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

Contrary to its gentle image of later years, created largely through one of the great public relations machines in corporate history, Ma Bell in its first few decades was close to a public menace—a ruthless, rapacious, grasping “Bell Octopus,” as its enemies would describe it to the press. “The Bell Company has had a monopoly more profitable and mo

At the time of the breakup, in fact, it was widely assumed in the business press that IBM and AT&T would now struggle for supremacy. What undermined such an assumption was the historical record: Everything Bell Labs had ever made for AT&T had been channeled into a monopoly business. “One immediate problem for which no amount of corporate bu

Janelia Farm,

He could remember, too, that as the tubes became increasingly common—in the phone system, radios, televisions, automobiles, and the like—they had come down to price levels that once seemed impossible. He had long understood that innovation was a matter of economic imperatives. As Jack Morton had said, if you hadn’t sold anything you hadn’t innovate

Bell Labs had the advantage of necessity; its new inventions, as one of Kelly’s deputies, Harald Friis, once said, “always originated because of a definite need.”

Why move in this direction? What kind of future did the men envision? One of the more intriguing attributes of the Bell System was that an apparent simplicity—just pick up the phone and dial—hid its increasingly fiendish interior complexity. What also seemed true, and even then looked to be a governing principle of the new information age, was that

Colleagues often stood amazed that Baker could recall by name someone he had met only once, twenty or thirty years before. His mind wasn’t merely photographic, though; it worked in some ways like a switching apparatus: He tied everyone he ever met, and every conversation he ever had, into a complex and interrelated narrative of science and technolo

I liked Fisk very much. But the combination of Fisk, who didn’t know a lot about what was going on in the bowels of the place, and Julius, who knew everything about what was going on in the bowels of the place, was a good combination.”

SHANNON’S PAPER contained a claim so surprising that it seemed impossible to many at the time, and yet it would soon be proven true. He showed that any digital message could be sent with virtual perfection, even along the noisiest wire, as long as you included error-correcting codes—essentially extra bits of information, formulated as additional 1s