Jon Gertner’s The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation is tech reverie, business book, political thriller and a superbly researched history into how some of mankind’s most profound technical innovations (semiconductors and the transistor, solar panels, lasers, communications satellites, cellular mobile and Unix…) developed from fundamental ideas into production and into normality.
It is an exhilarating and – to this engineer, at least – humbling read with an appealingly comfortable feel to it of the book almost having written itself.
A history of people, biography of a formula
The narrative follows the giants of Bell Labs from their induction into AT&T to their passing: insightful Claude Shannon and incisive William Shockley, the genial instigator John Pierce, the politically adept scientist Bill Baker and a cast of thousands working within the innovative innovation structure constructed by the angular visionary Mervin Kelly.
Kelly’s formula is the leitmotif running alongside those histories. Both culturally and architecturally, it was about ensuring happenstance. Scientists were meant to be unable to avoid engineers, chemists were meant to bump into physicists and the men who “wrote the book” to interact with those who “read it.” It was a theory of ivory corridors and canteens rather than towers.
Hearteningly for small-fry like me, those who shared lunch, labs and projects with the Giants are also called out by Gertner for their contributions as lab technicians, metallurgists, engineers, project managers, chemists or physicists. There is always that sense of perspective that the products initiated by the Shockleys and Shannons of the Bell Labs world really needed input from each and every member to take them to production.
He didn’t mention the cooks, though.
The invisible enthusiast
Jon Gertner is a journalist who has written for the New York Times and – less promisingly, perhaps – is editor-at-large at Fast Company*. This is his first book, up to now his largest undertaking by far. He spent five years building up this story - and it doesn’t show.
Not once did I feel the weight of his research, nor the burden of history, whilst reading The Idea Factory: the research and painstaking editing behind it is transparent. Gertner writes precisely yet lively, reflecting perhaps both the industrial-academic environment he describes and the local aspect of his endeavour: he grew up near the slightly mysterious, legendary Bell Labs headquarters at Murray Hill and his need to write this story comes across as being personal. Thankfully he found the energy and made the time to write it.
A monolith of innovation
AT&T enjoyed and, in pushing the boundaries of legislation, abused its monopoly position to maintain its role as “The System”. Those researchers and developers thrived within a massively integrated firm with the manufacturing might of Western Electric (which lovingly crushed or bought up many competitors in the past), the financial momentum of the phone operator (equally crushing), and the laboratories that drove the organisation to higher margins as well as higher callings (in not just the telephone sense…)
The calling to innovation as a justification of monopoly is the fascinating twist on our perception of this otherwise shimmering paragon of development. Teams that innovate need to get grubby, they need to ensure they have the best people and should “Never underestimate the importance of money.”
Without mass production, sales and distribution, no product may be considered to be innovative – so all of those tedious tasks surround, and can occasionally swamp, a product as it moves onwards to the market.
Notational Philosophy
The story behind the invention and development of the transistor would be worth the price of entry all by itself. But Gertner embellishes it with such lovely, pertinent little details that the reader can find thoughts spinning off in unexpected directions. One gem is the rigorously maintained notebooks used at Bell Labs. Each team member was required to write down thoughts and events relating to a particular case (or project, as we would call them now). Walter Brattain’s notebook, number 18194, relating to his work on semiconductors (case 38139) continued on page 40, after 4 years of interruption through the Second World War, with: “The war is over.”
There are other notational quotes in the book: from Morry Tanenbaum, as he closed in on discovering how best to manufacture layers of p-type and n-type silicone for the transistor: “will try direct approach…” (he melted an aluminium wire through the top layer) “This looks like the transistor we’ve been waiting for.”
These notebooks are - handwriting permitting - legible now, and are exceedingly well archived and organised. Will we be able to say the same of our loosely-managed files and cloudy projects in another sixty years? On the other hand – how searchable are those notebooks? Who can extract the knowledge that they contain, as well as the narrative, without knowing them intimately?
John Pierce – my new role model?
Although less well known (to me, at least) than the “transistor guys”, I felt an immediate affinity to one character that was totally new to me, John Pierce, of Telstar Satellite fame. “An instigator is different from a genius, but just as uncommon,” writes Gertner. “It was probably accurate to say that Pierce had too many ideas to actually pursue on his own, and too many interests… to focus on any single pursuit.”
Ah, I know this feeling only too well.
“’I tried to get other people to do things, I’m lazy,’ Pierce once told an interviewer. ‘Do you think this has helped your career?’ the interviewer asked. ‘Well, it was my career,’ Pierce replied.”
Pierce was a catalyst within Kelly’s formula of deliberate entanglement – wandering into offices with a bit of an idea and “just” starting things. It’s something that really should be encouraged, and perhaps remodelled in the virtual world, given how few offices are actually connected back in the real, normal world.
Moving on (looking wistfully back)
The book ends naturally with the passing of the golden generation and the fading into normality that is more poignant than any dramatic burn-out and crash. Gertner offers his thoughts on the meaning and lessons to be extracted for today’s Googles and Microsofts, for the myriad of startups gunning for their lunch – and for mere mortals like me.
Firstly, he considers whether swapping a factory of ideas (Bell Labs) for a geography of ideas (e.g. Silicon Valley) can match the muscle provided by monopoly. It’s close, perhaps, but, for all the advances that Silicon Valley has given us, in comparison with Bell Lab’s output, it has been largely incremental.
Secondly, he wonders if there is a way of escaping monopoly and government involvement in basic research at all. Here, he points out that “77 of the 88 U. S. entities that produced significant innovations were beneficiaries of federal funding.”
The concept of government involvement in anything brings with it the perception of incompetence, but Gertner summarises research into research with this:
“Creative environments that foster a rich exchange of ideas are far more important in eliciting important new insights than are the forces of competition."
White shirts and ties - the key to innovation?
Amidst all the deeply scientific and creative thinking going on at Bell labs during the “wonder years”, one constant appears to have underscored the whole process – everybody wore white shirts, and ties. Some eccentrics were known to go sockless in their shoes, but the fundamental aspect of Bell labs appears to have been the shirts.
My wardrobe consists of perhaps three white shirts, one of which is my wing-collar concert shirt for orchestra: it hardly brimming with scientific rigour.
So, when knocking on other peoples’ doors we should clearly be wearing crisp white shirts.
Hmm… a hint of sartorial determinism there? Perhaps Kelly has a better take on innovation:
“It’s the interaction between fundamental science and applied science, and the interface between many disciplines, that creates new ideas…”
This book is simply worth reading, and is worth reading again. So once you’ve got it, read it and lent it out, make sure you get it back…!
*(5 amazing lists on the habits of 8 of the most productive ’10 of’ list writers in business today, to click you cleverer” could be a typical Fast Company headline, even if that’s only four lists)
