The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation Author: Jon Gertner | Language: English | ISBN:
B005GSZIWG | Format: PDF
The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation Description
The definitive history of America's greatest incubator of technological innovation In this first full portrait of the legendary Bell Labs, journalist Jon Gertner takes readers behind one of the greatest collaborations between business and science in history. Officially the research and development wing of AT&T, Bell Labs made seminal breakthroughs from the 1920s to the 1980s in everything from lasers to cellular elephony, becoming arguably the best laboratory for new ideas in the world. Gertner's riveting narrative traces the intersections between science, business, and society that allowed a cadre of eccentric geniuses to lay the foundations of the information age, offering lessons in management and innovation that are as vital today as they were a generation ago.
- File Size: 1761 KB
- Print Length: 446 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1594203288
- Publisher: Penguin Books; Reprint edition (March 15, 2012)
- Sold by: Penguin Group (USA) LLC
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0143122797
- ISBN-13: 978-0143122791
- ASIN: B005GSZIWG
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #26,040 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #4
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Industries > Media & Communications - #9
in Books > Engineering & Transportation > Engineering > Reference > Patents & Inventions - #11
in Books > Engineering & Transportation > Engineering > Reference > History
- #4
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Industries > Media & Communications - #9
in Books > Engineering & Transportation > Engineering > Reference > Patents & Inventions - #11
in Books > Engineering & Transportation > Engineering > Reference > History
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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