A friend recently turned me onto the book, “The Idea Factory” by Jon Gertner. It is a fascinated history of Bell Labs. As the Justice Department begins its anti-trust investigation of Google, it seems especially timely.
From its beginning, Bell Labs has been one of the most influential R&D organizations in the world. So many breakthroughs — from the transistor, MOSFET, fiber optics, photovoltaics, cellular technology and UNIX, to information theory itself — were created by the extraordinary teams that worked there.
Bell Labs used proceeds from AT&Ts phone network monopoly to pioneer advanced research that led to core innovations we take for granted today. Many of these ideas began as pure research projects, long before the technologies were fully understood, much less, reduced to practice.
Bell himself imagined using light for voice transmission in 1880, decades before the idea could be empirically demonstrated and 70 years before fiber optics started to become an essential part of modern networks. The cascading sequence of innovations that were driven by the need to improve voice and data transmission is amazing.