The Idea Factory

Gertner writes the history of Bell Labs, which produced the transistor, the laser, information theory, the solar cell, the communications satellite, the Unix operating system and the C programming language, among a great deal else, and asks what conditions produced that output.

The institutional conditions he identifies include funding from a regulated monopoly, which insulated research from quarterly returns and gave researchers decades rather than years; the physical arrangement of the Murray Hill building, with long corridors that forced people from different disciplines to encounter each other; the deliberate mixing of theoretical physicists, experimentalists, chemists, metallurgists and engineers on the same problems; the freedom given to researchers to pursue their own directions combined with a requirement that the work connect eventually to communications; and management by people who had done the research themselves, particularly Mervin Kelly.

The biographical material covers Kelly, Shockley, Bardeen, Brattain, Claude Shannon, John Pierce and William Baker, and Gertner is candid about Shockley's conduct and about the disputes over credit. His analytical conclusion is that the conditions were specific to a regulated monopoly with a guaranteed revenue base and an obligation to serve, and that they cannot be reproduced by a company facing competitive pressure. The antitrust consent decree that required Bell to license its patents freely also meant the transistor was made available to the whole industry.

Gertner is a journalist and the technical explanations are at a general level. The book is admiring and does not seriously examine what the monopoly cost consumers during the period. The institutional analysis is the reason to read it.