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The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
Summary
In The Idea Factory, New York Times Magazine writer Jon Gertner reveals how Bell Labs served as an incubator for scientific innovation from the 1920s through the 1980s. In its heyday, Bell Labs boasted nearly 15,000 employees, 1,200 of whom held PhDs and 13 of whom won Nobel Prizes. Thriving in a work environment that embraced new ideas, Bell Labs scientists introduced concepts that still propel many of today’s most exciting technologies.
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Reviews
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.
This is an excellent history of Bell Labs. The author did a massive amount of research and produced a tremendous document which related the history of Bell Labs to the general audience. The characters in the story are synonymous with 20th century American innovation and invention. Bardeen, Shockley, Brattain, Shannon. The inventions critical to the rise of American prominence in technology: the transistor, the laser, the first lower ear orbit by a man made device, information theory. It was the best of times for American ingenuity, all because of a group of visionary engineers and scientists. It is the story of Mervin Kelly's vision, it is the story of how the Bell telephone company leveraged a government approved monopoly into the foremost research and development institution in the world, and then allowed it to be destroyed via the aegis of free trade. There are times that competition does horrible things to human imagination and effort, this is one of those instances.Gertner is a technology buff, so his narrative accounts of how the inventions came about and the character and foibles of the men who created these technologies are stimulating and riveting. If you are a technology geek, this book is the answer to your prayers. It also helps that the very inventions he details as well as the Bell Labs as an institution is something almost all engineers studies in their early professional education. So it is that I was able to immediately grasp and absorb the importance and the beauty of the accounting.I think the most intriguing thing to me was the intentional planning and design of the original Bell Labs building and how they managed to pull off the perfect research think tank. The ideas and features of what made Bell labs great are being practiced today in Silicon Vally and in Oregon. This history perfectly illustrates that the environment surrounding very smart people is just as important as the very smart people.
Informative and well researched, poorly written and edited.
Excellent, well-written work about the amazing scientists and engineers at Bell Labs.
The idea factory tells the story of Bell Labs and the almost magical production of ground breaking discoveries it is responsible for generating in the 20th century. These include the vacuum tube, the transitor, the communications satellite, information theory, fiber optic cables, cellular telephones, radar, superconductivity ... the list goes on.So what made this innovation possible? This is the fundamental question the book asks. The answer is interesting, since it relates to both the people who worked at Bell Labs, and the unique situation it was in. Firstly, the people at Bell Labs were uniformly at the head of their fields and chosen from a select group of research universities. These include the University of Chicago, Caltech, MIT, and Princeton. Many of the first staff at Bell Labs came from the lab of Robert Millikan, who later went on to start Caltech. Secondly, the staff at Bell Labs were given complete free reign. Projects still required approval from management, but most were approved so long as they were at least tangentially related to communications. Thirdly, management did not penalize staff whose projects failed. This was considered a part of the business. Fourth, management did not get involved in the projects of research staff. A certain distance was maintained. Fifth, a chain of research and development was established beginning with basic research, then applied research, development, and finally production. This enabled incredible follow through from end-to-end research, development and production. Sixth, Bell Labs was financially supported by AT&T at a time when it operated under a federally sanctioned monopoly. So long as this continued, AT&T was able to commit resources to research projects that could take decades to fully mature since it could expect to almost exclusively benefit from the products that were ultimately created.Other characteristics of Bell Labs supported constant innovation. These included an open door policy, where your door was never closed. If someone asked you for your help, you gave it to them and dropped what you were doing. Lab space was always available, and smart people were allowed to choose the projects that interested them. A very diverse group was put together in the same physical space - mathematicians, physicists, engineers, and others from different backgrounds would mingle and joint together to pursue interesting projects. And the buildings they were placed in were designed to force interaction. This included one very long hallway at Murray Hill that forced people to walk past one another and interact.Will Bell Labs ever exist again? Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy, is trying to re-create something similar with a focus on challenging research problems in the energy sector. Whether this succeeds will require still much more time to tell.
We wake up in the morning, turn on our televisions and computers that stream digital information everywhere, check our cell phones to see what has bounced off of towers and satellites, and we don't think about any of it. We don't think about how long that cell phone has been in the hands of human kind, we don't think about how television has changed, we don't think about how the satellites got put together to do what they do or where they get their power from. It's all just there. This book will make you realize what amazing things man has accomplished since the beginning of Bell Labs.Well written and thoroughly enjoyable, this isn't your average book on technology and invention. There is no dry rambling here, everything is entertaining and engaging, bringing the reader into history so perfectly that you feel as if you were inside one of the buildings, or out in the fields on a picnic with the families of the workers. One can't help but wonder how much we could accomplish if more places of invention and progress were set up the way Bell Labs had been arranged, creating environments of free invention.Being of the generation who was young just as the first computers were coming around, there were parts of this book that I was able to relive with a new, adult perspective, but there were also elements that came before my time where I found myself surprised at what had once been and how quickly times had changed. I think this will be a wonderful book for anyone of any age, whether the reader wants to relive their past or learn from something that happened before their time. You won't often hear this said about books dealing with invention and technology, but this one was a real page turner. I couldn't put it down.
Wonderful review of the fabled Bell Labs and the people who inhabited it - including one of my heroes, Claude Shannon. The technologies dreamed up and developed there are still astonishing, everything from vacuum tubes, to transistors, to information theory, to cellular networks, ... the list goes on for miles. The book is not a roadmap for how to innovate, but it does give glimpses of some of the successful strategies that were part of the Bell Labs culture.
Highly readable history of Bell Labs and the many brilliant scientists and technicians who worked there to develop the transistor, the solid state circuit, fiber optics, satellite and wireless communications, and other technologies that made modern telecommunications not only possible but affordable to the masses.
Excellent book of its type. There will never be another Bell Labs which
influenced all history forever with things like transistors which allowed the
development of computers and space travel etc etc.
influenced all history forever with things like transistors which allowed the
development of computers and space travel etc etc.