The Idea Factory

Favorite Quotes

To innovate, Kelly would agree, an institute of creative technology required the best people, Shockleys and Shannons, for instance—and it needed a lot of them, so many, as the people at the Labs used to say (borrowing a catchphrase from nuclear physics), that departments could have a “critical mass” to foster explosive ideas. What’s more, the institute of creative technology should take it upon itself to further the education and abilities of its promising but less accomplished employees, not for reasons of altruism but because industrial science and engineering had become so complex that it now required men and women who were trained beyond the level that America’s graduate schools could attain. In 1948, Bell Labs began conducting a series of unaccredited but highly challenging graduate-level courses for employees known as the Communications Development Training Program, or CDT. But nobody at Bell Labs really called it CDT. The program was informally known—much to Kelly’s discomfort—as “Kelly College,” because that’s what it was.

An institute of creative technology needed to house its critical mass close to one another so they could exchange ideas; it also needed to give them all the tools they needed. (153)

In a wide array of areas, from the transistor to fiber optics, and from switching theory to computer logic, the Bell System has been no more adequate as a conduit for Bell Labs’ scientific contributions than an eye dropper would be to channel a mountain freshet. The main users have been others—that is, non-telephone industries—with Bell Labs getting little out of its contributions other than an occasional footnote in a scientific paper.

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 (or “platform,” as it is often described) for industry […]

Kelly’s philosophy is sometimes summed up as a belief that innovation occurs by the movement of ideas in one direction: first a fundamental scientific discovery, which is then developed into a product, which is then pushed into the market. The textbook example was the transistor. In truth, he believed big scientific advances could come from any engineers or scientists encountering interesting problems.

Thoughts

It’s difficult to overstate the importance Bell Labs has had on instigating the digital age. Gertner’s novel veers back and forth between the “Great Man” theory of history, where things like Shannon’s seminal A Mathematical Theory of Communication could only be achieved by a singular genius, and a more yeoman, democratic view, where it just so happened to be Brattain, Shockley, and Bardeen who were first past the pole to invent the transistor. And this book is just as much about the history of Bell Labs as it is about innovation, and how that innovation catapulted America into pre-eminent superpower of the 20th century. Nearly everything important in computing was happening in America, sometimes by foreigners, but often by mechanically minded young men from rural America’s farmland.

The book advances a few ideas about the best way to go about generating innovation, but most of them boil down to a few key ideas: have a ton of money, don’t bound research by immediate profitability horizons, and get the smartest and best cross-discipline people and put them in a room and give them problems to solve.

But how actionable is this advice, if we are individually trying to innovate in our own professional lives? Bell Labs won’t be replicated in the future, certainly not by a private or publicly traded company. AT&T had basically a government-sanctioned monopoly allowed in part because of the company’s importance to military applications. Bell Labs was a way to continue to drive that sort of military research, but also as a hand-wave to public good, a counterweight to the ruthless business tactics of it’s financing body.

But we also have to ask, how necessary is this sort of innovation? Information technology was a completely fertile field in the mid-20th century, and nearly every seed planted yielded bountiful crops. There was just so much to discover, to define, to understand. While it does seem amazing that one research laboratory generated transistors, UNIX, the C programming language, lasers and masers, key advances in radar, fiber optic cables, and dozens of other fundamental advances, it is less surprising if we think about scale of Bell Labs and that the New Jersey lab was where everyone who was anyone in communications and information technology was working.

So ultimately, what do you takeaway from this book, beyond Bell Labs was pretty darn impressive, won’t happen again, and innovation has become so hyper-specialized in this space? It’s hard to say, but we are sitting here in 2023 when Large Language Models (LLM) like ChatGPT and Bing AI have broken into the zeitgeist and seem poised to change everything. So perhaps innovation will be machine-assisted in the future, and you can get the benefit of a Bell Labs in a machine learning model right on your laptop.