Name: The Idea Factory
ISBN: 9781594203282

Jon Gertner

Highlights achievements of Bell Labs as a leading innovator, exploring the role of its highly educated employees in developing new technologies while considering the qualities of companies where innovation and development are most successful.

Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

The Idea Factory

Really interesting history of AT&T and how the telephone industry created so many technological advancements that modern society relies on today.

Connor Johnson

Rohit Arondekar

A fascinating book on the history of Bell Labs. I didn't know that so many technologies and basic science that we take for granted emerged from this one place. It's amazing how so many factors came together ― unlimited budget, relatively little time pressure to productize basic research, great minds getting together at one place in such a short span of time etc.

It was surreal reading about the process of how junction transistors were discovered/invented. Remembered studying about them. Also in college, we had to learn just an overview of how cell phone towers organize in hexagonal cells and handoff between cells. It was fascinating to read how the process and research developed in figuring out hexagonal cells and other things we take granted for in mobile communication.

Highly recommend this book to everyone because you ought to know how the foundations of the device you are using to read this review were laid.

Jimmy Cerone

While the book does fail to include as much context and social commentary (in what ways were racism and sexism present at Bell Labs), it is a magnificent technological history. It filled in the gaps of my technical education as a software engineer and helped me better understand where and how the tech of today came to be.

jack morris

Listened to this one over the past month or so. I've wanted for awhile to learn the history of Bell Labs. Here's a quick primer: Bell Labs was *the* industrial research lab to work at in the 20th century. Bell Labs was the research wing of AT&T, which, at the time, was the only national phone carrier in the US. From 1920-1970(ish) researchers at Bell Labs invented the radio tower, the transistor, lots of types of vacuum tubes, the first satellite (Telstar), the cell phone, the UNIX operating system, and a lot of other things I'm leaving out. (In the 1990s– a bit after the golden ages– Yann Lecun was working at Bell Labs when he applied the first Convolutional Neural Network to handwriting recognition.) Bell Labs scientists invented signal processing, information theory, and modern electronics.

Bell Labs was also the workplace of some amazing scientists: Claude Shannon, Richard Hamming, Richard Nyquist, and Bill Shockley, to name a few. I also learned about some individals, like Mervin Kelly and John Pierce, who were instrumental in making the lab into the world powerhouse it eventually became. I appreciate the cultural grounding this book provided me, even though it went into some pretty serious detail about just about everything (for example, Mervin Kelly's upbringing in Missouri in the early 1900s...).

The author doesn't write about the happenings at the labs, rather, the people. I'm sure there are important events that were left out to save room for the color added to each significant personality introduced throughout the book. This style reminds me a lot of Michael Lewis's books, and it takes a bit of getting used to. But at the end of the day, I appreciate the small details. And in this case, the persons in question are often so unique and interesting that it would've been a shame to reduce them to just researchers. Who knew that Claude Shannon spent so much time building robots and automata at home? Or that he was an obsessed with juggling, but could never cross the threshold from good to great? (I was surprised, and somewhat confused, at how little Richard Hamming made it into this book. Perhaps he didn't do as much work at Bell Labs as I'd thought.)

So the first reason I like this book is its historical importance– Bell Labs was like Google, Facebook, OpenAI, etc. all rolled into one company and backed by the federal government. How did I not know more about this before?

The second is because of the perspective: Gertner treats Bell Labs as a case study of institutional innovation. How can you *plan* to make something new? How can you prepare a group of people to innovate? How can you optimize from there? And how can one balance short-term improvement with long-term disruption? 

For example, when Bell Labs scientists invented the transistor – arguably the most important invention of the 20th century – they obfuscated decades of their colleagues' research in improving vacuum tubes. The transistor didn't just make the vacuum tube irrelevant, it made it obsolete. But Bell Labs persisted, got the transistor to market, and ended up benefiting immensely from its production.

Seems like a lesson today's tech companies could learn from: incremental developments can only take your institution so far, and for so long. It could be true that (as the author suggests) Bell Labs could only innovate because it knew its business was not at risk (due to the government regulation on phone service at the time). Whatever the case, there's a lesson to learn here.

Bryan Alexander

A terrific history of a semi-forgotten yet crucial aspect of American history.

For two generations Bell Labs offered a torrent of inventions and drastically improved inventions, from transistors to lasers, information theory to satellites and digital audio. They accidentally invented solar cells and radio astronomy. They fought WWII (perhaps decisively: think of radar, comms, and precision bombing) and worked deeply in the Cold War (one Labs exec helped create the NSA and NRO). And Bell Labs did all of this in a unique position, housed within a phone company that was a federally protected monopoly.

Gertner's narrative focuses on odd and heroic figures moving within a complex organization. This means intertwined biographies, microeconomics, and the history of 20th century science. It's not a promising mix for an engaging read, but Idea Factory maintains an infectious sense of wonder, which carried me on.

Missing in this view are the non-heroes. We see little of the thousands of workers who made Bell Labs work. Women are nearly invisible. This is, in short, a blend of Great Man history with business biography, with the strengths and weaknesses of those respective forms.

I taught this to my graduate seminar on technology and innovation. Students were initially - not baffled, which is too strong, but thrown into historical discovery, since all but one were born after the Reagan administration undid Ma Bell. They became fascinated by the history that surfaced, as it gave them a route to their present along with an inspirational account of manic invention.

Strongly recommended.

Colton McCurdy

Josh Kuiros

Brian

Mert

Taya Reznichenko

From its beginnings in the 1920s until its demise in the 1980s, Bell Labs-officially, the research and development wing of AT&T-was the biggest, and arguably the best, laboratory for new ideas in the world. From the transistor to the laser, from digital communications to cellular telephony, it's hard to find an aspect of modern life that hasn't been touched by Bell Labs. In The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner traces the origins of some of the twentieth century's most important inventions and delivers a riveting and heretofore untold chapter of American history. At its heart this is a story about the life and work of a small group of brilliant and eccentric men-Mervin Kelly, Bill Shockley, Claude Shannon, John Pierce, and Bill Baker-who spent their careers at Bell Labs. Today, when the drive to invent has become a mantra, Bell Labs offers us a way to enrich our understanding of the challenges and solutions to technological innovation. Here, after all, was where the foundational ideas on the management of innovation were born. From the Trade Paperback edition.

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

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