The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation - Jon Gertner

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

Introduction

Introduction WICKED PROBLEMS

this book is about innovation—about how it happens, why it happens, and who makes it happen

life at the Labs between the late 1930s and the mid-1970s

At the peak of its reputation in the late 1960s, Bell Labs employed about fifteen thousand people, including some twelve hundred PhDs

For a long stretch of the twentieth century, Bell Labs was the most innovative scientific organization in the world. It was arguably among the world’s most important commercial organizations as well, with countless entrepreneurs building their businesses upon the Labs’ foundational inventions

Strictly speaking, this wasn’t Bell Labs’ intended function. Rather, its role was to support the research and development efforts of the country’s then-monopolistic telephone company, American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), which was seeking to create and maintain a system—the word “network” wasn’t yet common—that could connect any person on the globe to any other at any time

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: Mervin Kelly, Jim Fisk, William Shockley, Claude Shannon, John Pierce, and William Baker

All these men knew one another, and some were extremely close. With the exception of Mervin Kelly, the eldest of the group, they were sometimes considered members of a band of Bell Labs revolutionaries known as the Young Turks. What bound them was a shared belief in the nearly sacred mission of Bell Laboratories and the importance of technological innovation.

The men preferred to think they worked not in a laboratory but in what Kelly once called “an institute of creative technology.”

SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT how new ideas begin?

good arguments urge us to contemplate scientific history. Bill Gates once said of the invention of the transistor, “My first stop on any time-travel expedition would be Bell Labs in December 1947.”1 It’s a perceptive wish

understanding the circumstances that led up to that unusual winter of 1947 at Bell Labs, and what happened there in the years afterward, promises a number of insights into how societies progress

While our engineering prowess has advanced a great deal over the past sixty years, the principles of innovation largely have not. Indeed, the techniques forged at Bell Labs—that knack for apprehending a vexing problem, gathering ideas that might lead to a solution, and then pushing toward the development of a product that could be deployed on a massive scale—are still worth considering today, where we confront a host of challenges (information overloads, infectious disease, and climate change, among others) that seem very nearly intractable.

Some observers have taken to calling them “wicked problems.” As it happens, the past offers the example of one seemingly wicked problem that was overcome by an innovative effort that rivals the Apollo program and Manhattan Project in size, scope, expense, and duration. That was to connect all of us, and all of our new machines, together.

One: Oil Drops

The first thing they tended to notice about Mervin Kelly was his restlessness. Anyone in the town of Gallatin, Missouri, could see it. The boy was antsy, impatient

His high school class was small—just eighteen students

His father—kindly and bookish, and not nearly the go-getter his son was turning out to be—was named Joseph Fennimore Kelly. As a young man, Joe Kelly had taught high school history and English, but by 1900, when the Kelly family was counted for the first time in the Gallatin census, he was managing a hardware store

its location at the intersection of two train lines, the Rock Island and the Wabash, both of which stopped in town to take in and disgorge passengers. As a result, Gallatin, with a population of just 1,700, boasted three hotels and several restaurants

There were no radio stations yet—the device was mostly a new toy for hobbyists—so instead there might be a primitive Edison phonograph or a string band at the party, some friends who could play fiddle and mandolin.

As Mervin Kelly attended high school, automobiles began arriving in Gallatin

Thanks to a diesel generator, the town now enjoyed a few hours of electricity each evening. A local telephone exchange—a small switchboard connecting the hundred or so phone subscribers in Gallatin—opened its office near the town square, in the same brick building as the Kelly hardware store