Journalist Jon Gertner has provided a meticulously detailed look at research in one of the world's best incubators of invention in his book The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (2012).
Bell Labs was set up in the 1920s as the research and development wing of AT&T. While a lot of routine development was carried out at Bell Labs to make telephony convenient and affordable, it was also a hub that catalyzed research that ushered in the electronic age.
A lot of basic research was done at Bell Labs that translated later into useful technology. C. J. Davisson (along with G P Thompson) demonstrated that electrons have wavelike properties which earned him a share of the Nobel Prize in 1937.
Jack Scaff and Russel Ohl worked with silicon in the late 1930s and showed that a small amount of impurities ("dopants") could drastically change the electrical properties of silicon. This led to the development of p- and n-type semiconductors and eventually to the invention of the transistor by Walter Brattain, John Bardeen and William Shockley in 1947 (for which they shared a Nobel Prize). The silicon solar cell was first created in the early 1950s at Bell Labs by Gerald Pearson, Daryl Chapin and Cal Fuller.
Bell Labs contributed extensively to the war effort during World War II. Two mind-blowing inventions that emerged out of the US during the war were the atomic bomb and radar. While the atomic bomb was developed in secrecy at Los Alamos, Bell Labs played an important role in the development of the radar technology. Gertner writes:
"Scientists who worked on the radar often quipped that radar won the war, whereas the atomic bomb merely ended it. This was not a minority view. The complexity of the military's radar project ultimately rivaled that of the Manhattan Project, but with several exceptions. Notably, radar was a far larger investment on the part of the U.S. government, probably amounting to $3 billion as contrasted with $2 billion for the atomic bomb. In addition, radar wasn't a single kind of device but multiple devices...employing a similar technology that could be used on the ground, on water or in air. Perhaps most important, radar was both an offensive and a defensive weapon. It could be used to spot enemy aircraft, guide gunfire and bombs toward a target, identify enemy submarines, and land a plane at night or in thick fog."
The foundations of information theory were laid down by a Bell Labs pioneer, the much acclaimed Claude Shannon. Shannon envisioned the digital age in the 1940s when everyone was busy focusing on analog machines. Shannon not only founded the field but also stated all the major results in the field. As Gertner puts it: "Eventually mathematicians would debate not whether Shannon was ahead of his contemporaries. They would debate whether he was twenty, or thirty, or fifty years ahead."
While Shannon was a "lone hero" figure at Bell Labs, most of the results were a result of team work. For instance John Pierce (along with Rudi Kompfner at Oxford) and Bill Jakes formed a team to bring about the satellite revolution in telecommunications. The passive satellite Echo and the active satellite Telstar were products of collaboration between Bell Labs and NASA.
Satellite communication could not have been possible without a convergence of technologies: the transistor, the solar cell, and also the laser which was conceived at Bell Labs. Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow laid the foundations of the field of lasers (Townes had previously developed the maser). In 1960 a team at Bell Labs showed that lasers could be used to carry a telephone signal.
While Gertner does not cover this in detail, Bell Labs scientists were also responsible for the development of Unix, C and C++ and the establishment of frequency domain analysis (think Harry Nyquist and Hendrick Bode) which every control theorist is familiar with.
While Bell Labs had a string of successes, it also had some significant misses such as the IC chip (invented by Robert Noyce of Fairchild and Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments), photolithography, and fiber optics (for which Charles Kao received a Nobel Prize). Gertner states that most of these misses were errors of perception (of not visualizing the future far ahead) rather than errors of judgment.
In 1984, the AT&T monolith was split up due to charges of antitrust violation. Bell Labs became a corporate industrial research organization. Lacking funds from its parent organization, its glory started fading slowly.
To be sure, there were some bright spots: Steven Chu discovered a way to "trap" and study atoms at freezing temperatures by means of laser beams. The fractional quantum Hall effect was discovered at Bell Labs in the 1980s (Both groups eventually received the Nobel Prize). However, Bell Labs was no longer at the forefront of reshaping America's technology and culture. Many Bell Labs employees moved to Google, Apple, Microsoft or to academia.
A brilliant book, The Idea Factory brings alive the beginning and progress of the digital era and the technological flood unleashed by Bell Labs personnel throughout the world.
Bell Labs was set up in the 1920s as the research and development wing of AT&T. While a lot of routine development was carried out at Bell Labs to make telephony convenient and affordable, it was also a hub that catalyzed research that ushered in the electronic age.
A lot of basic research was done at Bell Labs that translated later into useful technology. C. J. Davisson (along with G P Thompson) demonstrated that electrons have wavelike properties which earned him a share of the Nobel Prize in 1937.
Jack Scaff and Russel Ohl worked with silicon in the late 1930s and showed that a small amount of impurities ("dopants") could drastically change the electrical properties of silicon. This led to the development of p- and n-type semiconductors and eventually to the invention of the transistor by Walter Brattain, John Bardeen and William Shockley in 1947 (for which they shared a Nobel Prize). The silicon solar cell was first created in the early 1950s at Bell Labs by Gerald Pearson, Daryl Chapin and Cal Fuller.
Bell Labs contributed extensively to the war effort during World War II. Two mind-blowing inventions that emerged out of the US during the war were the atomic bomb and radar. While the atomic bomb was developed in secrecy at Los Alamos, Bell Labs played an important role in the development of the radar technology. Gertner writes:
"Scientists who worked on the radar often quipped that radar won the war, whereas the atomic bomb merely ended it. This was not a minority view. The complexity of the military's radar project ultimately rivaled that of the Manhattan Project, but with several exceptions. Notably, radar was a far larger investment on the part of the U.S. government, probably amounting to $3 billion as contrasted with $2 billion for the atomic bomb. In addition, radar wasn't a single kind of device but multiple devices...employing a similar technology that could be used on the ground, on water or in air. Perhaps most important, radar was both an offensive and a defensive weapon. It could be used to spot enemy aircraft, guide gunfire and bombs toward a target, identify enemy submarines, and land a plane at night or in thick fog."
The foundations of information theory were laid down by a Bell Labs pioneer, the much acclaimed Claude Shannon. Shannon envisioned the digital age in the 1940s when everyone was busy focusing on analog machines. Shannon not only founded the field but also stated all the major results in the field. As Gertner puts it: "Eventually mathematicians would debate not whether Shannon was ahead of his contemporaries. They would debate whether he was twenty, or thirty, or fifty years ahead."
While Shannon was a "lone hero" figure at Bell Labs, most of the results were a result of team work. For instance John Pierce (along with Rudi Kompfner at Oxford) and Bill Jakes formed a team to bring about the satellite revolution in telecommunications. The passive satellite Echo and the active satellite Telstar were products of collaboration between Bell Labs and NASA.
Satellite communication could not have been possible without a convergence of technologies: the transistor, the solar cell, and also the laser which was conceived at Bell Labs. Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow laid the foundations of the field of lasers (Townes had previously developed the maser). In 1960 a team at Bell Labs showed that lasers could be used to carry a telephone signal.
While Gertner does not cover this in detail, Bell Labs scientists were also responsible for the development of Unix, C and C++ and the establishment of frequency domain analysis (think Harry Nyquist and Hendrick Bode) which every control theorist is familiar with.
While Bell Labs had a string of successes, it also had some significant misses such as the IC chip (invented by Robert Noyce of Fairchild and Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments), photolithography, and fiber optics (for which Charles Kao received a Nobel Prize). Gertner states that most of these misses were errors of perception (of not visualizing the future far ahead) rather than errors of judgment.
In 1984, the AT&T monolith was split up due to charges of antitrust violation. Bell Labs became a corporate industrial research organization. Lacking funds from its parent organization, its glory started fading slowly.
To be sure, there were some bright spots: Steven Chu discovered a way to "trap" and study atoms at freezing temperatures by means of laser beams. The fractional quantum Hall effect was discovered at Bell Labs in the 1980s (Both groups eventually received the Nobel Prize). However, Bell Labs was no longer at the forefront of reshaping America's technology and culture. Many Bell Labs employees moved to Google, Apple, Microsoft or to academia.
A brilliant book, The Idea Factory brings alive the beginning and progress of the digital era and the technological flood unleashed by Bell Labs personnel throughout the world.
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