pass the necessary filters and get jobs maintaining their position in the elite—which, for the most part, does not include those with jobs in hard science. In the hard sciences, therefore, most students today are Chinese or Indian, who take their knowledge home and advance their societies. For all these reasons (and perhaps others), even though our population is larger today, we appear to have fewer home-grown geniuses, and they are less prominent. Whether that means less absolute scientific advancement is less clear—maybe scientific breakthroughs are less obvious to the average person than they were decades ago, because earlier advances have made today’s advances more specialized and harder for the layman to understand. I suspect that if we had the old system we’d have a lot more advancement, though.
Bell Labs scientists not only worked closely together; they frequently socialized together, although many had odd, difficult or intensely private personalities that made such socializing probably less than glittering. Their work efforts were, as Gertner says, “group efforts, a compilation of the ideas and inventions of individuals bound together with common purposes and complementary talents.” It could not really be otherwise, given that their overall goal was improving the telephone system. But at root, all critical breakthroughs were individual breakthroughs—as Kelly said, “With all the needed emphasis on leadership, organization and teamwork, the individual has remained supreme—of paramount importance. It is in the mind of a single person that creative ideas and concepts are born.” Surrounding all this, of course, was a forward-looking, optimistic America, focused on individual and societal progress without a morbid fear of risk or cost. Viewing old “Twilight Zone” episodes, for example, will give you a sense of how America thought, and it is very different than the way America thinks today. It was the combination of these things—group effort, individual effort, and the national culture—that enabled the achievements of Bell Labs.
Gertner ends with an excellent question. “Regrettably, the language that describes innovations often fails to distinguish between an innovative consumer product and an innovation that represents a leap in human knowledge and a new foundation for industry. . . . [A]re we will living off the dividends from ideas that were nurtured, and risks that were taken, a half century ago?” Probably the answer is “yes.” I think that the existence and accomplishments of Bell Labs are in many ways a reproach to the extreme libertarian model that has taken hold of much of United States industry today. You don’t have to be a syndicalist or a Chestertonian Distributist to see that a model of close cooperation between a technology-focused company and the government, with the scientific results shared with all other comers for a nominal fee, rather than locked up by patents and legions of lawyers, accompanied by an ethos of public benefit (and lacking the parasitism of the “diversity and inclusion” crowd), is in many ways superior to the social utility-reducing quest for monopoly beloved by such men as Peter Thiel. It is not the case that everything that is not purely libertarian is crony capitalist. In fact, much of what is proudly libertarian is actually totally crony capitalist (see, e.g., Musk, Elon). Of course, the glory days of Bell Labs was a unique time, with easier, cheaper breakthroughs; a completely different government and ruling class; and World War II and the threat of global Communism—but then, every time is unique. Maybe, or probably, the exact same setup wouldn’t yield the same dividends today, but this book still has important lessons for us, among them that a search for a system that *will* yield such dividends is very worthwhile.
September 10, 2020
When we talk about innovation and invention these days, we think of Silicon Valley and companies like Google, Apple, and Intel. But it wasn’t always like this. Till the 1980s, it was the Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, which came to one’s mind when thinking of innovation and creativity. At the peak of its reputation in the late 1960s, Bell Labs owned almost 33000 patents. It is overwhelming even to enumerate the inventions. The Labs, at its height, comprised almost fifteen thousand people, including some twelve hundred PhDs. Its ranks included the world’s most brilliant (and eccentric) men and women. Bell Labs’ motto was that technological innovation is a permanent need in society. Being in the business of communications, they realized that fundamental questions of physics or chemistry would always affect communications. Hence, basic research was as much important as applied research and development. They viewed Science as having no true owners, but only participants, and contributors, transcending borders. With such an outlook, it is no surprise that Bell Labs even contributed to pioneering discoveries in Radio Astronomy. Its scientists, Arno Penzias and Bob Wilson, discovered by accident in 1965, the cosmic microwave background radiation that provided evidence for the Big Bang theory in the Universe’s creation. This book by Jon Gertner traces the history of Bell Labs from its inception in 1925 to its break-up by the federal Govt in 1982. The author presents its work culture and achievements through the lives and personalities of its superstars like William Shockley, Claude Shannon, et al.
The book discusses the inventions and innovations of Bell Labs sequentially from the 1930s. The top inventions from Bell Labs include the transistor, cellular telephone technology, solar cells, the radar, the laser, communication satellites, digital switching/transmission, information theory, charge-coupled devices, Unix operating system, and the C programming language. Amongst them, the transistor made a tremendous impact on the world. We know William Shockley as the inventor of the device. But it was John Bardeen and Walter Brattain who made the first transistor in Dec 1947, in a team led by Bill Shockley. They called it the point-contact transistor. However, Shockley understood the implications of the new device better. He had envisaged creating an electronic switch years before. Within two months in Jan 1948, he came up with a theory and design for a new transistor. He called it the junction transistor. It looked and functioned differently than Bardeen and Brattain’s. This got the team the Nobel prize in 1956. However, the world was slow to recognize its importance. The New York Times, in a famous lapse of editorial judgment, relegated announcing the device to page 46.
Bell Labs was also the place where Claude Shannon proposed a mathematical theory of Communication in 1948. Its importance was no less than that of the transistor. This theory studies the quantification, storage, and communication of information. It views information as a set of messages. The goal is to send these messages over a noisy channel. And then to have the receiver reconstruct the message with a low probability of error, despite the channel noise. This has been fundamental in developing the internet, data compression, the feasibility of the mobile phone, development of the compact disk, natural language processing, cryptography, and many other fields.
Bell Labs invented the Radar as a potent weapon of the Allies in World War II, though scientists knew of its principles even in the 1930s. Scientists often quipped that the radar won the war, while the atomic bomb only ended it. In April 1954, Daryl Chapin, Gerald Pearson, and Calvin Fuller of the Labs created the first practical solar cell. They developed it to power Telstar, the first active communication satellite, also a product of Bell Labs. This discovery generated even more excitement with the public than the transistor. However, the high cost of the cells and the test results in Georgia suggested that solar power would not be a marketable innovation soon. Pioneering work was also first done at Bell Labs by George Smith and Willard Boyle when they invented the Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) in 1969. This invention earned them the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics. The CCD would become the bedrock of digital photography as we now know it.
The book delves into the distinctions between discovery, invention, and innovation. A discovery often describes a scientific observation of the natural world, for eg, isolating a bacterium causing a deadly plague. An invention refers to a work of engineering that may use a new scientific discovery or long-existing ones in novel ways. Shockley considered the transistor device, in its various forms, to be an invention. It became an innovation when they manufactured it in substantial quantities and found a market to sell the product.
So, how did Bell Labs churn out path-breaking inventions at regular intervals over a long time? They achieved it by democratizing innovation through a systematic approach. For the Labs, inventing the future wasn’t just a matter of inventing things for the future. It also entailed inventing ways to invent those things. In developing the transistor and information theory, they found methods to foster the process of innovation and manage it with much success. Bell Labs viewed ideas moving from discovery through development to manufacturing. Hence, they organized the company into three groups. Research was the first group. Here, the scientists and engineers provided the reservoir of new knowledge, principles, materials, methods, and art. The second group was in systems engineering. Here, the engineers kept one eye on the reservoir of new knowledge and another on the existing communication systems and analyzed how to integrate the two. The third group was the engineers. They developed and designed new devices, switches, and transmissions systems. It also helped that they had Mervin Kelly as the President of Bell Labs. Kelly’s view of innovation was that an elite institution with the capacity for both research and development was the most fruitful way to organize “creative technology.” He developed Bell Labs as a place where a “critical mass” of scientists could exchange all kinds of information and consult with one another. He believed the interaction between fundamental science and applied science, and the interface between many disciplines creates new ideas.
The book contains comprehensive portraits of the stars of the company, namely Mervin Kelly, Jim Fisk, William Shockley, Claude Shannon, John Pierce, and William Baker. The narrative details their roles and contributions during their tenure in Bell Labs. It follows up with what they did after they left Bell Labs in a chapter titled “Afterlives”. I found the sketches on Shockley and Shannon tragic and fascinating.
Shockley had a high opinion of his capabilities, making him excessively competitive. In Bell Labs, he often transgressed the accepted norms of behavior for managers and colleagues. It brought him into conflict with fellow researchers and he left Bell Labs. In 1955, he started his own semiconductor company in Silicon Valley, CA. His vision was evident in hiring Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, Jean Hoerni, and Eugene Kleiner. All four of them would do much to put Silicon Valley on the map. Despite the star-studded team, Shockley’s life descended into paranoia and disgrace, making it difficult for his team to work together due to his temperament. Gordon Moore noted that Shockley laid the final straw on the company when he asked his entire staff to undergo polygraph tests. Later on, Shockley became fixated on dysgenics, genetics, and race. He believed that an elite, intellectual group should govern society rather than a popular majority, as in a democratic society. He favored a sterilization plan for people with low IQs and regarded the white race as superior to others.
John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, Shockley’s colleagues on the transistor invention, fared better after leaving Bell Labs. Bardeen was humble and held that he was lucky in getting the Nobel Prize. He said that someone else would have invented the transistor in two years’ time had Bell Labs not done so. He was at the University of Illinois, Urbana after he left Bell Labs and focused his research on Superconductivity. His ideas took shape in a way that merged theoretical physics with complex mathematics. Bardeen received a second Nobel Prize in Physics for the work, making him the world’s only physicist to have such a distinction.
Claude Shannon went back to MIT in the late 1950s. He believed that his best work was behind him. The future, he predicted, would depend on the business of collecting information and the business of transmitting it from one point to another and perhaps most important of all, the business of processing it. He predicted that chess programs will beat the world champion before the year 2001. Deep Blue, an IBM chess computer, beat the Russian world champion, Garry Kasparov, in 1997. In a sad turn of fate, Shannon was living in a Massachusetts nursing home then, his mind lost to Alzheimer’s. He didn’t know that his prediction came true.
This book is a loving tribute to a great American icon of Research and Development. The last chapter discusses the model of innovation in Silicon Valley today and contrasts it with Bell Labs’ approach. The Labs also had its dark moments. It was only during World War II that Bell Labs started hiring Jews, bucking a strain of anti-Semitism in the AT&T establishment. The author writes that Bell Labs had passed up hiring Richard Feynman on religious grounds! One chapter discusses AT&T, the parent company, getting into the crosshairs of the Federal Government, and the eventual break-up of Bell Labs. There are lovely historical photographs from the West Street office in New York and Murray Hill in New Jersey.
Jon Gertner has written a well-researched book. It is a delight to read.
The book discusses the inventions and innovations of Bell Labs sequentially from the 1930s. The top inventions from Bell Labs include the transistor, cellular telephone technology, solar cells, the radar, the laser, communication satellites, digital switching/transmission, information theory, charge-coupled devices, Unix operating system, and the C programming language. Amongst them, the transistor made a tremendous impact on the world. We know William Shockley as the inventor of the device. But it was John Bardeen and Walter Brattain who made the first transistor in Dec 1947, in a team led by Bill Shockley. They called it the point-contact transistor. However, Shockley understood the implications of the new device better. He had envisaged creating an electronic switch years before. Within two months in Jan 1948, he came up with a theory and design for a new transistor. He called it the junction transistor. It looked and functioned differently than Bardeen and Brattain’s. This got the team the Nobel prize in 1956. However, the world was slow to recognize its importance. The New York Times, in a famous lapse of editorial judgment, relegated announcing the device to page 46.
Bell Labs was also the place where Claude Shannon proposed a mathematical theory of Communication in 1948. Its importance was no less than that of the transistor. This theory studies the quantification, storage, and communication of information. It views information as a set of messages. The goal is to send these messages over a noisy channel. And then to have the receiver reconstruct the message with a low probability of error, despite the channel noise. This has been fundamental in developing the internet, data compression, the feasibility of the mobile phone, development of the compact disk, natural language processing, cryptography, and many other fields.
Bell Labs invented the Radar as a potent weapon of the Allies in World War II, though scientists knew of its principles even in the 1930s. Scientists often quipped that the radar won the war, while the atomic bomb only ended it. In April 1954, Daryl Chapin, Gerald Pearson, and Calvin Fuller of the Labs created the first practical solar cell. They developed it to power Telstar, the first active communication satellite, also a product of Bell Labs. This discovery generated even more excitement with the public than the transistor. However, the high cost of the cells and the test results in Georgia suggested that solar power would not be a marketable innovation soon. Pioneering work was also first done at Bell Labs by George Smith and Willard Boyle when they invented the Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) in 1969. This invention earned them the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics. The CCD would become the bedrock of digital photography as we now know it.
The book delves into the distinctions between discovery, invention, and innovation. A discovery often describes a scientific observation of the natural world, for eg, isolating a bacterium causing a deadly plague. An invention refers to a work of engineering that may use a new scientific discovery or long-existing ones in novel ways. Shockley considered the transistor device, in its various forms, to be an invention. It became an innovation when they manufactured it in substantial quantities and found a market to sell the product.
So, how did Bell Labs churn out path-breaking inventions at regular intervals over a long time? They achieved it by democratizing innovation through a systematic approach. For the Labs, inventing the future wasn’t just a matter of inventing things for the future. It also entailed inventing ways to invent those things. In developing the transistor and information theory, they found methods to foster the process of innovation and manage it with much success. Bell Labs viewed ideas moving from discovery through development to manufacturing. Hence, they organized the company into three groups. Research was the first group. Here, the scientists and engineers provided the reservoir of new knowledge, principles, materials, methods, and art. The second group was in systems engineering. Here, the engineers kept one eye on the reservoir of new knowledge and another on the existing communication systems and analyzed how to integrate the two. The third group was the engineers. They developed and designed new devices, switches, and transmissions systems. It also helped that they had Mervin Kelly as the President of Bell Labs. Kelly’s view of innovation was that an elite institution with the capacity for both research and development was the most fruitful way to organize “creative technology.” He developed Bell Labs as a place where a “critical mass” of scientists could exchange all kinds of information and consult with one another. He believed the interaction between fundamental science and applied science, and the interface between many disciplines creates new ideas.
The book contains comprehensive portraits of the stars of the company, namely Mervin Kelly, Jim Fisk, William Shockley, Claude Shannon, John Pierce, and William Baker. The narrative details their roles and contributions during their tenure in Bell Labs. It follows up with what they did after they left Bell Labs in a chapter titled “Afterlives”. I found the sketches on Shockley and Shannon tragic and fascinating.
Shockley had a high opinion of his capabilities, making him excessively competitive. In Bell Labs, he often transgressed the accepted norms of behavior for managers and colleagues. It brought him into conflict with fellow researchers and he left Bell Labs. In 1955, he started his own semiconductor company in Silicon Valley, CA. His vision was evident in hiring Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, Jean Hoerni, and Eugene Kleiner. All four of them would do much to put Silicon Valley on the map. Despite the star-studded team, Shockley’s life descended into paranoia and disgrace, making it difficult for his team to work together due to his temperament. Gordon Moore noted that Shockley laid the final straw on the company when he asked his entire staff to undergo polygraph tests. Later on, Shockley became fixated on dysgenics, genetics, and race. He believed that an elite, intellectual group should govern society rather than a popular majority, as in a democratic society. He favored a sterilization plan for people with low IQs and regarded the white race as superior to others.
John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, Shockley’s colleagues on the transistor invention, fared better after leaving Bell Labs. Bardeen was humble and held that he was lucky in getting the Nobel Prize. He said that someone else would have invented the transistor in two years’ time had Bell Labs not done so. He was at the University of Illinois, Urbana after he left Bell Labs and focused his research on Superconductivity. His ideas took shape in a way that merged theoretical physics with complex mathematics. Bardeen received a second Nobel Prize in Physics for the work, making him the world’s only physicist to have such a distinction.
Claude Shannon went back to MIT in the late 1950s. He believed that his best work was behind him. The future, he predicted, would depend on the business of collecting information and the business of transmitting it from one point to another and perhaps most important of all, the business of processing it. He predicted that chess programs will beat the world champion before the year 2001. Deep Blue, an IBM chess computer, beat the Russian world champion, Garry Kasparov, in 1997. In a sad turn of fate, Shannon was living in a Massachusetts nursing home then, his mind lost to Alzheimer’s. He didn’t know that his prediction came true.
This book is a loving tribute to a great American icon of Research and Development. The last chapter discusses the model of innovation in Silicon Valley today and contrasts it with Bell Labs’ approach. The Labs also had its dark moments. It was only during World War II that Bell Labs started hiring Jews, bucking a strain of anti-Semitism in the AT&T establishment. The author writes that Bell Labs had passed up hiring Richard Feynman on religious grounds! One chapter discusses AT&T, the parent company, getting into the crosshairs of the Federal Government, and the eventual break-up of Bell Labs. There are lovely historical photographs from the West Street office in New York and Murray Hill in New Jersey.
Jon Gertner has written a well-researched book. It is a delight to read.
January 27, 2018
This book is a history of Bell Labs, true, but perhaps more accurately, this book is a history of American engineering throughout the 20th century, since 20th century American engineering was the engineering of Bell Labs. From the telegraph to the internet, the span of innovation, experimentation, and discovery captured in the offices at Brooklyn and Murray Hill easily dwarf any other institution of that era. Perhaps no other company has so thoroughly touched our lives today, creating a new paradigm in the way we define ourselves in the information era.
Such great breadth of discovery is not easy to explain, but Gertner does a masterful job of doing so by encapsulating such technologies in the identities of their creators. From the infamous Shockley to the eccentric Shannon, to the ones who are unknown in general public spheres of the 21st century, this book is essentially a collection of biographies. Yet such a description falls short of the magnitude of what had occurred. These famous engineers and scientists, who thought into existence the ways that we communicate, think, and interact, were also in a unique environment provided by the Bell Labs from the 1930s through the 1960s. This book captures the culture of that time thoroughly, from the games that engineers would play when their supervisors weren't looking to the rare disputes between management and researcher.
A possible criticism is that the book focuses too heavily on the lives of Kelly, Shockley, Bardeen, Shannon, Fisk, Pierce, and Baker. This is entirely valid - look at the 16 page insert in the center of the book that provides beautiful black-and-white photos of these Young Turks at work in Murray Hill. Yet the picture that such biographies provide is perhaps representative of what the Bell Labs of that era represented. These men had different, sometimes conflicting, personalities, yet Bell Labs was able to draw out of them true genius. Gertner deflects this argument, stating in the conclusion that "maybe this argument - the individual versus the institution; the great men versus the yeomen; the famous versus the forgotten - is insoluble. Or ... perhaps the most significant thing was that Bell Labs had both kinds of people in profusion, and both kinds working together. And for the problems it was solving, both kinds were necessary.
Our understanding of innovation in today's world is fundamentally different from innovation at that time. Look at the primary motivations behind shocking American discoveries in the 20th century, and you will find how remarkably institutional they were. The man on the moon was a result of the Space Race between two superpowers. The Manhattan Project was a result of over 600,000 scientists, engineers, and workers combining forces to develop the most terrible weapon. Discoveries and innovations of that time were in large part supported by academic institutions, by government, or by large monopolies like the Ma Bell system. Gertner raises the point that perhaps this was one of the fatal flaws that led to the eventual collapse of the Bell Labs in the 1990s. By working in a vacuum, protected from competition through explicit promises by the government, Bell Labs never had to learn how to compete in an open marketplace. By outinventing everyone else, they eventually led to their own demise, being unable to capitalize on their new creations of satellite and internet communications as many of the new startups in Silicon Valley.
Perhaps it is for the better that Bell Labs has given way to Silicon Valley, and that we have a new wave of discovery. But I find Bell Labs, and this book, incredibly enduring for imparting the sense of community that such a research institution had at the time. Sure, it was stressful, competitive, and intensive. Yet such stresses only brought everyone to reach higher heights and think bigger than any other place on Earth.
Such great breadth of discovery is not easy to explain, but Gertner does a masterful job of doing so by encapsulating such technologies in the identities of their creators. From the infamous Shockley to the eccentric Shannon, to the ones who are unknown in general public spheres of the 21st century, this book is essentially a collection of biographies. Yet such a description falls short of the magnitude of what had occurred. These famous engineers and scientists, who thought into existence the ways that we communicate, think, and interact, were also in a unique environment provided by the Bell Labs from the 1930s through the 1960s. This book captures the culture of that time thoroughly, from the games that engineers would play when their supervisors weren't looking to the rare disputes between management and researcher.
A possible criticism is that the book focuses too heavily on the lives of Kelly, Shockley, Bardeen, Shannon, Fisk, Pierce, and Baker. This is entirely valid - look at the 16 page insert in the center of the book that provides beautiful black-and-white photos of these Young Turks at work in Murray Hill. Yet the picture that such biographies provide is perhaps representative of what the Bell Labs of that era represented. These men had different, sometimes conflicting, personalities, yet Bell Labs was able to draw out of them true genius. Gertner deflects this argument, stating in the conclusion that "maybe this argument - the individual versus the institution; the great men versus the yeomen; the famous versus the forgotten - is insoluble. Or ... perhaps the most significant thing was that Bell Labs had both kinds of people in profusion, and both kinds working together. And for the problems it was solving, both kinds were necessary.
Our understanding of innovation in today's world is fundamentally different from innovation at that time. Look at the primary motivations behind shocking American discoveries in the 20th century, and you will find how remarkably institutional they were. The man on the moon was a result of the Space Race between two superpowers. The Manhattan Project was a result of over 600,000 scientists, engineers, and workers combining forces to develop the most terrible weapon. Discoveries and innovations of that time were in large part supported by academic institutions, by government, or by large monopolies like the Ma Bell system. Gertner raises the point that perhaps this was one of the fatal flaws that led to the eventual collapse of the Bell Labs in the 1990s. By working in a vacuum, protected from competition through explicit promises by the government, Bell Labs never had to learn how to compete in an open marketplace. By outinventing everyone else, they eventually led to their own demise, being unable to capitalize on their new creations of satellite and internet communications as many of the new startups in Silicon Valley.
Perhaps it is for the better that Bell Labs has given way to Silicon Valley, and that we have a new wave of discovery. But I find Bell Labs, and this book, incredibly enduring for imparting the sense of community that such a research institution had at the time. Sure, it was stressful, competitive, and intensive. Yet such stresses only brought everyone to reach higher heights and think bigger than any other place on Earth.
May 2, 2012
This is a history of an institution - the Bell Telephone Laboratories. It is told through the stories of the dominant individuals associated with the glory days of the lab. It is also told through the stories of the most famous achievements associated with Bell Labs - communication theory, the transistor (and the integrated circuits that developed from it), communication satellites, mobile phones, the UNIX computer language, semiconductors, missile guidance, etc. The author is exceptional at communicating the key insights in a given technological achievement without going into the details that would keep the book from being accessible to general readers. For those who are junkies for details, there are sufficient references to original documents, many of which are available on the internet for little or no cost.
What did I like the most about the book? Well the author did a really good job at showing how a number of fundamental basic research results had to come together in order to produce an innovation. For example, he discussed all of the developments that would be necessary for an "active" telecommunications satellite to be developed (Telstar). He was also effective at showing all the knowledge that had to be brought together to develop the system of cellular communications that we take for granted today.
While it is not a focal point of the book, Gertner is also effective at showing the economic and business environment that was necessary for the Bell Labs model of innovation to work and why this model was so ineffective once the Bell System was deregulated. It is a complex story that incites strong opinions today and the author does his job well here.
The people stories are also interesting. My favorites were the stories of Claude Shannon, who literally "wrote the book" on the binary/digital world and William Shockley, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the transistor but had a very troubled and turbulent life afterwards.
For most anyone interested in the history of science and technology, this book will have something worthwhile. As I said, it is not that technical, but that did not seem necessary to the story. The technical details can be obtained elsewhere.
What did I like the most about the book? Well the author did a really good job at showing how a number of fundamental basic research results had to come together in order to produce an innovation. For example, he discussed all of the developments that would be necessary for an "active" telecommunications satellite to be developed (Telstar). He was also effective at showing all the knowledge that had to be brought together to develop the system of cellular communications that we take for granted today.
While it is not a focal point of the book, Gertner is also effective at showing the economic and business environment that was necessary for the Bell Labs model of innovation to work and why this model was so ineffective once the Bell System was deregulated. It is a complex story that incites strong opinions today and the author does his job well here.
The people stories are also interesting. My favorites were the stories of Claude Shannon, who literally "wrote the book" on the binary/digital world and William Shockley, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the transistor but had a very troubled and turbulent life afterwards.
For most anyone interested in the history of science and technology, this book will have something worthwhile. As I said, it is not that technical, but that did not seem necessary to the story. The technical details can be obtained elsewhere.
February 1, 2015
This book should have been so much better. The strand on the creation of information theory was excellent. Nevertheless, there are 3 main problems: (i) the author keeps alluding to how the people at Bell had already thought of everything internet and mobile, and (ii) the author jumped back and forth in time without providing flags for the change in context (this was especially problematic with the audiobook), and (iii) everyone is a star without any character faults. Also, another minor but annoying shortcoming (iv) failed on several occasions to provide adequate science, technology and economic background.
For (i), if we had androids, flying cars and brains in a vat, the author would have found some quote with such hubris stemming from some combination of TV, rockets and the vacuum tube discoveries. The history of the future is full of allusions to many things which were to come and which did not. This distracts from the 4 or 5 major breakthroughs at Bell Labs - (i) information/complexity theory, (ii) the transistor, (iii) semi-conductors, (iv) silicon, and (v) switching.
For (iii), all the people sound like great guys - kind, smart, quirky communicator with interesting hobbies and no mention of character flaws. This makes the whole book sound more like a fanboy memoir and the lack of reflexion and critical eye lends a sense of non-credibility to the whole book. Reads more like some comic book version of this history.
For (iv), this was especially annoying on the discovery of silicon as the 'right' material for transistors. What were the alternatives? Why did they choose silicon over them? Finally stopped reading 2/3 through the book when the author jumped back to 1947 suddenly and started linking bell lab's speculation about mobile with our modern world of ubiquitous computing.
For (i), if we had androids, flying cars and brains in a vat, the author would have found some quote with such hubris stemming from some combination of TV, rockets and the vacuum tube discoveries. The history of the future is full of allusions to many things which were to come and which did not. This distracts from the 4 or 5 major breakthroughs at Bell Labs - (i) information/complexity theory, (ii) the transistor, (iii) semi-conductors, (iv) silicon, and (v) switching.
For (iii), all the people sound like great guys - kind, smart, quirky communicator with interesting hobbies and no mention of character flaws. This makes the whole book sound more like a fanboy memoir and the lack of reflexion and critical eye lends a sense of non-credibility to the whole book. Reads more like some comic book version of this history.
For (iv), this was especially annoying on the discovery of silicon as the 'right' material for transistors. What were the alternatives? Why did they choose silicon over them? Finally stopped reading 2/3 through the book when the author jumped back to 1947 suddenly and started linking bell lab's speculation about mobile with our modern world of ubiquitous computing.
February 5, 2013
There are a lot of names to keep track of. But once you do, it becomes clear that these engineers, physicists, metallurgists and other company geniuses came together to invent modern communications and a networked future. I re-read the first third to more fully appreciate the science behind the transistors and semi-conductors Bell Labs invented. And it is fascinating. At an atomic level these men did nothing less than apply science in an alchemical fashion to herd electrons and make them travel crisp distances to broadcast information. The Bell Labs model, where theoretical and applied science came together, emerges as a new way of innovating. Basically, the Labs put the theory people and machine people together in a building where they would have to run into each other and talk. The decline of Bell Labs isn't as interesting as its rise, but is still worth following to understand where this government tolerated monopoly gave way to the thousands of smaller technology incubators which shape our life today.
May 10, 2012
I can't avoid sounding like a massively stereotypical nerd when I say: Not enough Unix! I'm not expecting the author to get into the finer points of bash scripting, but I would have liked more than a single sentence which basically amounts to "Meanwhile, some computer scientists along the corridor had invented Unix."
Apart from that it's a reasonably interesting scientific history. Loses steam a bit towards the end when the Labs fall into disgrace and disrepair and everyone starts dying of Alzheimer's.
Apart from that it's a reasonably interesting scientific history. Loses steam a bit towards the end when the Labs fall into disgrace and disrepair and everyone starts dying of Alzheimer's.
January 26, 2016
“The Idea Factory” is a fascinating look at the lives of some of the key men who shaped Bell Labs and created its greatest inventions. The scale of Bell Labs’ impact is truly incredible and this book does a good job of explaining the history of the institution and what factors contributed to its remarkable output. Gertner also explores the relationship between Bell Labs and the government - including some secret military work that Bell Labs did for the government (including helping set up the NSA) in a sort of tacit deal to allow them to maintain their monopoly. Incredible stuff.
Some of my favorite quotes below
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With the exception of Mervin Kelly, the eldest of the group, they were sometimes considered members of a band of Bell Labs revolutionaries known as the Young Turks. What bound them was a shared belief in the nearly sacred mission of Bell Laboratories and the importance of technological innovation.
Bill Gates once said of the invention of the transistor, “My first stop on any time-travel expedition would be Bell Labs in December 1947.”
To consider what occurred at Bell Labs, to glimpse the inner workings of its invisible and now vanished “production lines,” is to consider the possibilities of what large human organizations might accomplish.
Almost from the day the Bell System was created, when Alexander Graham Bell became engaged in a multiyear litigation with an inventor named Elisha Gray over who actually deserved the patent to the telephone, the Bell company was known to be ferociously litigious. In its later battles with independent phone companies, however, it would often move beyond battles in the courtroom and resort to sabotaging competitors’ phone lines and stealthily taking over their equipment suppliers.
... an amplifier known as the audion that had been brought to AT&T in 1912 by an independent, Yale-trained inventor named Lee De Forest… Soon to be known as the vacuum tube, it and its descendants would revolutionize twentieth-century communications.
In the Willis-Graham Act of 1921, the U.S. Congress formally exempted the telephone business from federal antitrust laws… On January 1, 1925, AT&T officially created Bell Telephone Laboratories as a stand-alone company.
“The [Bell] System,” Danielian pointed out, “constitutes the largest aggregation of capital that has ever been controlled by a single private company at any time in the history of business. It is larger than the Pennsylvania Railroad Company and United States Steel Corporation put together. Its gross revenues of more than one billion dollars a year are surpassed by the incomes of few governments of the world. The System comprises over 200 vassal corporations. Through some 140 companies it controls between 80 and 90 percent of local telephone service and 98 percent of the long-distance telephone wires of the United States.” The Bell System owned the wires involved in certain aspects of radio transmission, Danielian added, and had become involved in a host of other pursuits, such as equipment for motion pictures. Its needs for raw materials added up to “hundreds of millions of dollars” annually; its deposits in banks involved “almost a third of the active banks in the United States”; its investors numbered nearly a million. It was also, not incidentally, the largest employer in the United States.
And to ensure that the products manufactured by Western Electric were of the proper specifications and quality, a Bell Labs mathematician named Walter Shewhart invented a statistical management technique for manufacturing that was soon known, more colloquially, as “quality control.” [One of Shewhart’s disciples was W. Edwards Deming, who brought quality control to Japan’s automobile industry.]
At Kelly’s request, Shockley and Jim Fisk... figured out how to make a nuclear reactor. The men tried to patent the idea, but met with resistance from the government and the patent courts. As Fisk would recall, the reason was that the physicists Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard “had essentially the same idea and probably at about the same time. We may have been earlier, they may have been earlier, I don’t know. I don’t think that anybody will ever know.
In the first few years after Pearl Harbor, in fact, Bell Labs took on nearly a thousand different projects for the military—everything from tank radio sets to communications systems for pilots wearing oxygen masks to enciphering machines for scrambling secret messages—leading Kelly to expand his staff by several thousand. The Labs actually doubled its size from about forty-six hundred before the war to nine thousand during it.
THE DEVELOPMENT WORK on magnetrons—the work that preceded their manufacture—was done in concert at MIT and Bell Labs. At MIT, an ad hoc group of scientists and engineers, eventually numbering several thousand, worked in a secure campus building with blacked-out windows known as the Rad Lab.
One of Morton’s disciples, a Bell Labs development scientist named Eugene Gordon, points out that there were two corollaries to Morton’s view of innovation: The first is that if you haven’t manufactured the new thing in substantial quantities, you have not innovated; the second is that if you haven’t found a market to sell the product, you have not innovated.
Shannon suggested it was most useful to calculate a message’s information content and rate in a term that he suggested engineers call “bits”—a word that had never before appeared in print with this meaning. Shannon had borrowed it from his Bell Labs math colleague John Tukey as an abbreviation of “binary digits.”
All the error-correcting codes were meant to ensure that the information on the receiving end was exactly or very close to the message that left the transmission end. Even fifty years later, this idea would leave many engineers slack-jawed. “To make the chance of error as small as you wish?” Robert Fano, a friend and colleague of Shannon’s, later pointed out. “How he got that insight, how he even came to believe such a thing, I don’t know.” All modern communications engineering, from cell phone transmissions to compact discs and deep space communications, is based upon this insight.
And yet Kelly would say at one point, “With all the needed emphasis on leadership, organization and teamwork, the individual has remained supreme—of paramount importance. It is in the mind of a single person that creative ideas and concepts are born.” There was an essential truth to this, too—John Bardeen suddenly suggesting to the solid-state group that they should consider working on the hard-to-penetrate surface states on semiconductors, for instance. Or Shockley, mad with envy, sitting in his Chicago hotel room and laying the groundwork for the junction transistor.
They discerned only one common thread: Workers with the most patents often shared lunch or breakfast with a Bell Labs electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. It wasn’t the case that Nyquist gave them specific ideas. Rather, as one scientist recalled, “he drew people out, got them thinking.” More than anything, Nyquist asked good questions.
With Shannon’s startling ideas on information, it was one of the rare moments in history, an academic would later point out, “where somebody founded a field, stated all the major results, and proved most of them all pretty much at once.” Eventually, mathematicians would debate not whether Shannon was ahead of his contemporaries. They would debate whether he was twenty, or thirty, or fifty years ahead.
Shannon’s first paper on the subject—the one from which Scientific American adapted an article—happened to be the first paper ever written on chess programming.
“You get paid for the seven and a half hours a day you put in here,��� Kelly often told new Bell Labs employees in his speech to them on their first day, “but you get your raises and promotions on what you do in the other sixteen and a half hours.”
Why was an office in the White House so unappealing to Kelly? For one thing, he was already immensely influential at the highest military and policy levels. The tightening alignment between a handful of the largest American corporations and the armed forces—“the huge industrial and military machinery of defense,” as President Dwight D. Eisenhower would call it when he left office a decade later—had already become an enormous business for AT&T, which entrusted its Bell Laboratories and manufacturing divisions at Western Electric to design and manufacture a vast array of secret equipment for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Most of the industrial work orders related to radar and communications equipment; these were considered vital for national defense.
[Kelly] wanted to limit the Labs’ military contracts so that they would not get in the way of its communications business, yet he harbored no apparent qualms about such endeavors… all were potentially useful in keeping at bay the antitrust regulators, who still sought to break up the Bell System. The military work could easily be construed as part of the implicit pact between the phone company and the government that allowed it a monopoly.
Kelly would often point out that the Labs workforce—including PhDs, lab technicians, and clerical staff—by the early 1950s totaled around nine thousand. Only 20 percent of those nine thousand worked in basic and applied research, however. Another 20 percent worked on military matters. Meanwhile, the rest of the Labs’ scientists and engineers—the majority—toiled on the never-ending job of planning and developing the system.
In 1956, Fisk responded to Eisenhower’s request to set up a separate commission to figure out how to gather better information about the Soviet Union by suggesting Baker for the assignment. “There was the presumption that the Soviets had become undecipherable, that we would not have enough warning to respond defensively to their threats,” Baker recalled. The result was the Ad Hoc Task Force for the Application of Communications Analysis for National and International Security, otherwise known as the Baker Committee. The committee’s conclusions would be directed to the then five-year-old National Security Agency, a new unit within the Department of Defense charged with securing the country’s information networks and deciphering foreign intelligence. NSA’s very existence was then considered a national secret. So Baker was organizing a committee that did not officially exist to write a top secret report about how to improve an organization that didn’t officially exist either.
In his history of the NSA, James Bamford described the Baker Report as recommending “a Manhattan Project–like effort to push the USA well ahead of the Soviet Union and all other nations” through the application of information-age tools. Bamford also noted that one of the committee’s enduring legacies was its recommendation that the U.S. intelligence networks establish “a close yet secret alliance with America’s academic and industrial communities.”
“the eminence grise of Republican science,” as the British magazine New Scientist described him—Baker served as a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), a group that examined the operations of the CIA and other intelligence agencies. As part of his PFIAB work, he helped found in 1960 the National Reconnaissance Office, a government organization charged with planning, building, launching, and maintaining America’s spy satellites. The NRO remained secret for its entire first decade.
By the start of the 1960s Baker was engaged in a willfully obscure second career, much like the one Mervin Kelly had formerly conducted, a career that ran not sequentially like some men’s—a stint in government following a stint in business, or vice versa—but in parallel, so that Baker’s various jobs in Washington and his job at Bell Labs intersected in quiet and complex and multifarious ways. Baker could bring innovations in communications to the government’s attention almost instantly.
But in just a few years’ time, the integrated circuit would represent something new for Bell Labs: a moment when a hugely important advance in solid-state engineering, though built upon the scientific discoveries at the Labs, had occurred elsewhere. Such a development perhaps suggested that the landscape of competitiveness in American electronics, something that Mervin Kelly had written about in the closing days of World War II, was now very much a reality.
But to an innovator, being early is not necessarily different from being wrong.
It was Engel’s understanding that to get ahead at Bell Labs, “you were supposed to work on more than you were asked to work on.” It was necessary, in other words, not only to do your assigned work but to devote 20 or 30 percent of your time to another project.
Pierce later remarked that one thing about Kelly impressed him above all else... Kelly did not want to begin a project by focusing on what was known. He would want to begin by focusing on what was not known.
All during 1966 and 1967, Shockley urged the National Academy of Sciences, the organization of America’s most distinguished scientists, to focus more deeply on the question of how heredity affects intelligence. In April 1968, at a meeting of the academy, Shockley charged that the country’s leading thinkers were showing a “lack of responsibility and courage” by not examining correlations of race and intelligence.
“I don’t know how history is taught here in Japan,” he told the audience when he traveled there in 1985 to give an acceptance speech, “but in the United States in my college days, most of the time was spent on the study of political leaders and wars—Caesars, Napoleons, and Hitlers. I think this is totally wrong. The important people and events of history are the thinkers and innovators, the Darwins, Newtons, Beethovens whose work continues to grow in influence in a positive fashion.” [Claude Shannon]
“Unfettered research,” as Odlyzko termed it, was no longer a logical or necessary investment for a company. For one thing, it took far too long for an actual breakthrough to pay off as a commercial innovation—if it ever did. For another, the base of science was now so broad, thanks to work in academia as well as old industrial laboratories such as Bell Labs, that a company could profit merely by pursuing an incremental strategy rather than a game-changing discovery or invention.
In 1995, Forrester remarked that “science and technology is now a production line. If you want a new idea, you hire some people, give them a budget, and have fairly good odds of getting what you asked for. It’s like building refrigerators.”
“What does the Schon scandal mean?” an interviewer from the New York Times asked a young physicist named Paul Ginsparg. “The demise of Bell Labs by becoming corporate,” Ginsparg replied.
Finding an aspect of modern life that doesn’t incorporate some strand of Bell Labs’ DNA would be difficult. The transistors, lasers, quality assurance methods, and information technologies have been incorporated into computers, communications, medical surgery tools, factory productivity methods, digital photography, defense weaponry, and a list of industries and devices and processes almost too long to name. Scores of Bell Labs veterans have meanwhile taken jobs in technology companies such as Google and Microsoft; even more have gone into academia, following Shannon’s and Shockley’s example, and passed along their ideas to the next generation.
“The history of modernization is in essence a history of scientific and technological progress,” Wen Jiabao, the premier of China, said recently. “Scientific discovery and technological inventions have brought about new civilizations, modern industries, and the rise and fall of nations.”
“While only four percent of the [U.S.] work force is composed of scientists and engineers,” the National Academy report points out, “this group disproportionately creates jobs for the other 96 percent.”
Eugene Kleiner, moreover, a founding partner at the premier venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, was originally hired by Bill Shockley at his ill-fated semiconductor company. But the Silicon Valley process that Kleiner helped develop was a different innovation model from Bell Labs. It was not a factory of ideas; it was a geography of ideas. It was not one concentrated and powerful machine; it was the meshing of many interlocking small parts grouped physically near enough to one another so as to make an equally powerful machine.
The value of the old Bell Labs was its patience in searching out new and fundamental ideas, and its ability to use its immense engineering staff to develop and perfect those ideas.
“You may find a lot of controversy over how Bell Labs managed people,” John Mayo, the former Bell Labs president, says. “But keep in mind, I don’t think those managers saw it that way. They saw it as: How do you manage ideas? And that’s very different from managing people.
Pierce, to put it simply, was asking himself: What about Bell Labs’ formula was timeless? In his 1997 list, he thought it boiled down to four things: A technically competent management all the way to the top. Researchers didn’t have to raise funds. Research on a topic or system could be and was supported for years. Research could be terminated without damning the researcher.
What seems more likely, as the science writer Steven Johnson has noted in a broad study of scientific innovations, is that creative environments that foster a rich exchange of ideas are far more important in eliciting important new insights than are the forces of competition. Indeed, one might concede that market competition has been superb at giving consumers incremental and appealing improvements. But that does not mean it has been good at prompting huge advances (such as those at Bell Labs, as well as those that allowed for the creation of the Internet, for instance, or, even earlier, antibiotics).
For instance, a 2008 study titled “Where Do Innovations Come From?” concluded that partnerships among corporations, government laboratories, and federally funded university researchers has become increasingly essential to the U.S. innovation pipeline over the past several decades. In 2006, for instance, “77 of the 88 U.S. entities” that produced significant innovations were beneficiaries of federal funding. Clearly, at least in regard to innovation, capitalism is more deeply intertwined with government than many of us realize.
Perhaps information technology, then, is the wrong place to look for a new Bell Labs. We might do better to poke around in other parts of the economy. One place to consider is a complex of buildings set amid a 689-acre campus some thirty miles north of Washington, D.C. Known as Janelia Farm, the campus serves as an elite research center for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Janelia opened in 2006 with the intent of attacking the most basic biomedical research problems; it is patterned after Bell Labs and backed by a multibillion-dollar endowment. The primary goal is to understand consciousness and how the human brain processes information, but the approach to innovation is familiar: a close, interdisciplinary exchange of ideas between the world’s brightest science researchers, all of whom are given ample funding and tremendous freedom.
Some of my favorite quotes below
####################
With the exception of Mervin Kelly, the eldest of the group, they were sometimes considered members of a band of Bell Labs revolutionaries known as the Young Turks. What bound them was a shared belief in the nearly sacred mission of Bell Laboratories and the importance of technological innovation.
Bill Gates once said of the invention of the transistor, “My first stop on any time-travel expedition would be Bell Labs in December 1947.”
To consider what occurred at Bell Labs, to glimpse the inner workings of its invisible and now vanished “production lines,” is to consider the possibilities of what large human organizations might accomplish.
Almost from the day the Bell System was created, when Alexander Graham Bell became engaged in a multiyear litigation with an inventor named Elisha Gray over who actually deserved the patent to the telephone, the Bell company was known to be ferociously litigious. In its later battles with independent phone companies, however, it would often move beyond battles in the courtroom and resort to sabotaging competitors’ phone lines and stealthily taking over their equipment suppliers.
... an amplifier known as the audion that had been brought to AT&T in 1912 by an independent, Yale-trained inventor named Lee De Forest… Soon to be known as the vacuum tube, it and its descendants would revolutionize twentieth-century communications.
In the Willis-Graham Act of 1921, the U.S. Congress formally exempted the telephone business from federal antitrust laws… On January 1, 1925, AT&T officially created Bell Telephone Laboratories as a stand-alone company.
“The [Bell] System,” Danielian pointed out, “constitutes the largest aggregation of capital that has ever been controlled by a single private company at any time in the history of business. It is larger than the Pennsylvania Railroad Company and United States Steel Corporation put together. Its gross revenues of more than one billion dollars a year are surpassed by the incomes of few governments of the world. The System comprises over 200 vassal corporations. Through some 140 companies it controls between 80 and 90 percent of local telephone service and 98 percent of the long-distance telephone wires of the United States.” The Bell System owned the wires involved in certain aspects of radio transmission, Danielian added, and had become involved in a host of other pursuits, such as equipment for motion pictures. Its needs for raw materials added up to “hundreds of millions of dollars” annually; its deposits in banks involved “almost a third of the active banks in the United States”; its investors numbered nearly a million. It was also, not incidentally, the largest employer in the United States.
And to ensure that the products manufactured by Western Electric were of the proper specifications and quality, a Bell Labs mathematician named Walter Shewhart invented a statistical management technique for manufacturing that was soon known, more colloquially, as “quality control.” [One of Shewhart’s disciples was W. Edwards Deming, who brought quality control to Japan’s automobile industry.]
At Kelly’s request, Shockley and Jim Fisk... figured out how to make a nuclear reactor. The men tried to patent the idea, but met with resistance from the government and the patent courts. As Fisk would recall, the reason was that the physicists Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard “had essentially the same idea and probably at about the same time. We may have been earlier, they may have been earlier, I don’t know. I don’t think that anybody will ever know.
In the first few years after Pearl Harbor, in fact, Bell Labs took on nearly a thousand different projects for the military—everything from tank radio sets to communications systems for pilots wearing oxygen masks to enciphering machines for scrambling secret messages—leading Kelly to expand his staff by several thousand. The Labs actually doubled its size from about forty-six hundred before the war to nine thousand during it.
THE DEVELOPMENT WORK on magnetrons—the work that preceded their manufacture—was done in concert at MIT and Bell Labs. At MIT, an ad hoc group of scientists and engineers, eventually numbering several thousand, worked in a secure campus building with blacked-out windows known as the Rad Lab.
One of Morton’s disciples, a Bell Labs development scientist named Eugene Gordon, points out that there were two corollaries to Morton’s view of innovation: The first is that if you haven’t manufactured the new thing in substantial quantities, you have not innovated; the second is that if you haven’t found a market to sell the product, you have not innovated.
Shannon suggested it was most useful to calculate a message’s information content and rate in a term that he suggested engineers call “bits”—a word that had never before appeared in print with this meaning. Shannon had borrowed it from his Bell Labs math colleague John Tukey as an abbreviation of “binary digits.”
All the error-correcting codes were meant to ensure that the information on the receiving end was exactly or very close to the message that left the transmission end. Even fifty years later, this idea would leave many engineers slack-jawed. “To make the chance of error as small as you wish?” Robert Fano, a friend and colleague of Shannon’s, later pointed out. “How he got that insight, how he even came to believe such a thing, I don’t know.” All modern communications engineering, from cell phone transmissions to compact discs and deep space communications, is based upon this insight.
And yet Kelly would say at one point, “With all the needed emphasis on leadership, organization and teamwork, the individual has remained supreme—of paramount importance. It is in the mind of a single person that creative ideas and concepts are born.” There was an essential truth to this, too—John Bardeen suddenly suggesting to the solid-state group that they should consider working on the hard-to-penetrate surface states on semiconductors, for instance. Or Shockley, mad with envy, sitting in his Chicago hotel room and laying the groundwork for the junction transistor.
They discerned only one common thread: Workers with the most patents often shared lunch or breakfast with a Bell Labs electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. It wasn’t the case that Nyquist gave them specific ideas. Rather, as one scientist recalled, “he drew people out, got them thinking.” More than anything, Nyquist asked good questions.
With Shannon’s startling ideas on information, it was one of the rare moments in history, an academic would later point out, “where somebody founded a field, stated all the major results, and proved most of them all pretty much at once.” Eventually, mathematicians would debate not whether Shannon was ahead of his contemporaries. They would debate whether he was twenty, or thirty, or fifty years ahead.
Shannon’s first paper on the subject—the one from which Scientific American adapted an article—happened to be the first paper ever written on chess programming.
“You get paid for the seven and a half hours a day you put in here,��� Kelly often told new Bell Labs employees in his speech to them on their first day, “but you get your raises and promotions on what you do in the other sixteen and a half hours.”
Why was an office in the White House so unappealing to Kelly? For one thing, he was already immensely influential at the highest military and policy levels. The tightening alignment between a handful of the largest American corporations and the armed forces—“the huge industrial and military machinery of defense,” as President Dwight D. Eisenhower would call it when he left office a decade later—had already become an enormous business for AT&T, which entrusted its Bell Laboratories and manufacturing divisions at Western Electric to design and manufacture a vast array of secret equipment for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Most of the industrial work orders related to radar and communications equipment; these were considered vital for national defense.
[Kelly] wanted to limit the Labs’ military contracts so that they would not get in the way of its communications business, yet he harbored no apparent qualms about such endeavors… all were potentially useful in keeping at bay the antitrust regulators, who still sought to break up the Bell System. The military work could easily be construed as part of the implicit pact between the phone company and the government that allowed it a monopoly.
Kelly would often point out that the Labs workforce—including PhDs, lab technicians, and clerical staff—by the early 1950s totaled around nine thousand. Only 20 percent of those nine thousand worked in basic and applied research, however. Another 20 percent worked on military matters. Meanwhile, the rest of the Labs’ scientists and engineers—the majority—toiled on the never-ending job of planning and developing the system.
In 1956, Fisk responded to Eisenhower’s request to set up a separate commission to figure out how to gather better information about the Soviet Union by suggesting Baker for the assignment. “There was the presumption that the Soviets had become undecipherable, that we would not have enough warning to respond defensively to their threats,” Baker recalled. The result was the Ad Hoc Task Force for the Application of Communications Analysis for National and International Security, otherwise known as the Baker Committee. The committee’s conclusions would be directed to the then five-year-old National Security Agency, a new unit within the Department of Defense charged with securing the country’s information networks and deciphering foreign intelligence. NSA’s very existence was then considered a national secret. So Baker was organizing a committee that did not officially exist to write a top secret report about how to improve an organization that didn’t officially exist either.
In his history of the NSA, James Bamford described the Baker Report as recommending “a Manhattan Project–like effort to push the USA well ahead of the Soviet Union and all other nations” through the application of information-age tools. Bamford also noted that one of the committee’s enduring legacies was its recommendation that the U.S. intelligence networks establish “a close yet secret alliance with America’s academic and industrial communities.”
“the eminence grise of Republican science,” as the British magazine New Scientist described him—Baker served as a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), a group that examined the operations of the CIA and other intelligence agencies. As part of his PFIAB work, he helped found in 1960 the National Reconnaissance Office, a government organization charged with planning, building, launching, and maintaining America’s spy satellites. The NRO remained secret for its entire first decade.
By the start of the 1960s Baker was engaged in a willfully obscure second career, much like the one Mervin Kelly had formerly conducted, a career that ran not sequentially like some men’s—a stint in government following a stint in business, or vice versa—but in parallel, so that Baker’s various jobs in Washington and his job at Bell Labs intersected in quiet and complex and multifarious ways. Baker could bring innovations in communications to the government’s attention almost instantly.
But in just a few years’ time, the integrated circuit would represent something new for Bell Labs: a moment when a hugely important advance in solid-state engineering, though built upon the scientific discoveries at the Labs, had occurred elsewhere. Such a development perhaps suggested that the landscape of competitiveness in American electronics, something that Mervin Kelly had written about in the closing days of World War II, was now very much a reality.
But to an innovator, being early is not necessarily different from being wrong.
It was Engel’s understanding that to get ahead at Bell Labs, “you were supposed to work on more than you were asked to work on.” It was necessary, in other words, not only to do your assigned work but to devote 20 or 30 percent of your time to another project.
Pierce later remarked that one thing about Kelly impressed him above all else... Kelly did not want to begin a project by focusing on what was known. He would want to begin by focusing on what was not known.
All during 1966 and 1967, Shockley urged the National Academy of Sciences, the organization of America’s most distinguished scientists, to focus more deeply on the question of how heredity affects intelligence. In April 1968, at a meeting of the academy, Shockley charged that the country’s leading thinkers were showing a “lack of responsibility and courage” by not examining correlations of race and intelligence.
“I don’t know how history is taught here in Japan,” he told the audience when he traveled there in 1985 to give an acceptance speech, “but in the United States in my college days, most of the time was spent on the study of political leaders and wars—Caesars, Napoleons, and Hitlers. I think this is totally wrong. The important people and events of history are the thinkers and innovators, the Darwins, Newtons, Beethovens whose work continues to grow in influence in a positive fashion.” [Claude Shannon]
“Unfettered research,” as Odlyzko termed it, was no longer a logical or necessary investment for a company. For one thing, it took far too long for an actual breakthrough to pay off as a commercial innovation—if it ever did. For another, the base of science was now so broad, thanks to work in academia as well as old industrial laboratories such as Bell Labs, that a company could profit merely by pursuing an incremental strategy rather than a game-changing discovery or invention.
In 1995, Forrester remarked that “science and technology is now a production line. If you want a new idea, you hire some people, give them a budget, and have fairly good odds of getting what you asked for. It’s like building refrigerators.”
“What does the Schon scandal mean?” an interviewer from the New York Times asked a young physicist named Paul Ginsparg. “The demise of Bell Labs by becoming corporate,” Ginsparg replied.
Finding an aspect of modern life that doesn’t incorporate some strand of Bell Labs’ DNA would be difficult. The transistors, lasers, quality assurance methods, and information technologies have been incorporated into computers, communications, medical surgery tools, factory productivity methods, digital photography, defense weaponry, and a list of industries and devices and processes almost too long to name. Scores of Bell Labs veterans have meanwhile taken jobs in technology companies such as Google and Microsoft; even more have gone into academia, following Shannon’s and Shockley’s example, and passed along their ideas to the next generation.
“The history of modernization is in essence a history of scientific and technological progress,” Wen Jiabao, the premier of China, said recently. “Scientific discovery and technological inventions have brought about new civilizations, modern industries, and the rise and fall of nations.”
“While only four percent of the [U.S.] work force is composed of scientists and engineers,” the National Academy report points out, “this group disproportionately creates jobs for the other 96 percent.”
Eugene Kleiner, moreover, a founding partner at the premier venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, was originally hired by Bill Shockley at his ill-fated semiconductor company. But the Silicon Valley process that Kleiner helped develop was a different innovation model from Bell Labs. It was not a factory of ideas; it was a geography of ideas. It was not one concentrated and powerful machine; it was the meshing of many interlocking small parts grouped physically near enough to one another so as to make an equally powerful machine.
The value of the old Bell Labs was its patience in searching out new and fundamental ideas, and its ability to use its immense engineering staff to develop and perfect those ideas.
“You may find a lot of controversy over how Bell Labs managed people,” John Mayo, the former Bell Labs president, says. “But keep in mind, I don’t think those managers saw it that way. They saw it as: How do you manage ideas? And that’s very different from managing people.
Pierce, to put it simply, was asking himself: What about Bell Labs’ formula was timeless? In his 1997 list, he thought it boiled down to four things: A technically competent management all the way to the top. Researchers didn’t have to raise funds. Research on a topic or system could be and was supported for years. Research could be terminated without damning the researcher.
What seems more likely, as the science writer Steven Johnson has noted in a broad study of scientific innovations, is that creative environments that foster a rich exchange of ideas are far more important in eliciting important new insights than are the forces of competition. Indeed, one might concede that market competition has been superb at giving consumers incremental and appealing improvements. But that does not mean it has been good at prompting huge advances (such as those at Bell Labs, as well as those that allowed for the creation of the Internet, for instance, or, even earlier, antibiotics).
For instance, a 2008 study titled “Where Do Innovations Come From?” concluded that partnerships among corporations, government laboratories, and federally funded university researchers has become increasingly essential to the U.S. innovation pipeline over the past several decades. In 2006, for instance, “77 of the 88 U.S. entities” that produced significant innovations were beneficiaries of federal funding. Clearly, at least in regard to innovation, capitalism is more deeply intertwined with government than many of us realize.
Perhaps information technology, then, is the wrong place to look for a new Bell Labs. We might do better to poke around in other parts of the economy. One place to consider is a complex of buildings set amid a 689-acre campus some thirty miles north of Washington, D.C. Known as Janelia Farm, the campus serves as an elite research center for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Janelia opened in 2006 with the intent of attacking the most basic biomedical research problems; it is patterned after Bell Labs and backed by a multibillion-dollar endowment. The primary goal is to understand consciousness and how the human brain processes information, but the approach to innovation is familiar: a close, interdisciplinary exchange of ideas between the world’s brightest science researchers, all of whom are given ample funding and tremendous freedom.
August 22, 2017
A fascinating history of Bell Laboratories (part of AT&T/Ma Bell before the breakup), the colorful and brilliant personalities, and the earth-changing technologies they developed. Innovations like radar, transistors, satellites, and cell-phone service - in addition to their earlier work on vacuum tubes and the reliable and clear telephone service - as well as the host of other technologies they spawned like integrated circuits came from the corporate think-tank in New Jersey. Much of what we take for granted today was a result of the rigorous development and testing done by thousands who worked there, but the book follows particularly a group of innovators who came to Bell Labs in the early decades and collectively called themselves the Young Turks, and most of them received and shared Nobel Prizes for their ideas.
Gertner presents the history in such a way that it's easy to see how the technologies built upon each other to create the computer-driven world we now enjoy, and he delves into the reasons Bell Labs may have been able to produce such world-changing innovations. As part of a government-regulated monopoly, AT&T was able to funnel tremendous amounts of money into research and development, constantly focusing on improving telephone service and connectivity. But the innovations went far beyond telephone service - a sticky problem for company executives who were constantly trying to stave off regulators from the justice department.
But in doing so, Gertner raises the question of competitive markets verses a monopoly, and the potential benefits such wide-ranging research institution might have when not encumbered by the need to justify every decision against a bottom line. (Ultimately, he concludes that Bell Labs was a product of its own time, and probably wouldn't have the same effect now unless it were focused on clean and alternative energies or pharmaceuticals.) Still, it's a fascinating discussion and an excellent basis for thinking about technology and innovation even if it did seem a bit lengthy at times. (And for those who enjoy this book I highly recommend The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies which covers a little of the same territory, but looks more to the future of technology.)
Gertner presents the history in such a way that it's easy to see how the technologies built upon each other to create the computer-driven world we now enjoy, and he delves into the reasons Bell Labs may have been able to produce such world-changing innovations. As part of a government-regulated monopoly, AT&T was able to funnel tremendous amounts of money into research and development, constantly focusing on improving telephone service and connectivity. But the innovations went far beyond telephone service - a sticky problem for company executives who were constantly trying to stave off regulators from the justice department.
But in doing so, Gertner raises the question of competitive markets verses a monopoly, and the potential benefits such wide-ranging research institution might have when not encumbered by the need to justify every decision against a bottom line. (Ultimately, he concludes that Bell Labs was a product of its own time, and probably wouldn't have the same effect now unless it were focused on clean and alternative energies or pharmaceuticals.) Still, it's a fascinating discussion and an excellent basis for thinking about technology and innovation even if it did seem a bit lengthy at times. (And for those who enjoy this book I highly recommend The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies which covers a little of the same territory, but looks more to the future of technology.)
March 29, 2019
The Idea Factory is a long detailed history of Bell Labs, one of the most prestigious institutions of research in modern history. All of the current day communication, from the telephone to the internet, owes something to Bell Labs and its team of geniuses. They are also responsible for the boom in computers thanks to their invention of the transistor, UNIX, C language and information theory. Nine Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed here. For a long time, Bell Labs was to innovation what Silicon Valley is today and probably Shenzen and Bangalore will be in the future.
The author Jon Gertner investigates what made Bell Labs tick. What made Bell Labs the research powerhouse it was. He also explains what led to its downfall and eventual succession by Silicon Valley.
The book is a long detailed history. It introduces us to all the key players who built the work culture in this institute and also details how the key inventions of Bell Labs came to be. It is fascinating how important a private research institute was not just to the inventions I outlined above but also how it helped sway the tide of World War II in favour of the Allied forces.
So as a history book, I loved it. It had a ton of interesting vignettes. My favourite part was the part starring Claude Shannon. He is probably one of the greatest geniuses I had never heard of. And his playful antics make him so lovable. Wonder if they will ever make a movie about.
However, as a real ideas book it fell short. There was no in-depth analysis of what made the innovative atmosphere. What we have instead is a ton of anecdotes.
Also, the language was very dry. The author has tried to stay objective and a lot of people prefer that. But I personally would like a few emotional bells and whistles in the book. The book took me more than a month of forced reading to finish. It killed my 2019 reading challenge momentum.
So to conclude, if you love the history of technology and innovation then I do recommend this book. Bell Labs legacy is one you should definitely know about.
But if you are a casual reader then give this expensive book a hard pass. Maybe borrow it from a library if you get a chance. But only because Bell Labs is so freaking awesome.
The author Jon Gertner investigates what made Bell Labs tick. What made Bell Labs the research powerhouse it was. He also explains what led to its downfall and eventual succession by Silicon Valley.
The book is a long detailed history. It introduces us to all the key players who built the work culture in this institute and also details how the key inventions of Bell Labs came to be. It is fascinating how important a private research institute was not just to the inventions I outlined above but also how it helped sway the tide of World War II in favour of the Allied forces.
So as a history book, I loved it. It had a ton of interesting vignettes. My favourite part was the part starring Claude Shannon. He is probably one of the greatest geniuses I had never heard of. And his playful antics make him so lovable. Wonder if they will ever make a movie about.
However, as a real ideas book it fell short. There was no in-depth analysis of what made the innovative atmosphere. What we have instead is a ton of anecdotes.
Also, the language was very dry. The author has tried to stay objective and a lot of people prefer that. But I personally would like a few emotional bells and whistles in the book. The book took me more than a month of forced reading to finish. It killed my 2019 reading challenge momentum.
So to conclude, if you love the history of technology and innovation then I do recommend this book. Bell Labs legacy is one you should definitely know about.
But if you are a casual reader then give this expensive book a hard pass. Maybe borrow it from a library if you get a chance. But only because Bell Labs is so freaking awesome.
August 30, 2021
This is a well-researched book on a topic somewhat close to my heart: the "old" AT&T and its research arm, Bell Laboratories. My husband - and before him, most of his family - have all retired from Western Electric, the manufacturing arm of AT&T, or one of its later iterations after the break-up of "Ma Bell," for good in 1996.
I couldn't help thinking as I read the history of Bell Labs, and met many of its eccentric, talented physicist visionaries, about how well my husband would have thrived as one of the "technical assistants" at the Labs, talented people who actually did the work of turning the ideas into practical equipment for the phone company. Three of the physicists invented the transistor, and received a Nobel Prize for their work. It was just shocking how visionary the men hired in the 1920's turned out to be: dreaming up stuff that became practical maybe 30 years later. I don't know much about physics, but could probably give a basic explanation of how a transistor works now, so the physics/chemistry is accessible, at least for those w/ at least a high-school level of knowledge in those fields. And then to read that at the time that the book was written, there are two BILLION transistors on some microchips!!! Just mind-boggling.
Reading about the denouement of the Labs was upsetting, but for me, that's tied up w/ the end of Western Electric also. For others, perhaps they could see the end of Bell Labs foretold in the break-up of AT&T. There is simply no monopoly big enough these days - with an endless flow of cash from phone subscribers - to support a building simply focused on pure research, and possible practical applications. Another point made is that CEO-to-employee salary ratios have changed so much that such a project would be unfeasible from that standpoint also. Greed wins again. 4 stars.
I couldn't help thinking as I read the history of Bell Labs, and met many of its eccentric, talented physicist visionaries, about how well my husband would have thrived as one of the "technical assistants" at the Labs, talented people who actually did the work of turning the ideas into practical equipment for the phone company. Three of the physicists invented the transistor, and received a Nobel Prize for their work. It was just shocking how visionary the men hired in the 1920's turned out to be: dreaming up stuff that became practical maybe 30 years later. I don't know much about physics, but could probably give a basic explanation of how a transistor works now, so the physics/chemistry is accessible, at least for those w/ at least a high-school level of knowledge in those fields. And then to read that at the time that the book was written, there are two BILLION transistors on some microchips!!! Just mind-boggling.
Reading about the denouement of the Labs was upsetting, but for me, that's tied up w/ the end of Western Electric also. For others, perhaps they could see the end of Bell Labs foretold in the break-up of AT&T. There is simply no monopoly big enough these days - with an endless flow of cash from phone subscribers - to support a building simply focused on pure research, and possible practical applications. Another point made is that CEO-to-employee salary ratios have changed so much that such a project would be unfeasible from that standpoint also. Greed wins again. 4 stars.
June 28, 2020
It’s hard to overstate how big of an impact the work done in Bell Labs during the 20th century has had on the lives of billions of people on earth. Transistors (building blocks of computer processors), undersea cables, fiber optic cables, cellular networks, mobile phones, lasers, radars, satellite phone calls, CCD (sensors in digital camera), Unix operating system and C programming language are just a few examples of innovations which came out of Bell Labs.
It also has resulted in nine Nobel Prizes and four Turing awards for the breakthroughs in science. The information theory which is the cornerstone of everything done in IT today was created by Claude Shannon during his time there as well.
Bell Labs was a result of an incredibly vast AT&T monopoly in phone service. It’s a great example of Peter Thiel’s thesis from Zero to One which proposes that breakthrough innovations can’t happen through fierce competition in the market because the competition eats all the profits which otherwise could be used to pour into R&D.
In today’s world probably Google’s, Amazon’s, Microsoft’s and Facebook’s R&D labs resemble the most of Bell Labs’ essence thanks to the parent company’s dominance in respective markets.
This book had history, fascinating characters and technical details of the innovations. For anyone interested in IT and technology in general, it’s a treat.
It also has resulted in nine Nobel Prizes and four Turing awards for the breakthroughs in science. The information theory which is the cornerstone of everything done in IT today was created by Claude Shannon during his time there as well.
Bell Labs was a result of an incredibly vast AT&T monopoly in phone service. It’s a great example of Peter Thiel’s thesis from Zero to One which proposes that breakthrough innovations can’t happen through fierce competition in the market because the competition eats all the profits which otherwise could be used to pour into R&D.
In today’s world probably Google’s, Amazon’s, Microsoft’s and Facebook’s R&D labs resemble the most of Bell Labs’ essence thanks to the parent company’s dominance in respective markets.
This book had history, fascinating characters and technical details of the innovations. For anyone interested in IT and technology in general, it’s a treat.
February 6, 2017
Superb. A recommended reading if you are fascinated by the marvel of modern communication technology and the people who invented our present. I would also recommend 'the innovators' as complimentary to this book.
It is amazing how a group of motivated men and women engineers and scientists, clad in suit and tie in the heart of New Jersey churned out incremental innovations that literally define the modern world. They were thinking on the scale of decades. Yet not many of these names are as widely known as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
But what became of this company and how come we don't hear about it anymore? How was it so innovative? What *is* innovation? What problems they faced and how they solved them. This book is a treasure trove of answers to these questions and more!
It is amazing how a group of motivated men and women engineers and scientists, clad in suit and tie in the heart of New Jersey churned out incremental innovations that literally define the modern world. They were thinking on the scale of decades. Yet not many of these names are as widely known as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
But what became of this company and how come we don't hear about it anymore? How was it so innovative? What *is* innovation? What problems they faced and how they solved them. This book is a treasure trove of answers to these questions and more!
May 12, 2018
Outstanding. Though not exhaustive by any means, it is written in a popular style that explains the basics of how the technologies work and how they were developed, at a level I found suitable. Bell Labs was truly an amazing place. They are responsible for the vacuum tube, transistor, maser, laser, UNIX, C, fiber optics, cellular networks, etc. Essentially, as the book states, it would be hard to find any device we use today that is not based on the discoveries and refinement of the work done at Bell. A talented group of individuals who were able to not only have ideas, but the prowess to make it work, even if it meant inventing entirely new techniques, such as growing silicon crystals, or purifying glass.
February 19, 2016
the book presents an incredible story, it shows how all the innovations and technology that we take for granted like: the transistor, lasers, satellite technology, mobile phones, Shannons information theory, unix/c they all came out of an amazing environment that was Bell labs. I wonder if we will have anything like it ever again ?
i did want to give it 4 stars only since it didnt discuss the creation of unix and c in detail which also happened at bell labs, i would have included it but then i`m biased.
i did want to give it 4 stars only since it didnt discuss the creation of unix and c in detail which also happened at bell labs, i would have included it but then i`m biased.
October 24, 2022
I liked this book a lot. It was a very engaging historical account of Bell Labs' successes during the first half of the 20th century. I didn't realize how much physics and chemistry drove those successes; I though of Bell Labs as a telecom company only.
This book avoided all discussion of mistreatment of women in scientific workplaces during the 20th century. I think there were no women characters other than "wife of X"
This book avoided all discussion of mistreatment of women in scientific workplaces during the 20th century. I think there were no women characters other than "wife of X"
January 29, 2014
There's a lot of interesting history here, but not a lot of depth. Most of all, I feel a bit like Gertner is a bit too focused on the positive side of the Bell Labs phenomenon, but steps lightly around the monopolistic and domineering side of the operation. Still, tons of interesting background and biographical information on the various personalities involved.
July 17, 2017
For me, this is one of the few true books that addresses the history of the innovation process and industrial research. The history of Bell Labs is a great example.
"The scientists and engineers at Bell Labs had been producing too many ideas over the past half century for a single company to handle", Peter Drucker
"The scientists and engineers at Bell Labs had been producing too many ideas over the past half century for a single company to handle", Peter Drucker
June 14, 2017
A book that gets better once you're past the halfway mark & an important work of scientific history, nonetheless.
Three & a half stars seems fair.
Three & a half stars seems fair.
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