Is legendary Bell Labs the US’s “gold standard for innovation”?

By Steven T. Corneliussen

Last year for Physics Today, Venkatesh Narayanamurti —of Harvard University but formerly of Bell Labs—reviewed Jon Gertner’s The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. He observed that ‘Gertner asks the following: In a time of venture capitalists, open innovation, and highly successful information technology companies such as Apple, Google, and Facebook, is there a need for an organization like Bell Labs?’

Recent media reporting and commentary have engaged related questions, with similar treatment of Bell Labs as a sort of American scientific and technological standard, and as what Narayanamurti called ‘a source of lessons learned in how to build forward-looking, innovative technology institutions.’

Much of the impetus comes from the decision of Marissa Mayer, chief executive at Yahoo, to curtail telecommuting. When New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd joined that discussion , she cited Bell Labs as a standard: ‘Tech innovators—even as far back as Bell Labs scientists—have designed their campuses around the management philosophy that intellectual ferment happens when you force smart people to collaborate in person and constantly bounce creative ideas off each other.’

At the Washington Post, Richard Cohen began a recent column this way: ‘We can assume that the data-driven Marissa Mayer studied the data and algorithmed the heck out of everything in sight before deciding that Yahoo employees would henceforth cease telecommuting and report to the office.’ Here’s a key passage:

Bell Labs still exists , of course, but if it has stature as an American standard, the stature comes from the way it was structured and successfully operated in the past. That past stature explains a recent Wall Street Journal article ‘s mention of the institution as an ‘intellectual hive known for cranking out Nobel laureates.’ Below are other recent media examples:

* The Boston Globe ran the business article ‘Nation must rebuild ‘industrial ecosystem’ to spur manufacturing, says MIT.’ It recalled that ‘big corporate research efforts, such as the old AT&T’s famed Bell Labs, had spillover effects, benefitting other research and ideas, as well encouraging interplay between engineers and manufacturers.’

* Wired.com’s recent ‘Tech time warp of the week: Bell Labs Computer Center, 1973 ’ began, ‘That iPhone in your hand? You can trace its roots all the way back to the late ‘60s, when two researchers at the famed Bell Labs built a computer operating system called UNIX.’

* In a Washington Post interview with five engineers who shared the $500000 Charles Stark Draper Prize, one of the five, Joel Engel, credited institutions like Bell Labs for ‘the sweeping innovations of the past.’

* The Bell Labs heritage figured centrally in two lengthy New York Times obituaries: ‘John E. Karlin, who led the way to all-digit dialing, dies at 94 ’ and ‘Tingye Li dies at 81; played crucial role in laser’s development .’ The latter noted that ‘Bell Labs was virtually unchallenged as the largest and most inventive laboratory in the world, having a hand in many of the 20th century’s most important inventions.’

* At the Huffington Post, a commentary about economic recovery lamented today’s corporations’ short-term orientation ‘in contrast to the days when Bell Labs engaged in comprehensive R&D processes focused on long-term product-development goals.’ And Karen Kashmanian Oates, dean of arts and sciences at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, highlighted the Bell Labs example in the commentary ‘The importance of basic research .’

* At the Chicago Tribune, where an op-ed appeared last year under the headline ‘How the lessons of Bell Labs can help fix U.S. healthcare ,’ a recent article reported on a vision to ‘build a research and engineering powerhouse that will attract a range of industries to Chicago, along the lines of what the former Bell Labs did for the East Coast.’

The Bell Labs standard also appeared last month at the Globe and Mail, which calls itself ‘Canada’s national newspaper.’ That paper asked the University of Alberta’s Indira Samarasekera, ‘If you could make a pitch to larger companies that are skimping on R&D, what would you say?’ She replied , ‘Hire the brightest and best coming out of our universities. And learn to be patient. Look at Bell Labs. The transistor came out of Bell Labs, and that’s because, going back many, many years, it was conducting absolutely incredible basic research that led to that discovery.’ Another Globe and Mail article pointed out that the ‘development of the transistor in the 1940s partially took place at Bell Labs...because management purposely put people from different research groups in the same room.’

An electrical-power trade publicationreported on Steven Chu’s last public speech as secretary of the US Department of Energy. It said that ‘Chu noted, as he has in the past, that he has tried to bring to the Energy Department...the culture that fostered 17 Nobel Prize winners at Bell Labs, where he first worked.’ Nature had made much the same point last September: ‘Chu also battled to create a series of ‘energy innovation hubs’ to bring together scientists from different disciplines in institutes reminiscent’ of Bell Labs.

Also last year, in a Nature interview , Douglas Osheroff answered a question about his ‘ground-breaking research while at Bell Labs during its golden era.’ Osheroff, a Stanford University physicist, shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of superfluidity in helium-3. Nature asked, ‘What were the key ingredients for Bell Labs’ research successes, and do you think that similar research environments exist or could be created today?’ Osheroff replied,

But even if Osheroff’s judgment is correct—even if Bell Labs’ time has permanently passed—the institution with its scientific and technical culture connotes something like a techno-legend, at least in the media.

Recently a New York Times editorial ruminated on the questions raised by Yahoo’s new policy on telecommuting. One line mentioned that a ‘negative effect [of telecommuting]—hard to measure but an article of faith among entrepreneurs and some executives—is the missed serendipitous encounters between employees at the office that lead to new products or strategies.’

The editorial itself never mentioned Bell Labs. But from among the reply letters, the editors printed one from Norman Axelrod of New York City. He cited that line from the editorial and went on to summarize the legend:

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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.