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Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
Penguin Press
March 2012
On Sale: March 15, 2012
432 pages
ISBN: 1594203288
EAN: 9781594203282
Kindle: B005GSZIWG
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
A sweeping, atmospheric history of Bell Labs that
highlights its unparalleled role as an incubator of
innovation and birthplace of the century's most influential
technologies. Bell Laboratories, which thrived
from the 1920s to the 1980s, was the most innovative and
productive institution of the twentieth century. Long
before America's brightest scientific minds began migrating
west to Silicon Valley, they flocked to this sylvan campus
in the New Jersey suburbs built and funded by AT&T. At
its peak, Bell Labs employed nearly fifteen thousand
people, twelve hundred of whom had PhDs. Thirteen would go
on to win Nobel prizes. It was a citadel of science and
scholarship as well as a hotbed of creative thinking. It
was, in effect, a factory of ideas whose workings have
remained largely hidden until now. New York Times
Magazine writer Jon Gertner unveils the unique magic of
Bell Labs through the eyes and actions of its scientists.
These ingenious, often eccentric men would become
revolutionaries, and sometimes legends, whether for
inventing radio astronomy in their spare time (and on the
company's dime), riding unicycles through the corridors, or
pioneering the principles that propel today's technology.
In these pages, we learn how radar came to be, and lasers,
transistors, satellites, mobile phones, and much
more. Even more important, Gertner reveals the forces
that set off this explosion of creativity. Bell Labs
combined the best aspects of the academic and corporate
worlds, hiring the brightest and usually the youngest
minds, creating a culture and even an architecture that
forced employees in different fields to work together, in
virtually complete intellectual freedom, with little
pressure to create moneymaking innovations. In Gertner's
portrait, we come to understand why both researchers and
business leaders look to Bell Labs as a model and long to
incorporate its magic into their own work. Written
with a novelist's gift for pacing and an ability to convey
the thrill of innovation, The Idea Factory yields a
revelatory take on the business of invention. What are the
principles of innovation? How do new technology and new
ideas begin? Are some environments more favorable than
others? How should they be structured, and how should they
be governed? Can strokes of genius be accelerated,
replicated, standardized? The history of Bell Labs provides
crucial answers that can and should be applied today by
anyone who wants to understand where good ideas come from.
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