Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

I had a Grandfather that worked at Bell Labs from the early 50's through the 80's. He does not talk much about his time there but with the little I did know of his career at the Labs I was intrigued being a IT professional myself. When I heard of this book I bought it right away and breezed through it in no time. The history of the Labs is the starting point of everything we have today from any electronic device we use to Cellular technology (cell phone networks) and military technology such as Radar and Sonar. And that's just to name a few! The politics of the federal government allowing for a monopoly with AT&T but closely monitoring it is what allowed the Labs to be what they were until the government decided to break up the monopoly.

If you are like me and have interests in Technology and History than this will become an easy favorite read for you.

Gertner does a thorough review of the people and the culture that made the labs an "invention machine" during its heyday from the 1920's thru the 1960's. What would our world be like if the transistor had not been invented?? No silicon valley or PC's, laptops, smartphones, internet would have been possible.....as a former labs STA the book brought back fond memories of working in an environment of highly talented people.

The Export of Money Management Values

I've just finished reading Jon Gerter's book, The Ideal Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of Innovation. The book delves into the company that gave us many of the building blocks of today's economy such as the semi-conductor, laser, and mobile phone service. While the book explains some of the key breakthroughs, Mr. Gerter's major accomplishment is describing the culture, values, and management style of the professionals who ran the lab for fifty years before the breakup of AT&T. The organization was far from perfect, and enjoyed the benefit of being funded by a regulated monopoly. While much has changed in the past thirty years, Bell Labs and Mr. Gerter's book have much to offer us today.

The people who worked at Bell Labs didn't make huge salaries, they didn't receive big bonuses or stock options, and they didn't reap huge profits from their inventions. In fact, they signed away their rights to any patents for one dollar. Nonetheless, some of the greatest minds in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and engineering gladly joined the Lab and spurned offers that would have paid them more money. They were drawn to the Lab by the opportunity to confront complex problems, and a culture that permitted them to work collaboratively and pursue their intellectual curiosity.

In today's world, this business model is an impossibility because the principles of investment management have permeated the rest of the economy. In money management, there is only one value: making money. The foundation of an investment shop rests upon on its bonus plans, profit sharing arrangements, carried interest, and tax schemes. Money managers routinely warn us that they'd stop managing money if we tampered with these financial arrangements. We'd probably be better served by taking them up on this dare. While money managers espouse all kinds of laudable values, money trumps everything else.

In the past forty years money management and finance have consumed an increasing share of our economy. More perniciously, the values of money management have been exported to the rest of the economy. As a result, our CEOs and their management teams are compensated like investment bankers. Whether a company is developing a strategy to grow or reverse its downward course, the first order of business in today's economy is to set up a set of financial arrangements that provides financial incentives to deliver the desired result, and keep the management team happy. If you truly want to understand my point, spend a couple of hours with one of those proxy statements that you routinely throw in the recycling bin. The proxy statement is supposed to be about the governance of the company. However, you'll realize it's really an exposition on financial incentives for a handful of people. The predominant value is money, and making that money in the short-term.

Imagine if were setting up Bell Labs today? We'd spend countless hours creating key performance indicators (KPIs) and tying them to bonus plans and stock grants. By the time we were done developing our plan, creativity and cooperation would be subordinate to financial incentives. We might well attract some amazing talent, but the talent would be forever weighing offers from competing labs. Moreover, the research would almost always be directed toward the KPIs.

I'm not proposing that we eliminate all financial incentives and simply rely on other values to generate innovation, sales, or profitability. What I am suggesting is that we've lost our balance when it comes to corporate values. Money managers may need their financial incentives in order to continue to pursue their craft, but that doesn't mean that their values are a good thing for the rest of us.

I doubt we can create or even need another Bell Labs in telecommunications. Times have, in deed, changed. However, we can't solve our deepest economic problems by continuing to export money management values into the rest of the economy. Intractable problems in health care and energy aren't going to be attacked or solved on a system geared to rewarding quarterly financial results.

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Well-written, comprehensive history of the brilliant minds behind a unique organization that gave us the future. Funny, I grew up down the road from Claude Shannon in his post-Lab days and had no idea what a cool guy he was!

This mechanical engineer got a much better perspective on electrical engineering and its underlying physics through reading this book. The author also does a fine job describing the culture of a great laboratory. I now understand better some of my colleagues who worked there, as well as a similar spirit which infuses many of our national laboratories. What struck me most was that there is no secret sauce for doing great science. Sometimes it is done by an individual who when not buried in his office is riding a unicycle through the halls; other times it is done by a random pairing of disparate minds, and others by well-planned organization.

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.

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Very easy interesting glimpse into the development of critical brain mass , its value, challenges and pitfalls. The story of managing really smart people, driving to goals yet promoting creativity that finds its own potential

I learned more about what has really shaped the world we see today from this one book than I learned in 12 years of public and private education. After reading this book there is no doubt in my mind that what has made America great and allowed the nation to drive global innovation in the latter half of the 20th century is mostly the result of the men and women working at Bell Labs. The scope of innovations and the degree of foresight that came out of this one company's research facilities can be seen in every device and system we rely on today from information theory to computers, satellites, cellphones, lasers, robotics and more.

What happens when you put a Nobel Prize staff that spans all the basic sciences in one place with great tireless management with a depression era work ethic that frees the staff to follow their hearts - read the book - great stuff - One issue, I went around talking about Telstars launch as being on June 10 (page 223) looks like it was July 10 - how big a editing mistake - eh.

I'm not generally interested in science writing, but Gertner weaves the scientific discoveries and innovations into the context of history and communications needs. The results were very compelling.

While some passages and sections were wordy and could be improved with editing, that did not stop me from reading the entire book gladly.

This book is fantastic. Very insightful with many first hand accounts from the big names at Bell Labs, especially the people who ran it. Their leadership and the work of the Labs left a lasting impact on society and this books explains much of the motivation for these great thinkers and researchers

Jon Gertner, a former writer for the New York Times Magazine and an editor at Fast Magazine, explores the history of Bell labs from the 1920’s to the 1980’s in his first and only book, The Idea Factory. He answers the most important question of the century, “What causes innovation?” The book is a detailed and fascinating account of the years of discovery at Bell Labs and the milestones in the history of technology that were accomplished. Through these years of innovation, fourteen Bell Labs’ researchers won seven Nobel prizes for some astonishing achievements in the field of science and technology. Bell Labs, AT&T’s research branch, had the most brilliant minds in America as employees. Gertner takes us through the journey of innovation caused collectively by those creative minds.

The book is not just a history of Bell Labs. It defines the process of exploring, inventing, and innovating. It emphasizes the hard work necessary to accomplish great change. Gertner defines all of the characters in a very colorful and engaging manner. The book concentrates on the leadership and top scientists at Bell Labs rather than the thousands of physicists, chemists, and engineers working for them. Frank Jewett, the first president of Bell Labs, had a vision to hire the most brilliant men. He convinced men like Marvin Kelly to join to lab, who contributed greatly to the development of Bell Labs’ innovative culture. Kelly, in turn, recruited and engaged with some the best minds in United States. Men like Mervin Kelly, Bill Shockley, Walter Brittain, Charles Townes, and Claude Shannon dedicated their lives to the research and invention of impactful technology. Gertner provides a detailed bibliography on each of the men and their impact on many of the consumer innovations and technology used today.

Gertner dives thoroughly into the working environment at Bell Labs. The office dynamics, men with self-interests, collaborative guidance, and open door policy all contributed to the organization’s culture. Today’s innovators can learn a great deal from the history of Bell Labs’ culture. One very important aspect of the culture was the freedom that researchers were given to pursue their own interests. Creativity was more important than financial gain. Many management lessons can be learned by organizations today seeking to innovate. Profit is more difficult to achieve without creative, motivated people working to drive success.

Even through times of pressure, such as during World War II, the scientists and engineers at Bell Labs were capable of yielding great results. They accepted very challenging military projects such as Radar technology and achieved success despite their constraints. Bell Labs was nothing without its people. They had a much larger impact on society than even the monopoly of AT&T. With these people came a competitive culture. One invention, the transistor, was one of the most important and famous that can be accredited to Bell Labs. William Bradford Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Houser Brattain won a Nobel Prize in physics for the invention. Most believe that Bardeen and Brattain actually discovered the transistor and Shockley merely invented the better version of it. However, an accurate account of the finding was never made clear. In The Idea Factory, Gertner dives in to uncover this mystery, as well as the many other developments that occurred during the golden ages of Bell Labs.

Superb accounting of research and development and world changing technologies that was conceived at well Labs. Hats off to all those extremely talented engineers, mathematicians, physicists managers and planners.

The subject is fascinating, the author is well informed, the book is well written. and understandable to a wide audience. In my opinion, the work done at Bell Labs on lasers, nonlinear optics, fiber optics, and laser applications is not sufficiently emphasized by the author (may be, his competence in photonics is not very deep).

My husband is retired from the Bell Telephone System, and visited the Bell Labs during his career. He said the book gives a true look at Bell Labs, and he enjoys having the book in his collection of telephone memorabilia.

Having begun my engineering career with the Bell System (Western Electric), I enjoyed the book very much. It was really great to read of all the technical innovations, and the people responsible for them, that was produced by Bell Laboratories. An extremely well written book!

Bell Labs was where today's technology all began. This book explores the technology and more importantly the individuals who made it happen, that goes into nearly every device made in the more than the 30 years. I enjoyed reading it.

Michiko Kakutani was not kidding when she called this book "riveting" in her New York Times review last week. The Idea Factory is a compelling page-turner. As someone with no connection to Bell Labs, I came at this book knowing nothing of the history and not much more about the accomplishments of the institution. However, living and working in Silicon Valley, I was intrigued to find out more about this very different hotbed of innovation and intellect than the one I know, and Gertner's book does not disappoint. While combining an incredibly well-researched history of Bell Labs with a fascinating bio of the key personalities who founded and drove arguably the most important discoveries of the 20th century, Gertner's book could not be more timely. As we think about the path forward in the valley and in the U.S. in general, the history of Bell Labs is full of ideas waiting to be applied immediately -- they seem newer and fresher (despite being generations old) than so much of the noise passing as brilliance today.

As an AT&T alum, who lived through divestiture, I have always viewed with a sense of awe. To be part of the same company that produced so many technology breakthroughs gave one a enormous sense of pride. "Yes, my company discovered the transistor, harnessed light through fiber optics, and wrote the UNIX programming language that is so fundamental to all computers. Certainly we can help your business." Mr. Gertner captures that feeling in this book, as well as the sense of loss that everyone, not just folks like me, shares as Bell Labs, once the world's premier invention engine, has seen its sun slowly set. This book makes one think - if history could have only been slightly different, would we be better off today? Would Silicon Valley become the prominent innovation center or would Northern New Jersey still have a place in such a conversation?

An unusually well written book that I've gone back to time after time for over three years. Bell Labs was unusual in that it operated under the auspices of two government protected monopolies. Further, its mandate was to be searching and innovative when AT&T demanded that new devices work and last for forty years. Yet, they are all or largely responsible for vacuum tubes, radar, transistors and the wireless phone system. I woul steadfastly recommend this book for any parent or teacher of young people interested in a future in R&D, physic, chemistry or engineering.