AUDASE

What Hath Bell Labs Wrought? The Future

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI NEW YORK TIMES

THE IDEA FACTORY

Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

By Jon Gertner

In today’s world of Apple, Google and Facebook, the name may not ring any bells for most readers, but for decades — from the 1920s through the 1980s — Bell Labs, the research and development wing of AT&T, was the most innovative scientific organization in the world. As Jon Gertner argues in his riveting new book, “The Idea Factory,” it was where the future was invented.

Indeed, Bell Labs was behind many of the innovations that have come to define modern life, including the transistor (the building block of all digital products), the laser, the silicon solar cell and the computer operating system called Unix (which would serve as the basis for a host of other computer languages). Bell Labs developed the first communications satellites, the first cellular telephone systems and the first fiber-optic cable systems.

The Bell Labs scientist Claude Elwood Shannon effectively founded the field of information theory, which would revolutionize thinking about communications; other Bell Labs researchers helped push the boundaries of physics, chemistry and mathematics, while defining new industrial processes like quality control.

In “The Idea Factory,” Mr. Gertner — an editor at Fast Company magazine and a writer for The New York Times Magazine — not only gives us spirited portraits of the scientists behind Bell Labs’ phenomenal success, but he also looks at the reasons that research organization became such a fount of innovation, laying the groundwork for the networked world we now live in.

It’s clear from this volume that the visionary leadership of the researcher turned executive Mervin Kelly played a large role in Bell Labs’ sense of mission and its ability to institutionalize the process of innovation so effectively. Kelly believed that an “institute of creative technology” needed a critical mass of talented scientists — whom he housed in a single building, where physicists, chemists, mathematicians and engineers were encouraged to exchange ideas — and he gave his researchers the time to pursue their own investigations “sometimes without concrete goals, for years on end.”

That freedom, of course, was predicated on the steady stream of revenue provided (in the years before the AT&T monopoly was broken up in the early 1980s) by the monthly bills paid by telephone subscribers, which allowed Bell Labs to function “much like a national laboratory.” Unlike, say, many Silicon Valley companies today, which need to keep an eye on quarterly reports, Bell Labs in its heyday could patiently search out what Mr. Gertner calls “new and fundamental ideas,” while using its immense engineering staff to “develop and perfect those ideas” — creating new products, then making them cheaper, more efficient and more durable.

Given the evolution of the digital world we inhabit today, Kelly’s prescience is stunning in retrospect. “He had predicted grand vistas for the postwar electronics industry even before the transistor,” Mr. Gertner writes. “He had also insisted that basic scientific research could translate into astounding computer and military applications, as well as miracles within the communications systems — ‘a telephone system of the future,’ as he had said in 1951, ‘much more like the biological systems of man’s brain and nervous system.’ ”

Mr. Gertner’s portraits of Kelly and the cadre of talented scientists who worked at Bell Labs are animated by a journalistic ability to make their discoveries and inventions utterly comprehensible — indeed, thrilling — to the lay reader. And they showcase, too, his novelistic sense of character and intuitive understanding of the odd ways in which clashing or compatible personalities can combine to foster intensely creative collaborations.

Mr. Gertner deftly puts these scientists’ work in the context of what was known at the time (and what would rapidly evolve from their initial discoveries in the decades since), even as he describes in remarkably lucid terms the steps by which one discovery led — sometimes by serendipity, sometimes by dogged work — to another, as well as the process by which ideas were turned by imaginative engineers into inventions and eventually into products that could be mass-produced.

Most notably, there’s the team that would win a Nobel Prize for its work on semiconductors and the transistor: the brilliant, aggressive physicist William Shockley (later to become infamous for his unscientific views on race), who “enjoyed finding a hanging thread so he could unravel a problem with a swift, magical pull”; the soft-spoken John Bardeen, who “was content to yank away steadfastly, tirelessly, pulling on various corners of a problem until the whole thing ripped open”; and Walter Brattain, “a skeptical and talkative experimentalist” who played extrovert to Bardeen’s introvert.

Restlessness and curiosity were traits shared by many of Bell Labs’ most creative staff members. Mr. Gertner describes John Robinson Pierce, father of the communications satellite, as an “instigator” who “had too many interests (airplanes, electronics, acoustics, telephony, psychology, philosophy, computers, music, language, writing, art) to focus on any single pursuit” but possessed a knack for pushing others to do their best work.

As for Shannon, the mathematician and engineer whose information theory laid the groundwork for telecommunications and the computer industry, he burned off excess energy by riding his unicycle up and down the long hallways of Bell Labs (sometimes juggling as he rode) and building whimsical machines like a primitive chess computer and an electronic mouse that could learn to navigate a maze, demonstrating the ability of a machine to remember.

Many Bell Labs scientists, including Brattain, Kelly and the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Charles H. Townes, who helped develop the principles of the laser, grew up on farms or in small towns, which Dr. Townes argued were the perfect “training grounds for experimental physics.” Such childhoods, he contended, taught a person how to “pay attention to the natural world, to work with machinery and to know how to solve practical problems and fix things innovatively, with what is on hand.”

Mr. Gertner nimbly captures the collegial atmosphere of Bell Labs and the mood of intellectual ferment — a blending of entrepreneurial zeal, academic inquiry and passion to achieve things that initially seemed technologically impossible — that suffused its New Jersey campuses.

The very success of Bell Labs, he notes, contained the seeds of its destruction. Not only was it producing too many ideas for a single company to handle, but some of its innovations (like the transistor) also altered the technological landscape so much that its core business would be reduced to a mere part of the ever-expanding field of information and electronic technology — a field increasingly dominated by new rivals, with which a post-monopoly AT&T had difficulty competing.

In addition, as a Bell Labs researcher named Andrew Odlyzko observed, the new business environment meant that “unfettered research” was no longer a logical or necessary investment for a company, which, in Mr. Gertner’s words, “could profit merely by pursuing an incremental strategy rather than a game-changing discovery or invention.”

AT&T’s original mission — to create and maintain a system of modern communications — has largely been fulfilled. And according to Mr. Gertner, the current Bell Labs president, Jeong Kim, believes that the future of communications may be defined by an industry yet to be created: a business that does not simply deliver or search out information, but also somehow manages and organizes the vast flood of data that threatens to overwhelm our lives.

The larger idea, Mr. Gertner concludes, is that “electronic communication is a miraculous development but it is also, in excess, a dehumanizing force. It proves Kelly’s belief that even as new technology solves one problem, it creates others.”