Jon Gertner
Author of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
About the Author
Image credit: Jon Gertner
Works by Jon Gertner
The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (2012) 1,008 copies, 25 reviews
The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey into Greenland's Buried Past and Our Perilous Future (2019) 217 copies, 7 reviews
Mad Scientist 1 copy
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This book is highly recommended for a technology geek, history geek, history of technology geek, anyone interested in technological innovation, or just plain Ma Bell fans.
Mr. Gertner has amassed an excellent, in-depth (depth as in really deep), coverage of the phenomena that was Bell Labs. He's captured the development, processes, inventions, personalities - the egos, the drives, the vanities and intellects, the senses of humor (Jim Fisk "was fond of putting his colleagues on mailing lists show more of doctors peddling dubious tonics." !!) He writes with a literary description ("- men in crisp white shirts, sleeves rolled above their elbows, bent over rows and rows of drafting tables.") And, something I find quite refreshing, given this has to have elements of creative non-fiction (facts are dull...narrative gives them life):
So much information here, and insights into what Bell Labs was and created. Not all inventions, the processes that worked their way to the world:
Gertner writes of the demise, that Bell Labs "ceased being essential to America's technology and culture." Sad that, for an institution that created the transistor - arguably the most significant invention ever, the integrated circuit, solar cells, lasers, and a host of other common place today innovations, an institution that reinvented itself many times, finally succumbed.
Excellent history. show less
Mr. Gertner has amassed an excellent, in-depth (depth as in really deep), coverage of the phenomena that was Bell Labs. He's captured the development, processes, inventions, personalities - the egos, the drives, the vanities and intellects, the senses of humor (Jim Fisk "was fond of putting his colleagues on mailing lists show more of doctors peddling dubious tonics." !!) He writes with a literary description ("- men in crisp white shirts, sleeves rolled above their elbows, bent over rows and rows of drafting tables.") And, something I find quite refreshing, given this has to have elements of creative non-fiction (facts are dull...narrative gives them life):
One afternoon, Mervin Kelly invited [Walter] Brattain over to his home in Short Hills to discuss the matter [Brattain's displeasure with William Schockley]. They likely met in Kelly's study, where he saw all his visitors - [...]My emphasis added, that is the way to write about unknown information!
So much information here, and insights into what Bell Labs was and created. Not all inventions, the processes that worked their way to the world:
[Jack A.] Morton would eventually think more deeply about the innovative process than any Bell Labs scientist, with the possible exception of Kelly, In his view, innovation was not a simple action but a "total process" of interrelated parts. "It is not just the discovery of new phenomena, nor the development of a new product or manufacturing technique, nor the creation of a new market, " he later wrote. "Rather, the process is all these things acting together in an integrated way toward a common industrial goal."Holistic innovation. What a novel concept.
Gertner writes of the demise, that Bell Labs "ceased being essential to America's technology and culture." Sad that, for an institution that created the transistor - arguably the most significant invention ever, the integrated circuit, solar cells, lasers, and a host of other common place today innovations, an institution that reinvented itself many times, finally succumbed.
Excellent history. show less
Gertner, Jon. The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. Penguin, 2012.
Jon Gertner’s history of Bell Labs is told through portraits of some of its star scientists and administrators. Arguably, Bell Labs did more to shape the development of communications technology than RCA, Microsoft, and Apple, yet its stars were much less famous than David Sarnoff, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs. Ironically, Bell’s most prominent figure was William Shockley, who won a Nobel show more Prize for his work on semiconductors but is better known for the racist ideas on IQ he advocated in his retirement. Unlike the Edison lab, Bell was never a one-man show. It fostered collaboration from the beginning. In the first decade of the twentieth century, one of its early administrators, Theodore Vail, decided that for AT&T to succeed, it had to use political clout to become a monopoly and live up to its corporate motto: “One policy, one system, universal service.” He asked one of his engineers, Frank Jewett, what it would take to create a transcontinental phone line by 1914. Jewett’s idea was to raid the research labs of universities for scientists and engineers to solve problems that went beyond current engineering knowledge. They first tapped Merwin Kelly, a young Ph.D. working on electrical theory at the University of Chicago. Kelley became an administrator who for years fostered creative collaboration between theoretical scientists and engineers. Bell built a huge building in New Jersey with long halls that meant that researchers had to pass by the office of other researchers to get anywhere. They had to bump into each other every day. In fact, Claude Shannon, an engineer and mathematician who became the “father of information theory,” brought a unicycle to the office to navigate the halls. Sadly, Bell Labs, like AT&T, became the victim of its own success. It outgrew its “natural monopoly” and developed communication industries that did not at first require a corporate behemoth to prosper. The folks at Apple and Microsoft should take note. 5 stars. show less
Jon Gertner’s history of Bell Labs is told through portraits of some of its star scientists and administrators. Arguably, Bell Labs did more to shape the development of communications technology than RCA, Microsoft, and Apple, yet its stars were much less famous than David Sarnoff, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs. Ironically, Bell’s most prominent figure was William Shockley, who won a Nobel show more Prize for his work on semiconductors but is better known for the racist ideas on IQ he advocated in his retirement. Unlike the Edison lab, Bell was never a one-man show. It fostered collaboration from the beginning. In the first decade of the twentieth century, one of its early administrators, Theodore Vail, decided that for AT&T to succeed, it had to use political clout to become a monopoly and live up to its corporate motto: “One policy, one system, universal service.” He asked one of his engineers, Frank Jewett, what it would take to create a transcontinental phone line by 1914. Jewett’s idea was to raid the research labs of universities for scientists and engineers to solve problems that went beyond current engineering knowledge. They first tapped Merwin Kelly, a young Ph.D. working on electrical theory at the University of Chicago. Kelley became an administrator who for years fostered creative collaboration between theoretical scientists and engineers. Bell built a huge building in New Jersey with long halls that meant that researchers had to pass by the office of other researchers to get anywhere. They had to bump into each other every day. In fact, Claude Shannon, an engineer and mathematician who became the “father of information theory,” brought a unicycle to the office to navigate the halls. Sadly, Bell Labs, like AT&T, became the victim of its own success. It outgrew its “natural monopoly” and developed communication industries that did not at first require a corporate behemoth to prosper. The folks at Apple and Microsoft should take note. 5 stars. show less
Bell Labs was probably the most important scientific institution of the 20th century. Check out this list: transistors, semiconductors, microwave towers, digital transmission, satellites, radio astronomy, information theory, quality control, fiber optics, undersea cabling, CCDs, cell phones, video phones, pulse code modulation, lasers, Unix, and the C programming language. Every single one of those inventions, discoveries, technologies, or scientific fields was either birthed or midwived at show more Bell Labs, which at the height of its reputation counted 1,200 PhD holders among 15,000 employees. Seven Nobel Prize-winners worked and researched there, more than at most universities. It was a research laboratory without peer, freed from the short-term pressures of quarterly bottom lines. Instead of research being limited to direct applicability to existing products, Bell Labs scientists created new products, entire industries, and much of the modern world. Nowadays, Bell Labs exists as a shell of its former self, having been repeatedly merged and spun off like drops of quicksilver. Having worked for both Alcatel-Lucent and AT&T, I was interested to read the story of Bell Labs, both for my own curiosity and because its path from greatness to irrelevance says a lot about America.
There are three main layers of story told in this book, and each will appeal to a certain type of reader. The first is about a few of the more famous of the personalities at the Labs, like Shockley or Shannon, and their work; the second is about the history of AT&T as a company; and the third is about the way that the Labs were affected by the changes in the country around it. For the first layer, Gertner wisely focuses on the most prominent of the scientists while still trying to provide a sense of the scale of the Labs and how their work fit into the Labs' mission as a whole. For example, he tells the story of William Shockley, who shared the 1965 Physics Nobel Prize with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain for his work on the transistor. Both the early creative parts and the later stagnant, racist parts of Shockley's life story are told in brief but dense pages, and the reader is given a great deal of insight onto how collaborative scientific research actually works, as well as a decent outline of the technical differences between the point-contact transistor that Bardeen and Brattain invented, and Shockley's superior junction transistor. Shockley's attempts to one-up his own teammates to grab more credit for the invention of the transistor are nothing new, of course, and it says a lot about the quality of people at Bell Labs that people like Bardeen were able to not only cope with the kind of erratic behavior that Shockley brought there, but to rebound and win a second Nobel Physics Prize. Picking the right people was a big factor in the Labs' success, and as the parts recounting the idiosyncratic ways that the various recruits chose to use their travel money to hitchhike or wander to the Labs show, sometimes the right people are the ones with complementary quirks. Even the famous building in Murray Hill was designed to encourage interaction between all kinds of people, so that random encounters with colleagues from any department might spark an unusual insight. On a side note, it's interesting how many of the people profiled came from tiny rural towns; the Labs were a great magnet for talent, helping to turn obscure nobodies from tiny towns and universities into powerhouse researchers and raising the games of people who were already brilliant.
This process of rising in the ranks is integral to the second layer of the history. For most of its existence AT&T had a tripod-like structure, with manufacturer Western Electric producing equipment, AT&T Long Lines raising money through its near-total monopoly on lucrative long distance service, and Bell Labs spending money through long-term research. Many of the most important people in this history of the company spent most or all of their professional career at the company, and while this strategy has the well-known side effects of managerial inbreeding and risks of stagnation, the flip side is the potential for remarkable stability, which was essential for the multi-decade planning horizons that the company operated on. Indeed at times the company's solidity resembled a kind of priesthood or alchemist's guild, conducting experiments and conjuring forth wonders without regard for their creations' abilities to make profits or, just as often, to threaten core portions of AT&T's business model. To return to the example of the transistor, Gertner ably relates how research on it (and the related work on semiconductors in general) immediately obsoleted decades worth of expensive work on vacuum tubes. This might have worried some companies (think of Kodak and its ruinous reluctance to embrace digital technology at the expense of its core business), yet AT&T congratulated its team and immediately began to integrate this new invention into its network and system.
Even better, and this is where the third layer of the book comes into play, it provided samples of its creations to companies like Fairchild and Texas Instruments, who promptly made the billions that AT&T did not. I found this to be the most interesting aspect of the Labs' story, because by acting more as a public research laboratory than as part of a private company Bell Labs hurt AT&T as much as it helped them. Partially this unusual arrangement was due to onerous restrictions placed on AT&T by the federal government; forbidden to it were entire extremely lucrative industries, chiefly data processing, communication between computers, and the actual selling of phones and terminals (the company got around this by "leasing" its equipment to customers and vigorously suing people who attempted to attach other devices to its networks). In some ways AT&T was one of the most dominant monopolies ever to exist, to the extent that even famous corporate titans like Standard Oil paled in comparison, yet by locking AT&T out of so many fields the government ended up cultivating a curious sort of public spirit and creative independence at Bell Labs that seems very foreign to companies today.
What's the best way to fund innovation? Public grants to universities? Private sponsorship? Prizes? To some extent each has its merits, and it's possible to argue that even if AT&T hadn't sponsored all that research itself that several smaller companies might have done the work instead. After all, enough physicists headed back into the private sector at the end of WW2 that it would have been unusual for technology to stagnate without the helping hand of Ma Bell. Yet something about the concentration of all that talent makes even the titanic efforts of companies like Xerox, Microsoft, or Google seem slight. Maybe there just isn't a replacement for throwing billions of dollars at hundreds of PhDs, and if the government isn't willing to do it in these times of austerity and recession, who will? Even Bell Labs felt the impact of the Great Depression to some extent, and it was protected by one of the mightiest companies on Earth with a legal monopoly on communication; who could have taken its place then, and who would take its place now? Gertner suggests that the only modern analog of an organization like Bell Labs would be the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and that only a serious project to to tackle the problems of clean energy would be close to the kinds of challenges the Labs faced, yet good luck proposing to fund those projects commensurately; you would have better luck proposing sending people to Mars.
It's a curious fact that even as society has gotten richer in recent years, it's felt like innovation has slowed in all but a few gadget-focused areas. Perhaps this is just an illusion thrown up by our ever-increasing expectations of what The Future owes to us, but I do genuinely think that the pace of improvements in some fields has slowed or plateaued. Has progress simply gotten harder, or do those pictures of the abandoned Bell Labs Holmdel facility, and news articles about Alcatel-Lucent's defunding of basic research spending mean that in some way America has made deliberate choices to retreat inwards, and to dream smaller dreams than generations past? In the words of John Pierce, leader of the Bell Labs team that developed the communications satellite Telstar, "It is clear that we build for the day and not for the ages, and what we build has a community and functional rather than an individual character." There's simply no replacement for the talented individuals, the generous environment they need to work in, and the confident exploratory spirit towards science that characterized Bell Labs at its best. The world is a worse place for its passing. show less
There are three main layers of story told in this book, and each will appeal to a certain type of reader. The first is about a few of the more famous of the personalities at the Labs, like Shockley or Shannon, and their work; the second is about the history of AT&T as a company; and the third is about the way that the Labs were affected by the changes in the country around it. For the first layer, Gertner wisely focuses on the most prominent of the scientists while still trying to provide a sense of the scale of the Labs and how their work fit into the Labs' mission as a whole. For example, he tells the story of William Shockley, who shared the 1965 Physics Nobel Prize with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain for his work on the transistor. Both the early creative parts and the later stagnant, racist parts of Shockley's life story are told in brief but dense pages, and the reader is given a great deal of insight onto how collaborative scientific research actually works, as well as a decent outline of the technical differences between the point-contact transistor that Bardeen and Brattain invented, and Shockley's superior junction transistor. Shockley's attempts to one-up his own teammates to grab more credit for the invention of the transistor are nothing new, of course, and it says a lot about the quality of people at Bell Labs that people like Bardeen were able to not only cope with the kind of erratic behavior that Shockley brought there, but to rebound and win a second Nobel Physics Prize. Picking the right people was a big factor in the Labs' success, and as the parts recounting the idiosyncratic ways that the various recruits chose to use their travel money to hitchhike or wander to the Labs show, sometimes the right people are the ones with complementary quirks. Even the famous building in Murray Hill was designed to encourage interaction between all kinds of people, so that random encounters with colleagues from any department might spark an unusual insight. On a side note, it's interesting how many of the people profiled came from tiny rural towns; the Labs were a great magnet for talent, helping to turn obscure nobodies from tiny towns and universities into powerhouse researchers and raising the games of people who were already brilliant.
This process of rising in the ranks is integral to the second layer of the history. For most of its existence AT&T had a tripod-like structure, with manufacturer Western Electric producing equipment, AT&T Long Lines raising money through its near-total monopoly on lucrative long distance service, and Bell Labs spending money through long-term research. Many of the most important people in this history of the company spent most or all of their professional career at the company, and while this strategy has the well-known side effects of managerial inbreeding and risks of stagnation, the flip side is the potential for remarkable stability, which was essential for the multi-decade planning horizons that the company operated on. Indeed at times the company's solidity resembled a kind of priesthood or alchemist's guild, conducting experiments and conjuring forth wonders without regard for their creations' abilities to make profits or, just as often, to threaten core portions of AT&T's business model. To return to the example of the transistor, Gertner ably relates how research on it (and the related work on semiconductors in general) immediately obsoleted decades worth of expensive work on vacuum tubes. This might have worried some companies (think of Kodak and its ruinous reluctance to embrace digital technology at the expense of its core business), yet AT&T congratulated its team and immediately began to integrate this new invention into its network and system.
Even better, and this is where the third layer of the book comes into play, it provided samples of its creations to companies like Fairchild and Texas Instruments, who promptly made the billions that AT&T did not. I found this to be the most interesting aspect of the Labs' story, because by acting more as a public research laboratory than as part of a private company Bell Labs hurt AT&T as much as it helped them. Partially this unusual arrangement was due to onerous restrictions placed on AT&T by the federal government; forbidden to it were entire extremely lucrative industries, chiefly data processing, communication between computers, and the actual selling of phones and terminals (the company got around this by "leasing" its equipment to customers and vigorously suing people who attempted to attach other devices to its networks). In some ways AT&T was one of the most dominant monopolies ever to exist, to the extent that even famous corporate titans like Standard Oil paled in comparison, yet by locking AT&T out of so many fields the government ended up cultivating a curious sort of public spirit and creative independence at Bell Labs that seems very foreign to companies today.
What's the best way to fund innovation? Public grants to universities? Private sponsorship? Prizes? To some extent each has its merits, and it's possible to argue that even if AT&T hadn't sponsored all that research itself that several smaller companies might have done the work instead. After all, enough physicists headed back into the private sector at the end of WW2 that it would have been unusual for technology to stagnate without the helping hand of Ma Bell. Yet something about the concentration of all that talent makes even the titanic efforts of companies like Xerox, Microsoft, or Google seem slight. Maybe there just isn't a replacement for throwing billions of dollars at hundreds of PhDs, and if the government isn't willing to do it in these times of austerity and recession, who will? Even Bell Labs felt the impact of the Great Depression to some extent, and it was protected by one of the mightiest companies on Earth with a legal monopoly on communication; who could have taken its place then, and who would take its place now? Gertner suggests that the only modern analog of an organization like Bell Labs would be the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and that only a serious project to to tackle the problems of clean energy would be close to the kinds of challenges the Labs faced, yet good luck proposing to fund those projects commensurately; you would have better luck proposing sending people to Mars.
It's a curious fact that even as society has gotten richer in recent years, it's felt like innovation has slowed in all but a few gadget-focused areas. Perhaps this is just an illusion thrown up by our ever-increasing expectations of what The Future owes to us, but I do genuinely think that the pace of improvements in some fields has slowed or plateaued. Has progress simply gotten harder, or do those pictures of the abandoned Bell Labs Holmdel facility, and news articles about Alcatel-Lucent's defunding of basic research spending mean that in some way America has made deliberate choices to retreat inwards, and to dream smaller dreams than generations past? In the words of John Pierce, leader of the Bell Labs team that developed the communications satellite Telstar, "It is clear that we build for the day and not for the ages, and what we build has a community and functional rather than an individual character." There's simply no replacement for the talented individuals, the generous environment they need to work in, and the confident exploratory spirit towards science that characterized Bell Labs at its best. The world is a worse place for its passing. show less
The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey into Greenland's Buried Past and Our Perilous Future by Jon Gertner
Curiously (given my fondness for books on polar exploration), I enjoyed the second part of this book, which describes in depth the techniques and politics of glaciology and other ice-related sciences, more than the introductory description of early European and American exploration of Greenland. I guess I prefer detailed stories of individual expeditions more than short versions of multiple explorers (I prefer novels to short stories, so I suppose that makes sense in a way).
My already show more not-very-high opinion of Robert Peary fell even more when I read of how he extracted two meteorites and sold them to raise funds for his future explorations. Nice for him, but not so great for the local populations who lost their only source of metal for making weapons and tools. And it was sad to read how Alfred Wegener, who developed the theory of Pangaea and continental drift as I learned in [b:Assembling California|19898|Assembling California|John McPhee|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388306591l/19898._SX50_.jpg|26821], died in an effort to bring supplies to his colleagues in the interior before winter set in.
But what really fascinated me was the detailed descriptions of how the significance of ice cores became obvious, the progress of the technology for their extraction, the implications of the enormous weight of the ice on the ground in Greenland, and the integration of land and air based methods of improving our understanding of exactly what goes on with all that ice. Most importantly, the all too scary prospect of what could happen to low-lying cities, and even countries, if major ice sheets in Greenland or Antarctica break off.
That information is all very well presented, and if it interests you, you can skip the first part of the book without missing anything. show less
My already show more not-very-high opinion of Robert Peary fell even more when I read of how he extracted two meteorites and sold them to raise funds for his future explorations. Nice for him, but not so great for the local populations who lost their only source of metal for making weapons and tools. And it was sad to read how Alfred Wegener, who developed the theory of Pangaea and continental drift as I learned in [b:Assembling California|19898|Assembling California|John McPhee|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388306591l/19898._SX50_.jpg|26821], died in an effort to bring supplies to his colleagues in the interior before winter set in.
But what really fascinated me was the detailed descriptions of how the significance of ice cores became obvious, the progress of the technology for their extraction, the implications of the enormous weight of the ice on the ground in Greenland, and the integration of land and air based methods of improving our understanding of exactly what goes on with all that ice. Most importantly, the all too scary prospect of what could happen to low-lying cities, and even countries, if major ice sheets in Greenland or Antarctica break off.
That information is all very well presented, and if it interests you, you can skip the first part of the book without missing anything. show less
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