The Idea Factory

The Idea Factory

Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

Jon Gertner

Name Game

The hunt for words that stick

Bell Labs engineers had become fond of the suffix “-istor”: Small devices known as varistors and thermistors had already become essential components in the phone system’s circuitry. “Transistor,” the memo noted, was “an abbreviated combination of the words ‘transconductance’ or ‘transfer,’ and ‘varistor.’” ... But when the ballot results came in, transistor was the clear winner.
Shaping Structure

Method of creation shapes what is created.

“On the contrary, all buildings have been connected so as to avoid fixed geographical delineation between departments and to encourage free interchange and close contact among them.” The physicists and chemists and mathematicians were not meant to avoid one another, in other words, and the research people were not meant to evade the development people. By intention, everyone would be in one another’s way.
Kronos Cycle

Open systems consolidate into monopoly, then repeat.

Strangely enough, however, it may not have been in Mervin Kelly or in some of his disciples—perhaps because the monopoly, at least for a time, guaranteed that the phone company’s business would remain sturdy even in the face of drastic technological upheaval. Kelly, for instance, who toiled for decades to improve and perfect the vacuum tube, effectively lobbied for a research program on the transistor that, when it succeeded, rendered his entire previous career in science irrelevant. And an array of other technologies at Bell Labs had a similar effect of discarding the old in favor of the new.
Unreliable Parts

Mega-projects orchestrate unreliable elements into coherent wholes.

So many of the wartime and postwar breakthroughs—the Manhattan Project, radar, the transistor—were clearly group efforts, a compilation of the ideas and inventions of individuals bound together with common purposes and complementary talents. And the phone system, with its almost unfathomable complexity, was by definition a group effort. It was also the case, as Shockley would later point out, that by the middle of the twentieth century the process of innovation in electronics had progressed to the point that a vast amount of multidisciplinary expertise was needed to bring any given project to fruition.
Tinkering Sanctuary

Protected spaces insulated from interference enable breakthroughs.

The physicists and chemists and mathematicians were not meant to avoid one another, in other words, and the research people were not meant to evade the development people. By intention, everyone would be in one another’s way.