Reddit reviews The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

I think this is true, but the causality may be backwards. If you're a brilliant scientist with the ability to obtain venture financing and make a killing off your ideas, why would you trade that for a salaried position with very little upside?

I recently enjoyed The Idea Factory, a (popular) history of Bell Labs.

One of the striking contrasts with today's start-up culture is that it was taken for granted that Bell Labs employees would sign over rights to any work done at the Labs. This was the custom for other large corporate R&D departments as well. At the time, it might have been a good trade for the researcher - Bell Labs was a more lucrative post than a university, and there wasn't anyone willing to front you the equivalent of a few million to build an industrial research lab. Today, it's practically trivial for an inventor to raise a few million dollars for development.

The rise of the cell phone is what has led to potato quality calls - calls are all essentially data on cellular, and since everyone shares the airwaves, there is a large incentive to compress this data and make it as small as possible, leading to the poor quality calls.

The Atlantic had an article awhile back speculating this is one reason for the great decline in phone calls. This article also explains the problem of call quality.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/08/why-people-hate-making-phone-calls/401114/

Jon Gertner's book "The Idea Factory" documents AT&T's Bell Labs and the amazing technologies they developed during the 20th century. Fabulous book.

https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-Great-American-Innovation/dp/0143122797

You might like these pictures of the (an?) original, taken at (Nokia) Bell Labs. More dust. https://imgur.com/a/wPYNY3z


We owe so much to them (Cell phones, Satellites, C, Unix, etc etc). For those interested,this is a nice book on the topic:
https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-Great-American-Innovation/dp/0143122797

The Carterfone was acoustically coupled to the phone, not electrically. This is why early modems required you to put the phone in a special cradle rather than just plug into it.

While the carterfone ruling was indeed a landmark, it was a regulatory revision in the 70s that led to the development of the RJ11 jack, and ultimately the breakup of the Bell system in the late 80s that led to private phone ownership being viable

If you want to know more, here are some good books on the phone system:

• Exploding the Phone
  
• The Idea factory

The Idea Factory is an excellent history of Bell Labs.

>Companies that make robots and 3d printers are not massively valued on the stock market despite the very low long term interest rates right now.

My sense is that the private sector is typically not very good about investing in the development of technologies that aren't likely to pay off in the fairly near-term future, that's why basic research, and many really novel technologies like the internet, are often government-funded in their early stages. There are some exceptions like AT&T's historical Bell Labs but that kind of thing seems rare enough to be more like an "exception that proves the rule"--see this article which notes "Companies have moved away, however, from the Bell Labs and Xerox PARC model that afforded research scientists in the private sector more time (and funding) to focus on research that may not have direct application, at least in the short term."

As a matter of history, do you think it's typically true that the companies most involved in technologies that end up having massive economic effects, like the personal computer, are massively valued more than say 10 years before their impact becomes obvious? (leaving out examples of companies involved in major new technologies that were already very profitable for other reasons before the new technology was developed, like IBM long before the personal computer)

For anyone interested in the technical history of how we got here, The Idea Factory (Amazon Smile link) is a really fascinating read. It details the major players within Bell Labs (the research division, not business or development) from the 30s up until the 90s/today. While I'm sure the antitrust suit was beneficial for the average person, by the end of the book I was really rooting for Bell Labs to keep the guaranteed funding ensured by the monopoly.

The people who worked in this lab were responsible for the vacuum tube, transistor, solar panel, laser, satellites, cellular phones... the research for all of those breakthroughs was done in a single lab, funded by the monopoly. A huge part of why the modern world as we know it today exists is because of the monopoly that was dismantled in the 80s.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Idea-Factory-American-Innovation/dp/0143122797

Great book that covers some of the key players at Bell labs. Its certainly not a thorough technical history reference but I thought he did a nice job of laying out the relationships of the engineers, the inventions, and motivating factors.

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

Very good book if you are interested in Bell Labs. He really pioneered the idea of having engineers, scientists, and inventors working together. Which was not common at the time. If they needed a specialist in an area they brought one in.

The development of fiber optic cables is incredible. I only know the very, very basics, from [this fantastic book](http://www.amazon.com/The-Idea-Factory-American-Innovation/dp/0143122797 "really amazing for so many reasons") which I can't recommend enough. It shows the pioneering of a ton of the most important current technologies (tubes, telephones, microwaves, satellites, cell phones, fiber optics, cavitrons and a bunch more), and the revolutionary environments and cultures that fostered that growth. Corning (of course) made the fiber.

Cables in general were amazing. We think of plastic as so cheap as to practically cost nothing, but back then (IIRC, can't find my book D:) the insulation was one of the most expensive parts as it was made from natural latex from the gutta-percha tree (god I wish I could find the book). As you can imagine it took a ton of work to make a machine to produce cables that were kilometers long. The first real transatlantic cable was laid in 1955 and working up to that required a huge amount of research and iteration. It was fundamentally made possible by polyethylene. The first test cables just randomly started turning into swiss cheese; turns out shipworms don't give a damn about what they eat. Steel jackets. Then the cables just started snapping. It's pretty damn hard to figure out why an underwater cable three miles long is snapping when you don't have cameras, underwater radio, or scuba... turns out that sharks sense and apparently have an innate hatred of electricity (jk) and attacked the cables. Copper shield, steel cable reinforcement, thicker cables. Works pretty good. Minimizing crosstalk and such took some effort. Then microwaves start replacing cables on land- can't do microwaves underwater. Everybody wants to upgrade the TAT, but its actually pretty fucking tricky making a cable out of a bit of glass 3600 kilometers long and a fraction of a millimeter wide.

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

I would like to hear it.

The Idea Factory was a good read.

https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-Great-American-Innovation/dp/0143122797

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This book on Bell Labs was fascinating.

I was just reading about this! The Idea Factory is a great book that tells the story of Bell Labs.