The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation Author: Visit Amazon's Jon Gertner Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0143122797 | Format: PDF
The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation Description
Review
“Filled with colorful characters and inspiring lessons . . . The Idea Factory explores one of the most critical issues of our time: What causes innovation?”
(Walter Isaacson,
The New York Times Book Review)
“Riveting . . . Mr. Gertner’s portraits of Kelly and the cadre of talented scientists who worked at Bell Labs are animated by a journalistic ability to make their discoveries and inventions utterly comprehensible—indeed, thrilling—to the lay reader. And they showcase, too, his novelistic sense of character and intuitive understanding of the odd ways in which clashing or compatible personalities can combine to foster intensely creative collaborations.”
(Michiko Kakutani,
The New York Times)
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(
The Boston Globe)
“Fascinating history . . . the research behind The Idea Factory is astonishing.”
(
Slate Book Review)
“Compelling . . . Gertner's book offers fascinating evidence for those seeking to understand how a society should best invest its research resources.”
(
The Wall Street Journal)
“An expansive new history . . . does an impressive job of illuminating many of Bell Labs’ key technological triumphs.”
(Wired.com)
About the Author
Jon Gertner grew up in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, just a few hundred yards away from Bell Labs. He has been a writer for the New York Times Magazine since 2004 and is an editor at Fast Company magazine. He lives in Maplewood, New Jersey, with his wife and two children.
- Paperback: 432 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books; Reprint edition (February 26, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0143122797
- ISBN-13: 978-0143122791
- Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
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.
I spent most of my technical career at Bell labs between the late sixties until the mid-nineties. Over half of that time I worked in the fundamental research area and the other half a mixture of government contract work and administrative work. Virtually all the people detailed in this book who were still around when I started were known to me and one or two I at least crossed paths with personally. In particular, I began my career working directly for Bill Pfann for a number of years, a wonderful man and brilliant materials scientist, in further adapting his Nobel-quality work ( unfortunately there is no Nobel prize for Materials Research!) to mixed metallic as well as organic compounds. It is no exaggeration to say that if it were not for Pfann's breakthroughs in purifying semiconductors and developing techniques for accurate levels of doping, no transistor would ever have gone past the laboratory experimental phase.
To the extent that the author traces the Lab's beginnings and the dozen or so major players both in their scientific and engineering contributions as well as their later equally valuable administrative achievements it is an excellent, detailed ( often a bit more detail than the reader really needs to have) and well-researched history. The shortcoming is that the author concentrates so extensively (essentially exclusively) on these dozen or so "superstars" he has left no time or space for even a fair sampling of many of the "second-tier" scientists and engineers, those whose brilliant work never got Nobel Prize headlines but without whose contributions no "superstar" discoveries would have progressed beyond initial theoretical curiosities.
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