Walter Isaacson finds innovation lessons in the Bell Labs story

As reported last month , the lengthy 26 February New York Times commentary “ True innovation ” profiled Bell Labs and drew lots of letters. Jon Gertner, author of the new book The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation , wrote the piece. Now the Times ‘s Sunday book section has offered a review of Gertner’s book by Walter Isaacson, who uses the opportunity to consider the nature of American technological innovation.

Isaacson is a former Rhodes scholar who became the editor of Time and serves now as chief executive of the Aspen Institute. He has written biographies not only of Henry Kissinger and Steve Jobs but of physicists Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein.

He presents the usual summary of Bell Labs as a special R&D organization sustained by AT&T’s many-decades telephone monopoly, and he highlights the invention of the transistor. Early on, he declares that the “lesson of Bell Labs is that most feats of sustained innovation cannot and do not occur in an iconic garage or the workshop of an ingenious inventor,” but instead “occur when people of diverse talents and mind-sets and expertise are brought together, preferably in close physical proximity where they can have frequent meetings and serendipitous encounters.”

Isaacson uses the transistor to illustrate that collaboration principle and shows how theoretical and experimental physicists needed to be linked with “experimental chemists and metallurgists who were creating a revolution in materials.” Isaacson adds, “Like Bell Labs, the transistor stood at the intersection of theoretical science and applied engineering. It could be described as both a discovery and an invention.”

Then he goes further:

It was also an example of the “linear argument” in the history of science that was expounded by Vannevar Bush, James Conant and other academics who were involved in World War II’s scientific endeavors and wanted to encourage continued government funding of pure research: The theoretical discoveries of pure science would lead to applied science breakthroughs and new technological inventions. Gertner explains how this process could result in sustained innovation:

“If an idea begat a discovery, and if a discovery begat an invention, then an innovation defined the lengthy and wholesale transformation of an idea into a technological product (or process) meant for widespread practical use. Almost by definition, a single person, or even a single group, could not alone create an innovation. The task was too variegated and involved.”

Isaacson does observe, though, that the book lags in “drawing lessons from [the] lapses” of Bell Labs—for example, the failure to pursue fiber optics. And he closes with a worried question about the future:

The ability to combine theory, creativity and engineering was a great achievement of postwar America. For 50 years, economic growth and job creation were propelled by transistors, lasers and other discoveries that came from the willingness to nurture theoretical research in conjunction with applied science and manufacturing skills. But these days, manufacturing is being outsourced, and funding for pure science is being curtailed. With Bell Labs and other such idea factories disappearing, and with government research money endangered, what will propel innovation and job creation for the next 50 years?

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.