Paradigm Shifts

added by sari and · updated 7mo ago

“So often,” says Ian Ross, who worked in Jack Morton’s department at Bell Labs doing transistor development in the 1950s, “the original concept of what an innovation will do”—the replacement of the vacuum tube, in this case—“frequently turns out not to be the major impact.”1 The transistor’s greatest value was not as a replacement for the old but a
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from The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner
“IT IS THE BEGINNING of a new era in telecommunications and no one can have quite the vision to see how big it is,” Mervin Kelly told an audience of telephone company executives in 1951. Speaking of the transistor, he added that “no one can predict the rate of its impact.” Kelly admitted that he wouldn’t see its full effect before he retired from t
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from The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner
Ian Ross, who worked on transistor development in the 1950s: “So often the original concept of what an innovation will do frequently turns out not to be the major impact.”
from The Hummingbird and the Poison Tree by Daniel Jeffries
Prashanth Narayan added

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