The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner
A sweeping, atmospheric historical past of Bell Labs that highlights its unparalleled role as an incubator of innovation and birthplace of the century's most influential technologies.
Bell Laboratories, which thrived from the Nineteen Twenties to the Eighties, was the most modern and productive institution of the 20th century. Lengthy before America's brightest scientific minds began migrating west to Silicon Valley, they flocked to this sylvan campus in the New Jersey suburbs constructed and funded by AT&T. At its peak, Bell Labs employed practically fifteen thousand individuals, twelve hundred of whom had PhDs. Thirteen would go on to win Nobel prizes. It was a citadel of science and scholarship as well as a hotbed of creative thinking. It was, in effect, a manufacturing unit of ideas whose workings have remained largely hidden until now.
New York Occasions Journal author Jon Gertner unveils the unique magic of Bell Labs by means of the eyes and actions of its scientists. These ingenious, typically eccentric males would grow to be revolutionaries, and sometimes legends, whether or not for inventing radio astronomy in their spare time (and on the company's dime), riding unicycles via the corridors, or pioneering the ideas that propel immediately's technology. In these pages, we find out how radar came to be, and lasers, transistors, satellites, mobile phones, and much more.
Much more necessary, Gertner reveals the forces that set off this explosion of creativity. Bell Labs mixed the very best elements of the tutorial and company worlds, hiring the brightest and normally the youngest minds, making a tradition and even an architecture that pressured workers in different fields to work together, in nearly full mental freedom, with little strain to create moneymaking innovations. In Gertner's portrait, we come to understand why both researchers and enterprise leaders look to Bell Labs as a model and long to incorporate its magic into their own work.
Written with a novelist's present for pacing and an ability to convey the thrill of innovation, The Concept Manufacturing unit yields a revelatory take on the business of invention. What are the ideas of innovation? How do new know-how and new ideas begin? Are some environments more favorable than others? How should they be structured, and how ought to they be ruled? Can strokes of genius be accelerated, replicated, standardized? The history of Bell Labs supplies essential solutions that may and needs to be utilized at this time by anyone who desires to grasp the place good ideas come from.
