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

This book takes us back to a past where some of humanity's greatest minds laid the very foundations of modern civilization.

I am a budding engineer, and I just can't enough appreciate the importance of this book from professional POV. This served as tales of legends, an account of inspiring men who lead the electronics revolution 1947 onwards. This is for me what Gita would be for spiritual students. I can write a massive essay on this book itself, but in short I would say if you feel loner on path of being a masterful engineer, this book will introduce you to a bunch of souls to feel in company with, to keep on going.

The book gives an insight into one of the most innovative periods in Human history when most of what we call the modern world was invented by the scientists and inventors at Bell Labs. The books talks in length about inventions like the telephone, transistor, optic fibre etc and how they came into being. The book comes across as well researched and it appears that the author spent 100s of hours researching this period in American history, it's a detailed read and does get a little boring in parts especially if you are not technologically savvy, though I would recommend this book as it's also a great book on management and describes the steps to innovation in detail,make sure you read the last chapter which is a very nice summary of the period when the innovations came into being

It's a must read for anyone who's interested in knowing the history of tech that we use today. It's a well written book

Great study. One of the best book in recent time. Gives complete account of the evolution of communication and computer technology in the world.

Great book about how the modern world most essential components came into existence. Great read .

Jon Gartner had done an excellent job in capturing the history of technology, the characters involved, how they shapes the things of future in communication science. Excellent read

I love this book. It gives a vivid picture of how fundamental research has been done at Bell Labs until 1970 or so. The stories, the people, the discoveries add up really well and you dive into this forgotten time. There is also a lot to learn. Bell Labs not only did the technology behind telephone poles in the 1920s in the US. Rather, over decades, they invented things like the vacuum tube, transistors, solar, deep sea cables, semi-conductors, communication satellites, lasers, cellular mobile and more. Wow. The book concludes with a respectful view on how it ended. The people (several of whom got Nobel Prizes) passed away, and the long lasting monopoly (protected by the US government) finally collapsed. Today there is Alcatel Lucent as the closest what still exists from back then, but is not the same. My favorite quote about innovation: "Better, or cheaper, or both". A great read.

This book is really well researched and written and an extremely engaging way. It is a pleasure to read. A story of Bell Labs focusing on key personalities and Technologies

During its fifty odd years of existence, Bell Labs was the most productive scientific laboratory on the planet. It won seven Nobel Prizes, contributed innumerable practical ideas underlying our modern way of life and, whether by accident or design, also managed to make some spectacular basic scientific discoveries that expanded our understanding of the universe. How did it possibly accomplish all this? In this authoritative and intensely engaging book, Jon Gertner tells us exactly how. Gertner's book about this great American institution excels in three ways. Firstly, it describes in detail the genesis of what was then an unlikely research institution. Until then most communication related work was considered to be squarely within the domain of engineering. Bell Labs arose from a need to improve communications technology pioneered by its parent organization AT&T. But the real stroke of genius was to realize the value that basic scientists - mainly physicists and chemists - could bring to this endeavor along with engineers. This was largely the vision of two men - Frank Jewett and Mervin Kelly. Jewett who was the first president of Bell Labs had the foresight to recruit promising young physicists who were proteges of his friend Robert Millikan, a Nobel Prize winning physicist and president of Caltech. Kelly in turn was Millikan's student and was probably the most important person in the history of the laboratory. It was Kelly who hired the first brilliant breed of physicists and engineers including William Shockley, Walter Brittain, Jim Fisk and Charles Townes and who would set the agenda for future famous discoveries. During World War II Bell gained a reputation for taking on challenging military projects like radar; at the end of the war it handled almost a thousand of these. The war made the benefits of supporting basic science clear. It was Kelly again who realized that the future of innovation lay in electronics. To this end he moved Bell from its initial location in New York City to an expansive wooded field in New Jersey near Murray Hill and recruited even more brilliant physicists, chemists and engineers. This added further fuel to the fire of innovation started in the 1930s, and from then on the laboratory never looked back. Secondly, Gertner gives a terrific account of the people who populated the buildings in Murray Hill and their discoveries which immortalized the laboratory. Kelly instituted a policy of hiring only the best minds, and it did not matter whether these were drawn from industry, academia or the government. In some cases he would go to great lengths to snare a particularly valuable scientist, offering lucrative financial incentives along with unprecedented freedom to explore ideas. This led to a string of extraordinary discoveries which Gertner describes in rich and accessible detail. One feature of the book that stands out is Gertner's efforts in describing the actual science instead of skimming over it; for instance he pays due attention to the revolution in materials chemistry that was necessary for designing semiconductor devices. The sheer number of important things Bell scientists discovered or invented beggars belief; even a limited but diverse sampling includes the first transatlantic cable, transistors, UNIX, C++, photovoltaic cells, error-corrected communication, charged-coupled devices and statistical process control that now forms the basis of the six-sigma movement. The scientists were a fascinating, diverse lot and Gertner brings a novelist's eye in describing them. There was Bill Shockley, the undoubtedly brilliant, troubled, irascible physicist whose sin of competing against his subordinates led to his alienation at the lab. Gertner provides a fast-paced account of those heady days in 1947 when John Bardeen, Brittain and Shockley invented the transistor, the truly world-changing invention that is Bell Labs's greatest claim to fame. Then there was Claude Shannon, the quiet, eccentric genius who rode his unicycle around the halls and invented information theory which essentially underlies the entire modern digital world. Described also are Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, whose work with an antenna that was part of the first communications satellite - also built by Bell - led to momentous evidence supporting the Big Bang. The influence of the laboratory was so formative that even the people who left Bell Labs later went on to greatness; several of these such as future energy secretary Steven Chu joined elite academic institutions and won Nobel Prizes (Bardeen won two). It's quite clear that the cast of characters that passed through the institution will probably never again be concentrated in one place. But perhaps the most valuable part of the book deals not with the great scientific personalities or their discoveries but with the reasons that made Bell tick. When Kelly moved the lab to Murray Hill, he designed its physical space in ways that would have deep repercussions for productive thought and invention. Most crucially, he interspersed the basic and applied scientists together without any separation. That way even the purest of mathematicians was forced to interact with and learn from the most hands-on engineer. This led to an exceptional cross-fertilization of ideas, an early precursor of what we call multidisciplinary research. Labs and offices were divided by soundproof steel partitions that could be moved to expand and rearrange working spaces. The labs were all lined along a very long, seven-hundred foot corridor where everybody worked with their doors open. This physical layout ensured that when a scientist or engineer walked to the cafeteria, he or she would "pick up ideas like a magnet picks up iron filings". Other rules only fed the idea factory. For instance you were not supposed to turn away a subordinate if he came to ask you for advice. This led to the greenest of recruits learning at the feet of masters like Bardeen or Shannon. Most importantly, you were free to pursue any idea or research project that you wanted, free to ask anyone for advice, free to be led where the evidence pointed. Of course this extraordinary freedom was made possible by the immense profits generated by the monopolistic AT&T, but the heart of the matter is that Bell's founders recognized the importance of focusing on long-term goals rather than short-term profits. They did this by gathering bright minds under one roof and giving them the freedom and time to pursue their ideas. And as history makes clear, this policy led not only to fundamental discoveries but to practical inventions greatly benefiting humanity. Perhaps some of today's profitable companies like Google can lift a page from AT&T and channel more of their profits into basic, broadly defined, curiosity-driven research. Gertner's highly readable book leaves us with a key message. As America struggles to stay competitive in science and technology, Bell Labs still provides the best example of what productive industrial research can accomplish. There are many lessons that modern organizations can learn from it. One interesting lesson arising from the cohabitation of research and manufacturing under the same roof is that it might not be healthy beyond a point to isolate one from the other, a caveat that bears directly on current offshoring policies. It is important to have people involved in all aspects of R&D talking to each other. But the greatest message of all from the story of this remarkable institution is simple and should not be lost in this era of short-term profits, layoffs and declining investment in fundamental research: the best way to generate ideas still is to hire the best minds, put them all in one place and give them the freedom, time and money to explore, think and innovate. You will be surprised how much long-term benefit you get from that policy. As they say, mighty trees from little acorns grow, and it's imperative to nurture those little seeds.

21世紀のデジタル革命をハードウェアや情報理論の根幹を作りあげたベル研の評伝。圧巻は第7章の情報主義（Informationist）で、シャノンの理論どのように造られ、登場したのか。シャノンと同世代で全米科学財団（NSF）の初代総裁に収まるヴァンネヴァー・ブッシュがボストンからDCのカーネギー研究所に移る時代に、彼らはボストン、ニューヨーク、DCと東海岸での交流の背景にはマンハッタン計画が関係したいたことなど、実に興味深い新しい科学分野の創設と開拓に関るエピソードを詳述しており、大変興味深い。情報主義者という訳語は正確ではないが、現在のアメリカでは医学分野の情報専門家をインフォメーショニストと呼んでいる。 全体として21世紀の情報革命の意義とその実像は、20世紀前半の実に地味な基礎科学研究を企業ベースで着実に研究し、仕上げた民間のイノヴェーション（技術革新）が基盤にあることを本書は思い知らせている。 書名のアイディア・ファクトリー、思想工場と訳するとちょっと味気ないが、原語はエンジニアの夢を実現する過程を描かせる。現実に稼動する姿こそ正夢の工場だ、本書の内容に相応しい書名である。

Telling the story of one the most important innovation laboratories of all the times, this book tells the story of the main masterpiece in the history of telecommunications and electronics: transistor, information theory, satellite communications, solar cells, microwaves links and waveguides, optic fibers, cellular networks, etc. Clearly written the book shows those breakthroughs through the eyes, the mind and the heart of their fathers and their personal lives: Shannon, Shockley, Pierce, Friis, and many others.