In this first full portrait of the legendary Bell Labs, journalist Jon Gertner takes readers behind one of the greatest collaborations between business and science in history. Officially the research and development wing of AT&T, Bell Labs made seminal breakthroughs from the 1920s to the 1980s in everything from lasers to cellular elephony, becoming arguably the best laboratory for new ideas in the world. Gertner's riveting narrative traces the intersections between science, business, and society that allowed a cadre of eccentric geniuses to lay the foundations of the information age, offering lessons in management and innovation that are as vital today as they were a generation ago.
When I picked up this book, I was interested in highly productive Engineering organizations and their internal workings. I originally thought this book might provide some insight into one of the most productive Engineering organizations I can think of: Bell Laboratories. This book did go a little into the organizational structure, but most of the book dealt with the history and timelines of significant innovations (vaccuum tubes, transistors, information theory, radar, wireless communications, satellite communications, fiber optics, UNIX, etc) and the history of the lives of the Young Turks (Mervin Kelly, Jim Fisk, William Shockley, Claude Shannon, John Pierce, and William Baker). There is a great number of notable quotes and observations in this book, and as someone who lives and breathes information technology, it was a great look into a history I wasn’t a part of.
More than anything, I think this book highlighted the great tension of the productivity of Bell Laboratories. I came away from the book impressed with the magnitude of the advances Bell Labs made, and how freely they shared the information with the public. On the other hand, there is the ever pressing evil force of AT&T, hopelessly intertwined with the military and government, allowing it to extort the public through an unfair monopoly. On one hand, we have an organization that freely licensed technology like the transistor and UNIX — and on the other hand, we have the organization that encouraged the NSA-fueled privacy invasions of today. Perhaps a better description was that the output of Bell Laboratories was incredible, but that output came at a cost of an evil corporate overlord.
These are the passages I highlighted while reading. This is pretty long and boring, so if you’re not interested you can jump to the comments.
Like any elite organization, it suffered at times from personality clashes, institutional arrogance, and—especially in its later years—strategic missteps.
The Vail strategy, in short, would measure the company’s progress “in decades instead of years.”
One of the more interesting things about Bell Labs was it’s amazing vision toward the far future. Components were designed for 30-40 year lifespans, and research often given several years without progress before review.
His point was that genius would undoubtedly improve the company’s operations just as ordinary engineering could. But genius was not predictable. You had to give it room to assert itself.
Probably one of the better statements made about basic research: it’s unpredictable.
JOINING WESTERN ELECTRIC, even as a PhD in physics, entailed indoctrination in the phone company’s ways. In Harvey Fletcher’s first year he was taught to climb telephone poles, install telephones, and operate switchboards.
Science had no true owners, only participants and contributors.
This feels so spot on, and incredibly relevant to today’s advances in software. We have maintainers, committers, and contributors. Increasingly ownership is giving way to contribution.
Physical proximity, in Kelly’s view, was everything. People had to be near one another. Phone calls alone wouldn’t do. Kelly had even gone so far as to create “branch laboratories” at Western Electric factories so that Bell Labs scientists could get more closely involved in the transition of their work from development to manufacture.
This turned out to be an incredibly important, recurring theme. Proximity increases accidental collaboration, and eventually, results. The Murray Hill building was crafted after this: one big long hallway designed so people would run into each other going to and from offices.
To Kelly, inventing the future wasn’t just a matter of inventing things for the future; it also entailed inventing ways to invent those things.
code-named Nike, after the Greek goddess of victory
Well, you learn something new every day. What a great brand name.
“Few companies are more conservative,” Time magazine said about AT&T, “none are more creative.”
“The solar cell just sort of happened,” he said. It was not “team research” in the traditional sense, but it was made possible “because the Labs policy did not require us to get the permission of our bosses to cooperate—at the Laboratories one could go directly to the person who could help.”
More often than not, I think the success of organizations depends on which rules you do not make.
Kelly had made sure that the undersea project, in sum a great innovation, used the least innovative components.
Kelly’s loose formula for innovation—namely, that in any company’s greatest achievements one might, with the clarity of hindsight, locate the beginnings of its own demise.
“Too much freedom is horrible,” he would say in describing his first few months at the Labs. Indeed, he eventually came to believe that freedom in research was similar to food; it was necessary, but moderation was usually preferable to excess.
YES
Ideas may come to us out of order in point of time,” the first director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, Simon Flexner, once remarked. “We may discover a detail of the façade before we know too much about the foundation. But in the end all knowledge has its place.”
“There’s a difference, you see, in thinking idly about something, and in setting out to do something,”
Silicon Valley could learn from it’s ancestors.
You begin to see what the problems are when you set out to do things
Estimates, as they say, are bullshit.
In Baker’s view, the Young Turks succeeded for the first time in bridging the gap between the best science of the academy and the important applications that a modern society needed.
Innovators make different kinds of mistakes. The waveguide, for instance, might be considered a mistake of perception. It was an instance where a technology of legitimate promise is eclipsed by a breakthrough elsewhere—in another corporate department, at another company, at a university, wherever—that solves a particular problem better. […] Mistakes of perception are not the same as mistakes of judgment, though. In the latter, an idea that developers think will satisfy a need or want does not. It may prove useless because of its functional shortcomings, or because it’s too expensive in relation to its modest appeal, or because it arrives in the marketplace too early or too late. Or because of all those reasons combined. The Picturephone was a mistake in judgment.
I love this view of different types of mistakes. Sometimes it’s your environment or worldview that results in a mistake, but sometimes it’s just bad judgement. Good things to look out for when designing new product strategies.
According to Irwin Dorros, one of the Bell Labs executives involved in the launch, the team working on the Picturephone had never doubted its eventual success. “Groupthink,” as Dorros puts it, had infiltrated the endeavor. Yet as the Picturephone’s demise became more evident, even its most ardent proponents began to ask why it was failing and why they hadn’t anticipated that outcome.
Robert Metcalfe would surmise that the value of a networked device increases dramatically as the number of people using the network grows. The larger the network, in other words, the higher the value of a device on that network to each user. This formulation—sometimes known as Metcalfe’s law—can help explain the immense appeal of the telephone system and Internet.
Hi, social media.
But to an innovator, being early is not necessarily different from being wrong.
Indeed, a marketing study commissioned by AT&T in the fall of 1971 informed its team that “there was no market for mobile phones at any price.”
I’m coming around to the opinion that market research as it stands today is basically complete bullshit. I think he really captured the meaning of this later on:
Though Engel didn’t perceive it at the time, he later came to believe that marketing studies could only tell you something about the demand for products that actually exist.
Yep. People can judge what exists today, but we are horrible at predicting what we might use.
At some point between 1963 and 1964, Shockley came to the conclusion that the long-term health of the human race was imperiled by the reproductive tendencies of society’s least intelligent members.
It seems so often that those who contribute great things, also contribute such evil things.
“I don’t know how history is taught here in Japan,” he told the audience when he traveled there in 1985 to give an acceptance speech, “but in the United States in my college days, most of the time was spent on the study of political leaders and wars—Caesars, Napoleons, and Hitlers. I think this is totally wrong. The important people and events of history are the thinkers and innovators, the Darwins, Newtons, Beethovens whose work continues to grow in influence in a positive fashion.”
What a fantastic statement. You’d be well worth your time to read the entire speech.
In sum, it had become difficult, and perhaps unnecessary, for a company to capture the value of a big breakthrough. So why do it? To put it darkly, the future was a matter of short-term thinking rather than long-term thinking.
“It’s the interaction between fundamental science and applied science, and the interface between many disciplines, that creates new ideas,” explains Herwig Kogelnik, the laser scientist. This may indeed have been Kelly’s greatest insight.
“You see, out of fourteen people in the Bell Laboratories,” he once remarked, “only one is in the Research Department, and that’s because pursuing an idea takes, I presume, fourteen times as much effort as having it.”
What about Bell Labs’ formula was timeless? In his 1997 list, he thought it boiled down to four things:
- A technically competent management all the way to the top.
- Researchers didn’t have to raise funds.
- Research on a topic or system could be and was supported for years.
- Research could be terminated without damning the researcher.
Interesting list. It definitely is missing some things, but I think these are all great values to strive for in an organizations.
If you'd like to keep in touch, I tweet @kneath on Twitter. You're also welcome to send a polite email to kyle@warpspire.com. I don't always get the chance to respond, but email is always the best way to get in touch.