New York Times profiles Bell Labs: “Ivory tower with a factory downstairs”
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0193
With an elaborate flow chart tracing decades of interrelated scientific and technological successes, the front page of the 26 February New York Times commentary section carried “True innovation ,” an essay that considered the place of Bell Labs in American history. The article has now also stimulated a notable set of responses on the Times‘s letters page .
The essay’s author, Jon Gertner, also wrote the forthcoming The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation . He begins his Times piece by identifying Bell Labs as “the onetime research and development organization of the country’s formerly monopolistic telephone company, AT&T.”
Gertner declares that Bell Labs “offers a number of lessons about how our country’s technology companies—and our country’s longstanding innovative edge—actually came about.” He asserts that it “also presents a more encompassing and ambitious approach to innovation than what prevails today,” in that its “staff worked on the incremental improvements necessary for a complex national communications network while simultaneously thinking far ahead, toward the most revolutionary inventions imaginable.”
After citing the transistor, the silicon solar cell, the first patent for a laser, the charge-coupled device, fiber optics, statistics-based quality control and, from the software realm, Unix and C, Gertner introduces the person he calls “most responsible for [this] culture of creativity,” Mervin Kelly:
[Kelly’s] fundamental belief was that an “institute of creative technology” like his own needed a “critical mass” of talented people to foster a busy exchange of ideas. But innovation required much more than that. Mr. Kelly was convinced that physical proximity was everything; phone calls alone wouldn’t do. Quite intentionally, Bell Labs housed thinkers and doers under one roof. Purposefully mixed together on the transistor project were physicists, metallurgists and electrical engineers; side by side were specialists in theory, experimentation and manufacturing. Like an able concert hall conductor, he sought a harmony, and sometimes a tension, between scientific disciplines; between researchers and developers; and between soloists and groups.
Gertner laments what he sees as the present-day “belief that small groups of profit-seeking entrepreneurs turning out innovative consumer products are as effective as our innovative forebears.” He adds:
History does not support this belief. The teams at Bell Labs that invented the laser, transistor and solar cell were not seeking profits. They were seeking understanding. Yet in the process they created not only new products but entirely new—and lucrative—industries.
To “consider the legacy of Bell Labs is to see that we should not mistake small technological steps for huge technological leaps,” Gertner writes at the end. In the 5 March set of responding letters to the editor, one writer—a digital signal processing engineer—agrees that innovators like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Facebook don’t really innovate like Bell Labs did. He asserts that the “innovations of today’s modern titans of technology have more in common with the ‘innovations’ of the financial industry—juggling, renaming and rebranding existing technologies in a way that maximizes profit.”
Another letter emphasizes something mentioned in the article, that Bell Labs’ “existence was predicated on an implicit tax foisted on the nation’s phone bills by its monopoly,” which the writer sees leading to a fundamentally important question: “Is the business model that supported Bell Labs most conducive to innovation?” Still another writer takes the opportunity to remind the world that as the article shows, “it is more important than ever that we as a nation increase our investment in basic research.”
Jeong Kim, president of Bell Labs today, also takes the opportunity to remind the world of something. He declares that his “institution continues to be the destination of choice for a remarkable number of graduates from the world’s pre-eminent research universities and a wellspring of communications technologies leadership.” He expresses amazement at seeing “the occasional past tense reference” to Bell Labs. He reports that his organization continues “to retool [its] research capacity to explore promising new technologies for the future.” And he offers an example: They “are making remarkable progress on a potentially revolutionary technology to move us beyond the approaching limits of the optical transport systems that make up the foundation of the Internet.”
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.