The Idea Factory Bell Lbs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner
Nearly one hundred
and fifty years after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, in
1947, at Bell Laboratories, the transistor was invented and humankind
would never be the same. As this technological revolution unfolded
innovative advances progressed at exponential speed. Now
micro-miniaturization coupled with ingenious applications have become
expected.
I loved the book’s
delivery of this ongoing revolutionary story taking place in our
lifetimes. I was born before the transistor and the days of
television when radio tubes powered our communications. Today's
applied innovations are miraculous!
Excerpts from The Idea Factory
“Inventions are a
valuable part, but invention is not to be scheduled nor coerced.”
The point of this kind of experimentation was to provide a free
environment for “The operation of genius.” His point was that
genius would undoubtedly improve the company’s operations just as
ordinary engineering could. But genius was not predictable. You had
to give it room to assert itself.
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.”
The design for the
switching station had taken two thousand “man-years” of work to
create and used tens of thousands of transistors. Its complexity
dwarfed that of other previous Bell Labs undertakings such as the
transatlantic undersea cable.
The “switching
art,” as it was known at Bell Labs, was suitably captured by a
specialized technical jargon describing relays, registers,
translators, markers, and so forth and a bevy of convoluted,
mind-twisting flow charts. Those who had mastered the switching art
were members of a technological priesthood.
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