I picked up this book after watching a podcast with the CEO of Windsurf. He talked about this book inspiring him, so I grabbed it.

The full title is The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. This book covers Bell Labs, how it was set up, grew, and advanced through the 20th century, until it basically disappeared in the early 2000s.

It’s an interesting history lesson that examines the lab and some of the figures that drove it forward, as well as the various inventions and discoveries from the lab that helped create the technology revolution. It’s amazing to read for a technologist to think about how many things we depend on came out of Bell Labs.

I used to want to work at Bell Labs. I mostly learned about it from Unix, with the history of that operating system being developed there by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson. I used a lot of Unix and thought that would be a neat place to work.

After reading the book I realized I wasn’t really smart enough to work there, nor necessarily driven enough to be as assistant conducting experiments.

What I found interesting is that originally the labs were created in New Jersey to help further analog communications. As a research arm of ATT, early leaders needed a way to help ensure the company would lead the telecommunications world and produce items that could be engineered into products that supported the telephone network.

We learn about then work in furthering speech compression, video transmission (in 1927), information theory, radio astronomy, and perhaps most importantly, the transistor. I didn’t realize that Bell Labs created this, after trying to hand grow p- and n-  gates out of germanium and succeeding. We also get some of the sordid history of people not necessarily sharing credit with each other.

Maybe the most interesting thing is how many researchers worked there almost as professors, without deadlines, without structure, with the need to drive themselves to think about how to innovate things that hadn’t previously existed in the world. To me, this brings home the idea that we need people in universities who can just research things and think. Without time or money pressure, but perhaps most importantly, with the goal of their ideas being licensed and used by anyone else.

This happened with the transistor, and it’s a little sad that today universities lock inventions down with a stake in companies formed by graduate students and professors. It seems like we’ve lost that part of knowledge searching and sharing in the world.

This is a fairly long book, and definitely historical in nature, but it’s well written, and I enjoyed reading it.