Excerpts and Thoughts from Jon Gertner’s The Idea Factory
I recently finished The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner and I wanted to make a note of some of my favorite excerpts. This is mostly for my own organizational purposes, but perhaps others will find these quotes thought provoking, as well. All page references are to the epub version of the book.
“An industrial lab, he said, ‘is merely an organization of intelligent men, presumably of creative capacity, specially trained in a knowledge of the things and methods of science, and provided with the facilities and wherewithal to study and develop the particular industry with which they are associated.’ In short, he added, modern industrial research was meant to apply science to the ‘common affairs’ of everyday life. ‘It is an instrument capable of avoiding many of the mistakes of a blind cut-and-try experimentation. It is likewise an instrument which can bring to bear an aggregate of creative force on any particular problem which is infinitely greater than any force which can be conceived of as residing in the intellectual capacity of an individual.” – loc 554. Referencing a speech Bell Labs head Frank Jewett’s gave on the purpose of industrial research.
“The scientists and engineers at Bell Labs inhabited what one researcher there would aptly describe, much later, as ‘a problem-rich environment.’” – This very briefly summarizes the work environments that I myself hope to be a part of. AT&T began with a goal along the lines of “allow humans to communicate no matter the circumstance.” To achieve this (with the telephone, at least), researchers at the Bell Labs had to invent and improve almost every aspect of AT&T’s operations. And so, while their end goal was exceedingly hard to accomplish, the Bell Labs environment allowed scientists to doggedly pursue it.
“Progress, in both technology and business, depended on new materials, and new materials were scattered about the earth in confusion.” – Materials science is poetry. The tools for progress are all around us, if only we are clear-eyed and quick-witted enough to assemble them.
“Who is in a better position than the originator to recognize and profit from further advances?” – Tech companies like Apple jealously guard their patents and research. By restricting access to state-of-the-art technology, corporations have effectively caused tech stagnation. For most of the 20th century, AT&T turned massive profits even while cheaply licensing Bell Labs products.
“If an idea begat a discovery, and if a discovery began an invention, then an innovation defined the lengthy and wholesale transformation of an idea into a technological product (or process) meant for widespread practical use.” – I find myself using the word “innovation” interchangeable with the word “invention,” but this excerpt demarcates the boundaries of both words. And by separating the notions in my own mind, I have a better idea of which side of the fence I want to invest my time and energy.
“His paper demonstrated that designing logic circuits for a computer could be an efficient mathematical endeavor rather than a painstaking art.” – Loc 1983
“’I am not at all sure that that sort of work would appeal to me,’ he had worried to Bush, “for there is bound to be some restraint in an industrial organization as to the type of research pursued.’” – loc 2015
“One shouldn’t necessarily think of information in terms of meaning. Rather, one might think of it in terms of its ability to resolve uncertainty. Information provided a recipient with something that was not previously known, was not predictable, was not redundant.” – loc 2167.
“With Shannon’s startling ideas on information, it was one of the rare moments in history, an academic would later point out, ‘where somebody founded a field, stated all the major results, and proved most of them all pretty much at once.’ Eventually, mathematicians would debate not whether Shannon was ahead of his contemporaries. They would debate whether he was twenty, thirty or fifty years ahead.” – loc 2292.
Each of the above quotations are related to the work of Claude Shannon, a brilliant mathematician employed by the Bell Labs in the mid-twentieth century. Shannon came up with the field of Information Theory, the theoretical framework behind how all networks are built. I want to read more about Shannon and his work. What allowed him to make singularly massive gains in mathematics?
“Bell Labs helped maintain and improve that [telephone] system, he [Mervin Kelly] said, by creating an organization that could be divided into three groups. The first group was research, where scientists and engineers provided “the reservoir of completely new knowledge, principles, materials, methods an art.” The second group was in systems engineering, a discipline started by the Labs, where engineers kept one eye on the reservoir of new knowledge and another on the existing phone system and analyzed how to integrate the two. In other words, the systems engineers considered whether new applications were possible, plausible, necessary, and economical. That’s when the third group came in. These were the engineers who developed and designed new devices, switches, and transmissions systems.” – loc 2535. I like how Kelly sees technological progress as the result of a well-mapped process. The Lab’s didn’t operate abstractly – they followed a system, themselves. And this quotation, again, will help me articulate which aspects of discovery, development, and manufacture I find to be most captivating.
“Working in an environment of applied science, as one Bell Labs researcher noted years later, ‘doesn’t destroy a kernel of genius – it focuses the mind.’” – loc 2608. The Idea Factory sells the benefits of working in industrial research. I want to find information from academics and industrial scientists that might give me a more balanced opinion.
“’None of the inventions were made specifically for space purposes,” the New York Times pointed out. On the other hand, only all of them together allowed for the deployment of an active space satellite.” – loc 3729. What products and technologies are ripe for conception, just waiting for their constituent ideas to be assembled by some intrepid inventor? Conversely, what inventions sit idle until their ideas can be ushered into existence?
“Shockley and Pierce used Bell Labs’ resources to create ‘a new kind of science – one that was `deep` but at the same time closely coupled with human affairs.’” – loc 4071. Technology gets value from its ability to improve people’s lives, and I think we’ve lost sight of that in this era of late capitalism. Rather than push for game-changing products, modern companies make their money by selling incrementally improved and gimmicky products. My goal is to blend my scientific knowledge with my understanding of American society.
“It was a ‘wondrous coincidence,’ as Bill Baker described it, ‘that all of human knowledge and experience can be completely and accurately expressed in binary digital terms.’” – loc 4210. Can this possibly be true? Will we ultimately be able to represent consciousness, for example, in bits? I need to read up on the philosophical and mathematical underpinnings of this statement.
“Ring and Young hadn’t used the word ‘cellular’ in their presentation. Nevertheless what they outlined – in the honeycomb of hexagons and repeating frequencies – was exactly that. Those hexagons were cells.” – loc 4748. Reading about the invention of the mobile telephone network served as a reminder of just how little I know about the system. This note mostly exists as a reminder to read more on how it all works.
“Some technology journalists, notably the writer Nicholas Carr, have asked recently whether an increasing reliance on instant communications and Internet data is eroding our need, or ability, to think deeply. ‘What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,’ Carr writes. ‘My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.’” – loc 5761. I certainly have a hard time concentrating on the internet, but I am working to improve my focus. I’m curious if internet-related concentration issues on a species-wide scale are causing detriment to humanity (in any sort of measurable way, at least).
“New gadgets or new technologies are important only when they really make good new things possible or good old things cheaper or better.” – John Pierce on the value of tech. A restatement of above thoughts.
“It’s the interaction between fundamental science and applied science, and the interface between many disciplines, that creates new ideas.” – scientist Herwig Kogelnik. This notion has been on my mind a lot recently. I have formal training in computer science, but my skills are only truly useful when they can be applied to problems outside of my knowledge-base. In the same way that the Murray Hill complex was arranged to facilitate exchange across scientific disciplines, I want to systemize idea pollination for myself, outside of a formal corporate or university organization.
“The expectation that, say, Google or Apple could behave like Bell Labs – that such companies could invest heavily in basic or applied research and then sprinkle the results freely around California – seems misplaced, if not naïve. Such companies don’t exist as part of a highly regulated national public trust. They exist as part of our international capital markets. They are superb at producing a specific and limited range of technology products. And at the end of the day, new scientific knowledge matters far less to them than the demands – for leadership, growth and profits – of their customers, employees, and shareholders.” – loc 5966. Google is a monopoly, though not very highly regulated. They have the profit margins to conduct basic research on the same scale, and for the public benefit, as Bell Labs. How can they be incentivized to do this? What is the cost of not doing so, both for them and for our society?
“By early indications, too, the results at Janelia and Howard Hughes outshine the results of academics working within the existing structure for federally financed medical research.” – loc 5979. Note to read more about this organization.
“It seems clear that a great, if not the greatest, present day need is the development of some new source of cheap utilizable energy.” – loc 6005. Agreed. It also offers the clearest opportunity for wealth creation on a monopoly (i.e. Rockefeller, or Zuckerberg) scale.