The Innovation Masters
November 1947, and William Shockley is in a frenzy. He’s head of a research team at Bell
Labs, just outside of New York, and he’s a Very intelligent man (as anyone who speaks to
him is quickly informed). But yet somehow, two hicks – the Midwesterner John Bardeen,
and the Oregon rancher Walter Brattain – look like they’re going to outwit him.
They’re on the verge of finding what many in the Labs have been questing after for years:
their holy grail: a device, that could be made out of what’s basically solid rock, yet which
will take electrical signals, and switch them, hustle them, and – most miraculously of
all – magnify them, so that what was a weak, feeble Clark Kent stream of electrons upon
entering will emerge as a Superman torrent.
The device, of course, was called the, well, for a while it was going to be the iatotron,
then the sexy name ‘solid triode’ was considered, but finally a vote among Bell engineers
decided on the ‘transistor’. The first one took over a decade to create, and cost a small
fortune. Today billions are created each second. Were there to be no transistors, although
mercifully we’d have no live broadcasts of British teams humiliating themselves in distant
ex-colonies, and no deathless Twitter posts (and, more pleasantly, no chance of Iran’s antiSemites creating nuclear weapons), we’d also have no cell phones, no GPS, and pretty much
no computers at all.
Now for what’s extraordinary. If Bardeen and Brattain had never been hired – if Bell Labs
had never created the transistor – the place would still be known as the greatest innovation
center of the mid 20th century. For from its few simple if lengthy hallways, situated amidst
the green hills of beautiful New Jersey, there also emerged a tremendous number of the
century’s other core developments: in fiber optics, lasers, solar cells, communication
satellites, and very much else. Something more was going on than the lucky confluence of a
few researchers. But what?
First off was cash, great cascading gobs of the green stuff. The Labs’ parent company, AT&T,
ran the entire telephone network in America, and – a capitalist’s dream – it had managed
to convince America’s lawmakers that it should never, ever, have any competition. It owned
it all, and only had a few pliable regulators to work through to establish the high rates at
which it could ring in the money. It was, accordingly, very, very rich.
That alone wouldn’t be enough. Russian oligarchs are also very rich, but clamber on to
one of their yachts, stepping over the models and football players and rictus-smiling
politicians, and you are unlikely to find research labs supported with billions of dollars, for
problems that are unlikely to show much return for decades. AT&T’s leadership, luckily,
was terrified that someday, somehow, America’s politicians would realize how much they’d
been manipulated, and take away the firm’s monopoly. As a result it was corporate policy to
create magnificent, useful innovations, and then – as publicly as possible – give them away,
or lease them out at low rates, to show the firm’s good citizenship.
Along with the cash, and fear, the Labs also had leadership that set research goals of exactly
the right sort. This is where many well-meaning institutions fail. If goals are too detailed,
there’s little space for deep innovation. But if goals are too general, they provide no useful
guidelines at all, and billions of dollars can remarkably quickly be wasted.
Bell’s lab directors set their goal to be improved communication: nothing less, but nothing
more. To work within that wise constraint, they had one very good tool already at hand.
The Bell phone network was perhaps the largest machine in the world at the time. It had
millions of nodes (individual phones), and millions of switches (big clanking electromechanical devices, which were just begging to be transformed), and a continent-width’s
of expensive wiring (ditto), and – perhaps most importantly – untold numbers of flickering
signals, shooting through that complex mess.
Replace each part with better materials – fiber optics or satellites for the copper wires;
transistors and clever transfer protocols for the clanking switches – and you can see today’s
internet ‘naturally’ emerging into light.
Interacting with the physical network was crucial. Bell Labs was far from being an ivory
tower. If anything, it was, as Jon Gertner, author of this near perfect book has put it, ‘an
ivory tower with a factory downstairs’. An institution like All Souls Oxford is an excellent
machine to take highly intelligent people out of circulation, and make sure they have no
effect on the outside world. Bell Labs reversed that. They connected with the real world at
every stage of their work, and from that produced marvels.
It didn’t last of course. By the 1980s, America’s phone monopoly was being broken up.
Funding went down at the Labs. Short term goals took over. A new model, the Silicon Valley
system, was held to be the wave of the future. This has been good in some domains, but,
on the whole, weak when it comes to fundamental breakthroughs on a large scale. Gertner
has noted that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s number one Friend, has declared that his firm
should ‘move fast and break things’. At Bell Labs, by contrast, Gertner notes, the motto
could have been ‘move deliberately and build things’.
Whether we’ll see its like again, I do not know. Zuckerberg and his ilk mean well, but to
most of them, what exists ‘now’ is, by definition, better than what existed before. Yet we’re
still living off the practical legacy of those mid 20th discoveries at the Labs. Given our
species’ political immaturity perhaps it’s good that we get no more tools as powerful as the
transistor, at least for a while. But in the interim, there’s Gertner to remind us how those
glory days were gained.
Review of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation,
by Jon Gertner; in The Literary Review, April 2012