The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

419 Pages·2012·3.54 MB·English

by  Jon Gertner

The
Idea
Factory
The
Idea
Factory
Bell Labs and the
Great Age of
American Innovation
JON GERTNER
THE PENGUIN PRESS
New York
2012
THE PENGUIN PRESS
•
Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin
Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
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80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in 2012 by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Jon Gertner, 2012

All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gernter, Jon.
The idea factory : the Bell Labs and
the great age of American innovation / Jon Gernter.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-101-56108-9
1. Bell Telephone Laboratories—History—20th century.
2. Telecommunication—United States—History—20th century.
3. Technological innovations—United States—History—20th century.
4. Creative ability—United States—History—20th century. 5. Inventors—United States—History—20th century. I. Title.
TK5102.3.U6G47 2012
384—dc23
2011040207

Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
DESIGNED BY AMANDA DEWEY
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ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
For Liz, Emmy, and Ben
CONTENTS
Introduction. WICKED PROBLEMS
PART ONE
One. OIL DROPS
Two. WEST TO EAST
Three. SYSTEM
Four. WAR
Five. SOLID STATE
Six. HOUSE OF MAGIC
Seven. THE INFORMATIONIST
Eight. MAN AND MACHINE
Nine. FORMULA
Ten. SILICON
Eleven. EMPIRE
PART TWO
Twelve. AN INSTIGATOR
Thirteen. ON CRAWFORD HILL
Fourteen. FUTURES, REAL AND IMAGINED
Fifteen. MISTAKES
Sixteen. COMPETITION
Seventeen. APART
Eighteen. AFTERLIVES
Nineteen. INHERITANCE
Twenty. ECHOES
Acknowledgments
Endnotes and Amplifications
Sources
Selected Bibliography
Index
Where is the knowledge we have lost in
information?
—T. S. Eliot, The Rock
Introduction
WICKED PROBLEMS
T
his book is about the origins of modern communications as seen through the
adventures of several men who spent their careers working at Bell Telephone
Laboratories. Even more, though, this book is about innovation—about how it
happens, why it happens, and who makes it happen. It is likewise about why
innovation matters, not just to scientists, engineers, and corporate executives but
to all of us. That the story is about Bell Labs, and even more specifically about
life at the Labs between the late 1930s and the mid-1970s, isn’t a coincidence. In
the decades before the country’s best minds began migrating west to California’s
Silicon Valley, many of them came east to New Jersey, where they worked in
capacious brick-and-glass buildings located on grassy campuses where deer
would graze at twilight. At the peak of its reputation in the late 1960s, Bell Labs
employed about fifteen thousand people, including some twelve hundred PhDs.
Its ranks included the world’s most brilliant (and eccentric) men and women. In
a time before Google, the Labs sufficed as the country’s intellectual utopia. It
was where the future, which is what we now happen to call the present, was
conceived and designed.
For a long stretch of the twentieth century, Bell Labs was the most innovative
scientific organization in the world. It was arguably among the world’s most
important commercial organizations as well, with countless entrepreneurs
building their businesses upon the Labs’ foundational inventions, which were
often shared for a modest fee. Strictly speaking, this wasn’t Bell Labs’ intended
function. Rather, its role was to support the research and development efforts of
the country’s then-monopolistic telephone company, American Telephone &
Telegraph (AT&T), which was seeking to create and maintain a system—the
word “network” wasn’t yet common—that could connect any person on the
globe to any other at any time. AT&T’s dream of “universal” connectivity was
set down in the early 1900s. Yet it took more than three-quarters of a century for
this idea to mature, thanks largely to the work done at Bell Labs, into a
fantastically complex skein of copper cables and microwave links and glass
fibers that tied together not only all of the planet’s voices but its images and data,