Favorite Quotes from The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner

“Murray Hill was put in a similar context: A move to the suburbs would allow the physics, chemistry and acoustics staff to conduct research in a location unaffected by the dirt, noise, vibrations, and general disturbances of New York City.” (p. 76)

“All written and spoken exchanges, to some degree, depend on code—the symbolic letters on the page, or the sounds of consonants and vowels that are transmitted (encoded) by our voices and received (decoded) by out ears and minds. With each passing decade, modern technology”has tended to push everyday written and spoken exchange ever deeper into the realm of ciphers, symbols, and electronically enhanced puzzles of representation.” (p 125)

“He was also intrigued by the fact that the phone system was build to be efficient and tremendously broad in its sweep but was not build to be efficient and tremendously broad in its sweep but was not built to think in depth. In connecting callers, it did innumerable simple tasks over and over again. But he knew that other machines could be built for a contrary purpose, to be deep rather than broad, and he began thinking about how to do so.” (p.136)

“In London, Kelly seems to be saying that Bell Labs’ experience over the past few years demonstrated that the process of innovation could now be professionally fostered and managed with a large degree of success—and even, perhaps with predeicability. Industrial science was now working on a scale, and embracing a complexity, that Edison could never have imagined. Please listen, Kelly was telling the Europeans. He had a formula.” (p. 152)

“Or to put it another way, the solution to a technological problem invariably created other problems that needed solutions. So making something truly new seemed to ensure that you would be making something else truly new before too long. The only trouble was, this rule suggested that your competitors—that is, if you weren’t a regulated monopoly like the American Telephone and Telegraph company, and you actually had competitors could do the same.” (p. 155)

“Eugene O’Neill, Telstar’s project engineer, would recall, noting that the tight deadlines and financial pressures were a departure for Bell engineers accustomed to working on a more orderly schedule and with a focus on quality and durability rather than speed.” (p. 221)

“He still had plenty to do. All during his work on satellites, for instance, Pierce had become more and more involved with electronic computer-generated music. Along with his colleague Max Mathews, Pierce and some Labs researches had compiled an album of computer-programmed music, released by Decca Records, that they’d created on a primitive IBM 7090 computer. The music was intriguing and nearly unlistenable—beeps and blips, mainly, interspersed with shards of classical melodies and eccentric diversions. The Labs scientists called it Music from Mathematicians. Pierce sent unsolicited copies of the record, along with an enthusiastic cover letter, to the composers Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland.” (p. 225)

“When the AT&T market researchers asked Picturephone users whether it was important to see the person they were speaking to during a conversation, a vast majority said it was either ‘very important’ or ‘important.’ To phone company executives, this must have been deeply encouraging. Apparently the market researchers never asked users teir opinion about whether it was important, or even pleasurable, that the person they were speaking with could see them, too.” (p. 231)

“Labs engineers has looked beyond the current waveguide and the millimeter waves it carried to even shorter infared and visible light waves/ These waves are so tiny they must be measured in arcane angstroms. By 1960, the Bell engineers believed that within a few decades it might be possible to send data over such wavelengths—in other words, to send data through light itself. If they could figure out how to do that, they system would be able to transmit an unimaginably huge amount of information.” (p. 236)

“One occurred when several computer scientists at Murray Hill got together to write a revolutionary computer operation system they called Unix, which was written in a new computer language called C. Eventually, these advances would form the backbone of modern computing—the model for the Google Android and Apple Macintosh and iPhone operating systems, for example, and the programing language for every Microsoft Windows device.” (p. 261)

“The waveguide, for instance, might be considered a mistake of perception. It was an instance where a technology of legitimate promise is eclipsed by a breakthrough elsewhere—in another corportate department, at another company, at a university, wherever—that solves a particular problem better. It was perhaps understandable, moreover, that a breakthrough in the creation of pure glass fibers wouldn’t come from an organization such as Bell Labs, where materials scientists were a were experts on the behaviors of metals, polymers and semiconductor crystals. Rather, it would come from a company like Corning, with over a century of expertise in glass and ceramics.” (p. 262)

“Many years later, a computer engineer named Robert Metcalfe would surmise that the value of a networked device increases dramatically as the number of people using the network grows. The larger the network, in other words, the higher the value of a device on that network to each user. This formulation—sometimes known as Metcalfe’s law—can help explain the immense appeal of the telephone system and Internet. However, the smaller the network, the lower the value of a device to each user. Picturephone’s network was minuscule. Price cuts didn’t seem to be working. And so its value was vanishingly small, with little prospect of any increase.” (p. 264)

“A look back on the network of the early 1970s, however—especially with a knowledge of what it would become in the decades following—erodes any belief that it was near completion. The businesses and citizens of the world had only begun to consider how they might send, and how they might use, information. What altered their understanding were two complex and expensive projects, both undertaken at Bell Labs amid the the efforts to break its parent company apart. These projects—the first in exploring how to manufacture and install glass fiber to cary light pulses, the second in mobile telephones—actually transformed the network into something else. Those efforts made global communications into something thoroughly modern.” (p. 275)

“The thing about Bell Labs, Frenkiel remarks, was that it could spend millions of dollars—or even $100 million, which was what AT&T would spend on cellular before it went to market—on a technology that offered little guarantee it would succeed technologically or economically. Indeed, a marketing study commissioned by AT&T in the fall of 1971 informed its team that ‘there was no market for mobile phones at any price.’ Neither man agreed with that assessment. Though Engel didn’t perceive it at the time, he later came to believe that marketing studies could only tell you about the demand for products that actually exist. Cellular phones were a product that people had to imagine might exist. (p. 289)

“That this idea—dial, then send—would later prove crucial to texting technology was not even considered.” (p. 295)

“It was as though there had always been too much occurring in his [Shockley] life, and too much occurring in his mind, to possibly hold it in one place.” (p. 315)

“He [Shannon] once told an interviewer: ‘I think you impute a little more practical purpose to my thinking that actually exists. My mind wanders around, and I conceive of different things day and night. Like a science-fiction writer, I’m thinking, ‘What if it were like this?’ or, ‘Is there an interesting problem of this type?’…It’s usually just that I like to solve a problem, and I work on these all the time.” (p. 319)

“He and Pierce and Baker justified the research to AT&T management by explaining, truthfully, that is would yield insights into computer-synthesized speech, which was considered useful for the phone system.” (p. 326)

“But music tends to resist easy description. The experience of listening to compositions written in the scale—easily done through an Internet search—can be Pierce-like, too: quirky, ethereal, intriguing. You are certain you’re not listening to any-thing you’ve heard before.” (p. 326)

“In America and European industry, Odlyzko concluded, the prospects for a return to unfettered research in the near future are slim. The trend is towards concentration on narrow market segments.” (p. 335)

“At least in the communications industry, the greatest innovative challenge on the horizon, Kim says, is to organize information in a way that allows you to live the way you want to live, to take time off with your kids without fear you’re going to miss out on something. The larger idea, then, is that electronic communication is a miraculous development, but it is also, in excess, a dehumanization force. It proves Kelly’s belief that even as new technology solves one problem, it creates others.” (p. 343)

“Do we yet have the scientific base—akin to the ‘substantial gains’ of transistors or lasers or optical fiber—on which to build that future economy? Or are we still living off the dividends from ideas that were nurtured, and the risks that were taken, a half century ago?” (p. 345)

“’It’s the intersection between fundamental science and applied science, and the interface between many disciplines, that creates new ideas,’ Herwig Kogelnik, the laser scientist. This may indeed have been Kelly’s greatest insight.” (p. 345)

“’You see, out of fourteen people in the Bell Laboratories,’ he once remarked, ‘only one is in the Research Department, and that’s because pursuing an idea takes, I presume, fourteen times as much effort as having it.’” (p. 348)

“Back in the 1940s and 1950s, moreover, smart and talented graduate students could never be wooed away from the Labs by the prospect of making millions. It wasn’t even thinkable. You were in it for the adventure. ‘I don’t think I was ever motivated by the notion of winning prizes, although I have a couple of dozen of them in the other room,” Claude Shannon said late in life.” (p. 350)

“Such companies [FAANG ]don’t exist as part of our international capital markets. They are superb at producing a specific and limited range of technology products. And at the end of the day, new specific knowledge matters far less to them than the demands—for leadership, growth, and profits—of their customers, employees and shareholders.” (p. 354)