the idea factory. bell labs and the great age of american innovation-jon gertner

[...]... basic and applied research As Arnold explained, his department would include the fields of physical and organic chemistry, of metallurgy, of magnetism, Y THE TIME ELLY ARRIVED 5 6 7 8 9 of electrical conduction, of radiation, of electronics, of acoustics, of phonetics, of optics, of mathematics, of mechanics, and even of physiology, of psychology, and of meteorology.” From the start, Jewett and Arnold... the mysteries of science, remained an integral part of the phone business The Labs management made an effort to isolate its scientists from the gritty day-to-day political concerns of the business But the managers themselves had to keep track of how the technology and politics and finances of their endeavor meshed together Indeed, they could never forget it As long as the business remained robust and. .. linemen bet with their lives on the integrity of the leather harnesses that kept them tethered at great heights—so Labs technicians established strength and standards for the two-inch leather belts (limiting the content of Epsom salts, glucose, free acid, ash and total water-soluble materials”) and improving the metal rivets and parts Millions of soldered joints held the system together—so Labs engineers... grease and oil from the surface of the glass and wires The faintest trace of impurities raised the risk of failure Finally it was time for a worker to arrange the functional parts of the vacuum tube the parts that would amplify phone signals—around the glass core and wires These parts were the cathode, grid, and anode It had taken the Bell scientists years to figure out, in Edisonian, trial -and- error... precise point of origin At the start, forces that precede an invention merely begin to align, often imperceptibly, as a group of people and ideas converge, until over the course of months or years (or decades) they gain clarity and momentum and the help of additional ideas and actors Luck seems to matter, and so does timing, for it tends to be the case that the right answers, the right people, the right... Out of habit, the men addressed one another by their last names According to Brattain, it was always Shockley and Woolridge—never Bill and Dean, and never Dr Shockley and Dr Woolridge As the study group wound down for the evening, the men would often make their way over to Brattain’s Greenwich Village apartment for a drink By then it was 8 or 9 p.m.—time for dinner at a restaurant in the Village and then... at a time, and with deep conviction—about the virtues of the Bell System and the scientific research it paid for at his laboratory The difficulty was to reconcile his views with Danielian’s Perhaps the only way to do so was to accept that there was no reconciliation The truths about the Bell System, and in turn Bell Labs, were not so much mutually exclusive as simultaneous The overseers of the phone... and production To explain the process, Kelly used the example of the repeater tube known as the 101-D Its production began with a glass pipe about the size of a man’s pinkie The pipe was heated and rotated on a machine so that its bottom opening could then be flared out A different machine would take the top opening of the pipe, insert four long wires, and then heat the glass to seal the wires so they... functioning of tens of thousands of mechanical and electronic elements, all of them designed and developed by Bell Labs, and all of them manufactured by Western Electric What’s more, almost every part of the system was designed and built to stay in service for forty years That entailed a litany of durability tests at the West Street plant on even the most trifling of system components Labs engineers invented... it off into a semiautonomous company They chose the name Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc Some of their reasoning remains obscure A short notice about the new labs in the New York Times noted that the new company was said to [mean] a greater concentration upon the experimental phases of the telephone industry.” The spin-off, in other words, was justified by the notion that scientific research at Bell . w1 h0" alt="" The Idea Factory The Idea Factory Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation JON GERTNER THE PENGUIN PRESS New York 2012 THE PENGUIN PRESS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin. Data Gernter, Jon. The idea factory : the Bell Labs and the great age of American innovation / Jon Gernter. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-101-56108-9 1. Bell Telephone. presidents of the Labs, and served as stewards during the institution’s golden age. All these men knew one another, and some were extremely close. With the exception of Mervin Kelly, the eldest of the