作者：Jon Gernter
出版社：Penguin Press
副标题：Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
发行时间：March 1st 2012
来源：下载的 epub 版本
Goodreads：4.12（3847 Ratings）
豆瓣：7.7（77人评价）

概要

"The Idea Factory" is the story of the origins of modern communications and the beginnings of the information age--a deeply human story of extraordinary men who were given extraordinary means--time, space, funds, and access to one another--and edged the world into a new dimension.

作者介绍

I’m currently an articles editor at Fast Company magazine, where I write and edit features on innovation and technology. Between 2004 and 2011, I worked as a writer at The New York Times Magazine, where I wrote about science, business, society, and (sometimes) economics. In March 2012 Penguin Press published The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. This is my first book.

读后感

之所以关注贝尔实验室，是因为他出过8名诺贝尔得奖，5位图灵奖，创造的发明和理论有：晶体管、移动电话、信息论、太阳能电池、激光、微处理器、通信卫星、无线电天文学、C语言、UNIX操作系统、条码读取器、摄影机、扫描仪、复印机、调制解调器等等一大堆的东西，阅读本书也是为了了解其神秘之处

那么为什么贝尔实验室能获得如此大的成就呢？

1. 贝尔实验室诞生于1925年，但是他的前身是贝尔自身的研发部门，在1907年
   AT&T 的主席 Theodore Vail 为其确定了基本策略「in decades instead of years」，在首任主席 Frank Jewett 和第三任主席 Mervin Kelly 的推动下，发展成了拥有1.5万人的独立研发机构

2. 美国的大学和产业刚刚发展到可以合作的节点，一方面产业界过去的理论能力被学术界超过，另一方面学术界的开始培养出了许许多多优秀的年轻人，所以才可能让 Frank Jewett 从美国各大工科院校招募到许许多多的优秀年轻人

3. 贝尔实验室的研发经费主要来自美国民众缴纳电话费的附加税，所以美国人不需花很多钱就可获取贝尔实验室的专利技术授权，分享贝尔实验室的研究成果，在两次世界大战和冷战期间，和军方的合作也让贝尔实验室获利颇丰

4. 跨学科合作被高度支持，让许多世界级的人才形成了聚集效应，较为自由的创新周期（可以达到5-12年的规划）

本书的撰写方式和我想的不大一样，结构上围绕6个核心人物：Mervin Kelly, Jim Fisk, William Shockley, Claude Shannon, John Pierce, and William Baker，将贝尔实验室本身的发展穿插了这些故事的中间，在讲述这6个人的时候，还穿插了大量的技术创新理论点，感觉这个结构有点复杂

摘录

This book is about the origins of modern communications as seen through the adventures of several men who spent their careers working at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Even more, though, this book is about innovation—about how it happens, why it happens, and who makes it happen. It is likewise about why innovation matters, not just to scientists, engineers, and corporate executives but to all of us. That the story is about Bell Labs, and even more specifically about life at the Labs between the late 1930s and the mid-1970s, isn’t a coincidence. In the decades before the country’s best minds began migrating west to California’s Silicon Valley, many of them came east to New Jersey, where they worked in capacious brick-and-glass buildings located on grassy campuses where deer would graze at twilight. At the peak of its reputation in the late 1960s, Bell Labs employed about fifteen thousand people, including some twelve hundred PhDs. Its ranks included the world’s most brilliant (and eccentric) men and women. In a time before Google, the Labs sufficed as the country’s intellectual utopia. It was where the future, which is what we now happen to call the present, was conceived and designed.
For a long stretch of the twentieth century, Bell Labs was the mostinnovative scientific organization in the world. It was arguably among the world’s most important commercial organizations as well, with countless entrepreneurs building their businesses upon the Labs’ foundational inventions, which were often shared for a modest fee. Strictly speaking, this wasn’t Bell Labs’ intended function. Rather, its role was to support the research and development efforts of the country’s then-monopolistic telephone company, American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), which was seeking to create and maintain a system—the word “network” wasn’t yet common—that could connect any person on the globe to any other at any time. AT&T’s dream of “universal” connectivity was set down in the early 1900s. Yet it took more than three-quarters of a century for this idea to mature, thanks largely to the work done at Bell Labs, into a fantastically complex skein of copper cables and microwave links and glass fibers that tied together not only all of the planet’s voices but its images and data, too. In those evolutionary years, the world’s business, as well as its technological progress, began to depend on information and the conduits through which it moved. Indeed, the phrase used to describe the era that the Bell scientists helped create, the age of information, suggested we had left the material world behind. A new commodity—weightless, invisible, fleet as light itself—defined the times.

Still, good arguments urge us to contemplate scientific history. Bill Gates once said of the invention of the transistor, “My first stop on any time-travel expedition would be Bell Labs in December 1947.” It’s a perceptive wish, I think. Bell Labs was admittedly imperfect. Like any elite organization, it suffered at times from personality clashes, institutional arrogance, and—especially in its later years—strategic missteps. Yet understanding the circumstances that led up to that unusual winter of 1947 at Bell Labs, and what happened there in the years afterward, promises a number of insights into how societies progress. With this in mind, one might think of a host of reasons to look back at these old inventions, these forgotten engineers, these lost worlds.
While our engineering prowess has advanced a great deal over the past sixty years, the principles of innovation largely have not. Indeed, the techniques forged at Bell Labs—that knack for apprehending a vexing problem, gathering ideas that might lead to a solution, and then pushing toward the development of a product that could be deployed on a massive scale—are still worth considering today, where we confront a host of challenges (information overloads, infectious disease, and climate change, among others) that seem very nearly intractable. Some observers have taken to calling them “wicked problems.” As it happens, the past offers the example of one seemingly wicked problem that was overcome by an innovative effort that rivals the Apollo program and Manhattan Project in size, scope, expense, and duration. That was to connect all of us, and all of our new machines, together.
“At first sight,” the writer Arthur C. Clarke noted in the late 1950s, “when one comes upon it in its surprisingly rural setting, the Bell Telephone Laboratories’ main New Jersey site looks like a large and up-to-date factory, which in a sense it is. But it is a factory for ideas, and so its production lines are invisible.” Some contemporary thinkers would lead us to believe that twenty-first-century innovation can only be accomplished by small groups of nimble, profit-seeking entrepreneurs working amid the frenzy of market competition. Those idea factories of the past—and perhaps their most gifted employees—have no lessons for those of us enmeshed in today’s complex world. This is too simplistic. To consider what occurred at Bell Labs, to glimpse the inner workings of its invisible and now vanished “production lines,” is to consider the possibilities of what large human organizations might accomplish.

There seemed no better example of this than Thomas Edison. By the time Kelly was born, in 1894, Edison was a national hero, a beau ideal of American ingenuity and entrepreneurship. Uniquely intuitive, Edison had isolated himself with a group of dedicated and equally obsessive men at a small industrial laboratory in New Jersey. Edison usually worked eighteen hours a day or longer, pushing for weeks on end, ignoring family obligations, taking meals at his desk, refusing to pause for sleep or showers. He disliked bathing and usually smelled powerfully of sweat and chemical solvents. When fatigue overcame him he would crawl under his table for a catnap or stretch out on any available space (though eventually his wife placed a bed in the library of his West Orange, New Jersey, laboratory). For his inventing, Edison used a dogged and systematic exploratory process. He tried to isolate useful materials—his stockroom was replete with everything from copper wire to horses’ hoofs and rams’ horns—until he happened upon a patentable, and marketable, combination.

AT&T’s savior was Theodore Vail, who became its president in 1907, just a few years after Millikan’s friend Frank Jewett joined the company. In appearance, Vail seemed almost a caricature of a Gilded Age executive: Rotund and jowly, with a white walrus mustache, round spectacles, and a sweep of silver hair, he carried forth a magisterial confidence. But he had in fact begun his career as a lowly telegraph operator. Thoughtfulness was his primary asset; he could see almost any side of an argument. Also, he could both disarm and outfox his detractors. As Vail began overseeing Bell operations, he saw that the costs of competition were making the phone business far less profitable than it had been—so much so, in fact, that Vail issued a frank corporate report in his first year admitting that the company had amassed an “abnormal indebtedness.” If AT&T were to survive, it had to come up with a more effective strategy against its competition while bolstering its public image. One of Vail’s first moves was to temper its aggression in the courts and reconsider its strategy in the field. He fired twelve thousand employees and consolidated the engineering departments (spread out in Chicago and Boston) in the New York office where Frank Jewett then worked. Meanwhile, Vail saw the value of working with smaller phone companies rather than trying to crush them. He decided it was in the long-term interests of AT&T to buy independent phone companies whenever possible. And when it seemed likely a few years later that the government was concerned about this strategy, Vail agreed to stop buying up companies without government permission. He likewise agreed that AT&T would simply charge independent phone companies a fee for carrying long-distance calls.
Vail didn’t do any of this out of altruism. He saw that a possible route to monopoly—or at least a near monopoly, which was what AT&T had always been striving for—could be achieved not through a show of muscle but through an acquiescence to political supervision. Yet his primary argument was an idea. He argued that telephone service had become “necessary to existence.” Moreover, he insisted that the public would be best served by a technologically unified and compatible system—and that it made sense for a single company to be in charge of it. Vail understood that government, or at least many politicians, would argue that phone subscribers must have protections against a monopoly; his company’s expenditures, prices, and profits would thus have to be set by federal and local authorities. As a former political official who years before had modernized the U.S. Post Office to great acclaim, Vail was not hostile toward government. Still, he believed that in return for regulation Ma Bell deserved to find the path cleared for reasonable profits and industry dominance.
In Vail’s view, another key to AT&T’s revival was defining it as a technological leader with legions of engineers working unceasingly to improve the system. As the business historian Louis Galambos would later point out, as Vail’s strategy evolved, the company’s executives began to imagine how their company might adapt its technology not only for the near term but for a future far, far away: “Eventually it came to be assumed within the Bell System that there would never be a time when technological innovation would no longer be needed.” The Vail strategy, in short, would measure the company’s progress “in decades instead of years.” Vail also saw it as necessary to merge the idea of technological leadership with a broad civic vision. His publicity department had come up with a slogan that was meant to rally its public image, but Vail himself soon adopted it as the company’s core philosophical principle as well. It was simple enough: “One policy, one system, universal service.” That this was a kind of wishful thinking seemed not to matter. For one thing, there were many systems: The regional phone companies, especially in rural areas, provided service for millions of Americans. For another, the closest a customer could get to telephoning long distance was a call between New York and Chicago. AT&T did not have a universal reach. It didn’t even have a national reach.

ewett returned to the University of Chicago in the fall of 1910 to visit his old friend Millikan, and he started the conversation without small talk. Jewett began, “Mr. John J. Carty, my chief, and the other higher-ups in the Bell System, have decided that by 1914, when the San Francisco Fair is to be held, we must be in position, if possible, to telephone from New York to San Francisco.” To get through to San Francisco by the present methods was out of the question, he explained, but he wondered if perhaps Millikan’s work—he pointed to some complex research on electrons—suggested that a different method might be possible. Then Jewett asked his friend for help. “Let us have one or two, or even three, of the best of the young men who are taking their doctorates with you and are intimately familiar with your field. Let us take them into our laboratory in New York and assign to them the sole task of developing a telephone repeater.”
Here was a new approach to solving an industrial problem, an approach that looked not to engineers but to scientists. The first person offered this opportunity was Millikan’s lab assistant from the oil-drop experiment, Harvey Fletcher, who declined. Fletcher wanted to return home to Salt Lake City to teach at Brigham Young University. The next person was Harold Arnold, a savvy experimentalist who said yes, and who quickly joined the New York engineering group under Jewett.

For Frank Jewett, meanwhile, the cross-country link proved that his cadre of young scientists could be trusted to achieve things that might at first seem technologically impossible. That led him to redouble his efforts to hire more men like Harold Arnold. Jewett kept writing to Harvey Fletcher, Millikan’s former graduate student who was now in Salt Lake City, sending him every spring for five consecutive years a polite and persuasive invitation to join AT&T. In 1916, Fletcher finally agreed to leave Brigham Young and come work for Jewett. Millikan, meanwhile, didn’t stop serving as the link between his Chicago graduates and his old friend. In late 1917, responding to an offer from Jewett for $2,100 a year, Mervin Kelly, now done counting oil drops, decided that he would come to New York City, too.

the U.S. government had begun to concur with Theodore Vail’s arguments for his company’s expansion. A group of senators issued a report noting that the phone business, because of its sensitive technological nature—those fragile voice signals needed a unified and compatible infrastructure—was a “natural monopoly.” A House of Representatives committee, clearly sympathetic to the prospect of simply dealing with a single corporate representative, complained that telephone competition was “an endless annoyance.” In the Willis-Graham Act of 1921, the U.S. Congress formally exempted the telephone business from federal antitrust laws.
By then, the so-called natural monopoly had grown even larger. Indeed, the engineering department at West Street had become so big (two thousand on its technical staff, and another sixteen hundred on its support staff) that AT&T executives agreed in a December 1924 board meeting to spin it off into a semiautonomous company. They chose the name Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. Some of their reasoning remains obscure. A short notice about the new labs in theNew York Times noted that “the new company was said to [mean] a greater concentration upon the experimental phases of the telephone industry.” The spin-off, in other words, was justified by the notion that scientific research at Bell Labs would play an increasingly greater role in phone company business. Frank Jewett’s private memos, meanwhile, suggest that the overlap between the AT&T and Western Electric engineering departments was creating needless duplications and accounting problems. By establishing one central lab to serve two masters, the phone company would simply be more efficient.
On January 1, 1925, AT&T officially created Bell Telephone Laboratories as a stand-alone company, to be housed in its West Street offices, which would be expanded from 400,000 to 600,000 square feet. The new entity—owned half by AT&T and half by Western Electric—was somewhat perplexing, for you couldn’t buy its stock on any of the exchanges. A new corporate board, led by AT&T’s chief engineer, John J. Carty, and Bell Labs’ new president, Frank Jewett, controlled the laboratory. The Labs would research and develop new equipment for Western Electric, and would conduct switching and transmission planning and invent communications-related devices for AT&T. These organizations would fund Bell Labs’ work. At the start its budget was about $12 million, the equivalent of about $150 million today.
As president of Bell Labs, Jewett now commanded an enormous shop. That an industrial laboratory would focus on research and development was not entirely novel; a few large German chemical and pharmaceutical companies had tried it successfully a half century before. But Bell Labs seemed to have embraced the idea on an entirely different scale. Of the two thousand technical experts, the vast majority worked in product development. About three hundred, including Clinton Davisson and Mervin Kelly, worked under Harold Arnold in basic and applied research. As Arnold explained, his department would include “the fields of physical and organic chemistry, of metallurgy, of magnetism, of electrical conduction, of radiation, of electronics, of acoustics, of phonetics, of optics, of mathematics, of mechanics, and even of physiology, of psychology, and of meteorology.”

Essentially Kelly was creating interdisciplinary groups—combining chemists, physicists, metallurgists, and engineers; combining theoreticians with experimentalists—to work on new electronic technologies. But putting young men like Shockley in a management position devastated some of the older Labs scientists. Addison White, a younger member of the technical staff who before the war had taken part in Shockley’s weekly study group, told Hoddeson he nevertheless considered it “a stroke of enormously good management on Kelly’s part.” He even thought it an act of managerial bravery to strip the titles from men Kelly had worked with for decades. “One of these men wept in my office after this happened,” White said. “I’m sure it was an essential part of what by this time had become a revolution.”

By mid-June 1948, the patent application on the transistor had been filed and a press conference on the new device had been scheduled for the end of the month at the large auditorium in Bell Labs’ West Street offices in Manhattan. Crafting the news release had been something of a nightmare, with at least a half dozen cooks (Shockley, Bardeen, Bown, and Brattain included) adding to the broth. “It has been rewritten at least N times, where N > 6,” Shockley noted. The transistor was not much larger than the tip of a shoelace, the news release said, and more than a hundred of them could fit easily in an outstretched hand. Yet it was quite complicated. The explanation of the device took up seven typed pages. Bardeen and Brattain’s letter to the Physical Review that announced their breakthrough, meanwhile, was impenetrable to all but an accomplished solid-state physicist. If anyone really wanted to know what the scientists had accomplished over the past few years, they would need a world-class understanding of metallurgy, quantum physics, and electrical engineering.

In truth, the handoff between the three departments at Bell Labs was often (and intentionally) quite casual. Part of what seemed to make the Labs “a living organism,” Kelly explained, were social and professional exchanges that moved back and forth, in all directions, between the pure researchers on one side and the applied engineers on the other. These were formal talks and informal chats, and they were always encouraged, both as a matter of policy and by the inventive design of the Murray Hill building. Researchers and engineers would find themselves discussing their respective problems in the halls, over lunch, or they might be paired together on a project, either at their own request or by managers. Or a staffer with a question would casually seek out an expert, “whether he be a mathematician, a metallurgist, an organic chemist, an electromagnetic propagation physicist, or an electron device specialist.” At the Labs this was sometimes known as going to “the guy who wrote the book.” And it was often literally true. The guy who wrote the definitive book on a subject—Shockley on semiconductors, John Tukey on statistics, Claude Shannon on information, and so forth—was often just down the hall. Saddled with a difficult problem, a new hire at Bell Labs, a stuttering nobody, was regularly directed by a supervisor toward one of these men. Some young employees would quake when they were told to go ask Shannon or Shockley a question. Still, Labs policy stated that they could not be turned away.
Physical proximity, in Kelly’s view, was everything. People had to be near one another. Phone calls alone wouldn’t do. Kelly had even gone so far as to create “branch laboratories” at Western Electric factories so that Bell Labs scientists could get more closely involved in the transition of their work from development to manufacture.

Why was an office in the White House so unappealing to Kelly? For one thing, he was already immensely influential at the highest military and policy levels. The tightening alignment between a handful of the largest American corporations and the armed forces—“the huge industrial and military machinery of defense,” as President Dwight D. Eisenhower would call it when he left office a decade later—had already become an enormous business for AT&T, which entrusted its Bell Laboratories and manufacturing divisions at Western Electric to design and manufacture a vast array of secret equipment for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Most of the industrial work orders related to radar and communications equipment; these were considered vital for national defense.
These contracts earned AT&T more than revenue; they gave the company strong allies within the government that the company would need as the twentieth century reached its midpoint.

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