Takeaways From “The Idea Factory: Bell Labs And The Great Age Of American Innovation”
Main takeaway: to the extent that Bell Labs did basic research, it actually wasn’t all that far ahead of others. Their major breakthroughs would almost certainly have happened not-much-later, even in a world without Bell Labs.
There were really two transistor inventions, back to back: Bardain and Brattain’s point-contact transistor, and then Schockley’s transistor. Throughout, the group was worried about some outside group beating them to the punch (i.e. the patent). There were semiconductor research labs at universities (e.g. at Purdue; see pg 97), and the prospect of one of these labs figuring out a similar device was close enough that the inventors were concerned about being scooped.
Most inventions which were central to Bell Labs actually started elsewhere. The travelling-wave tube started in an academic lab. The idea for fiber optic cable went way back, but it got its big kick at Corning. The maser and laser both started in universities. The ideas were only later picked up by Bell.
In other cases, the ideas were “easy enough to find” that they popped up more than once, independently, and were mostly-ignored long before deployment—communication satellites and cell communications, for instance.
The only fundamental breakthrough which does not seem like it would have soon appeared in a counterfactual world was Shannon’s information theory.
So where was Bell’s big achievement? Mostly in development, and the research division was actually an important component of that. Without in-house researchers chewing on the same problems as the academic labs, keeping up-to-date with all the latest findings and running into the same barriers themselves, the development handoff would have been much harder. Many of Bell Labs’ key people were quite explicitly there to be consulted—i.e. “ask the guy who wrote the book”. I think it makes most sense to view most of the Labs’ research that way. It was only slightly ahead of the rest of the world at best (Shannon excepted), and often behind, but having those researchers around probably made it a lot easier to get new inventions into production.
Major reason this matters: a lot of people say that Bell was able to make big investments in fundamental research because they had unusually-long time horizons, protected by a monopoly and a cozy government arrangement (essentially a Schumpeterian view). This is contrasted to today’s silicon valley, where horizons are usually short. But if Bell’s researchers generally weren’t significantly ahead of others, and mostly just helped get things to market faster, then this doesn’t seem to matter as much. The important question is not whether something silicon-valley-like induces more/less fundamental research in industrial labs, but whether academics heeding the siren call of startup profits can get innovations to market as quickly as Bell Labs’ in-house team could. And by that metric, silicon valley looks pretty good: Bell Labs could get some impressive things through the pipe very quickly when rushed, but they usually had no reason to hurry, and they acted accordingly.
I loved this book. The most surprising thing to me was the answer that people who were there in the heyday give when asked what made Bell Labs so successful: They always say it was the problem, i.e. having an entire organization oriented towards the goal of “make communication reliable and practical between any two places on earth”. When Shannon left the Labs for MIT, people who were there immediately predicted he wouldn’t do anything of the same significance because he’d lose that “compass”. Shannon was obviously a genius, and he did much more after than most people ever accomplish, but still nothing as significant as what he did when at at the Labs.
Takeaways From “The Idea Factory: Bell Labs And The Great Age Of American Innovation”
Main takeaway: to the extent that Bell Labs did basic research, it actually wasn’t all that far ahead of others. Their major breakthroughs would almost certainly have happened not-much-later, even in a world without Bell Labs.
There were really two transistor inventions, back to back: Bardain and Brattain’s point-contact transistor, and then Schockley’s transistor. Throughout, the group was worried about some outside group beating them to the punch (i.e. the patent). There were semiconductor research labs at universities (e.g. at Purdue; see pg 97), and the prospect of one of these labs figuring out a similar device was close enough that the inventors were concerned about being scooped.
Most inventions which were central to Bell Labs actually started elsewhere. The travelling-wave tube started in an academic lab. The idea for fiber optic cable went way back, but it got its big kick at Corning. The maser and laser both started in universities. The ideas were only later picked up by Bell.
In other cases, the ideas were “easy enough to find” that they popped up more than once, independently, and were mostly-ignored long before deployment—communication satellites and cell communications, for instance.
The only fundamental breakthrough which does not seem like it would have soon appeared in a counterfactual world was Shannon’s information theory.
So where was Bell’s big achievement? Mostly in development, and the research division was actually an important component of that. Without in-house researchers chewing on the same problems as the academic labs, keeping up-to-date with all the latest findings and running into the same barriers themselves, the development handoff would have been much harder. Many of Bell Labs’ key people were quite explicitly there to be consulted—i.e. “ask the guy who wrote the book”. I think it makes most sense to view most of the Labs’ research that way. It was only slightly ahead of the rest of the world at best (Shannon excepted), and often behind, but having those researchers around probably made it a lot easier to get new inventions into production.
Major reason this matters: a lot of people say that Bell was able to make big investments in fundamental research because they had unusually-long time horizons, protected by a monopoly and a cozy government arrangement (essentially a Schumpeterian view). This is contrasted to today’s silicon valley, where horizons are usually short. But if Bell’s researchers generally weren’t significantly ahead of others, and mostly just helped get things to market faster, then this doesn’t seem to matter as much. The important question is not whether something silicon-valley-like induces more/less fundamental research in industrial labs, but whether academics heeding the siren call of startup profits can get innovations to market as quickly as Bell Labs’ in-house team could. And by that metric, silicon valley looks pretty good: Bell Labs could get some impressive things through the pipe very quickly when rushed, but they usually had no reason to hurry, and they acted accordingly.
I loved this book. The most surprising thing to me was the answer that people who were there in the heyday give when asked what made Bell Labs so successful: They always say it was the problem, i.e. having an entire organization oriented towards the goal of “make communication reliable and practical between any two places on earth”. When Shannon left the Labs for MIT, people who were there immediately predicted he wouldn’t do anything of the same significance because he’d lose that “compass”. Shannon was obviously a genius, and he did much more after than most people ever accomplish, but still nothing as significant as what he did when at at the Labs.