Rating: 7.8/10.
Book that describes the origin and eventual breakup of Bell Labs, a research division of AT&T. In the early 1900s, AT&T’s phone service was seen as unreliable and only operated locally; it was expensive with a lot of technical issues. Jewett was a manager who recruited several graduate students at Millikan’s lab who were involved with measuring the charge of an electron using experiments with oil drops. Together they solved technical challenges and delivered a cross-continental phone call demo in 1915.
Bell Labs was then founded in 1925, with flexibility to work on both applied and fundamental research. One of the first problems was improving the vacuum tube, which was expensive and unreliable; they recruited talented new graduates from across the country to work in New York. In the 1930s, Bell Labs was rich in problems that needed solving because telephone technology was so unreliable. Shockley arrived as a brilliant theoretician and did some early work on what would eventually become solid state physics, and he would eventually be a Nobel medalist.
After the war broke out in the early 1940s, everyone at Bell Labs was redirected towards wartime efforts like the Manhattan Project, improving radar systems, and providing intelligence information for generals. They went back to their previous projects once the war finished. Bell Labs moved to a new building that was designed to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration, with theoreticians and experimentalists working together. They worked on solid state electronics and discovered that the electrical properties of silicon can be changed by adding a small amount of impurities. Bardeen, Brattain, Shockley, and some others invented the transistor in 1947 based on solid state physics, which would be a better alternative to the vacuum tube. However, it was initially unclear whether the device would be practical enough due to its manufacturing difficulty.
Claude Shannon worked on information theory and methods for communication through noise to support error correction. He also conducted experiments with various game-playing machines, like for chess and guessing games, and became a bit of a celebrity. At this point, there was more attention to the parent company AT&T’s monopoly position, which was giving some of the projects a poor reputation because of increasing awareness that Bell Labs’ moonshot projects were only possible due to the monopoly position. At that point, leadership was allying with the government and cooperating with defense technology in exchange to keep monopoly regulations going for some time.
In the early 1950s, transistors existed but had limited adoption within AT&T. Tanenbaum discovered that a silicon setup worked better for the transistor than using germanium, and another invention that was more practical was microwave communication. They engineered a transatlantic cable requiring many amplifiers to boost the analog signal. Shockley also started his own semiconductor company in Palo Alto, and by the time transistors were more available, analog was also shifting to digital.
The second half of the book shifts to the gradual decline of Bell Labs, the first signs was as early as 1962, when the lab launched a communication satellite, led by John Pierce. But the government stepped in to take over the space program to prevent monopoly from private industry on space technology. In the 1960s, they were working on technologies like switching systems and microwave transmission, headed by Bill Baker (described as smart but overly verbose). One of the missteps was the Picturephone, which was launched but was a commercial failure since it was too expensive and led to anti-network effects, where it was not useful when nobody else had it. Innovations in laser, fiber optic communications, Unix and C, etc, were more successful.
In the 1970s, the AT&T monopoly first came into question when the government allowed competition from MCI on long-distance phone calls. At first, radio spectrum allocation was allocated to television over mobile phone technology, but as it showed more promise, pressure from anti-monopoly legislators grew through the 1970s, with the government determined to not let mobile networks become equally monopoly-controlled as long-distance phone calls were at the time. This forced the breakup of AT&T starting in 1974, which was the beginning of the end of Bell Labs
After the company lost this monopoly status, it was no longer able to generate the profits needed to sustain a research lab. Many researchers went to academia, giving guest lectures like Pierce and Shockley. Shockley became obsessed with eugenics and became an embarrassment; Shannon worked on mathematically modeling the market and the physics of juggling. Many of the researchers got shuffled between the descendant labs or were simply laid off. The lab broke into several smaller ones focused on practical applications to the telecommunications network rather than the pure fundamental research that it was known for in the last few decades.
In the last chapter, the author reminisces about the Golden Age of Bell Labs, which was only possible due to the monopoly status of the parent company and was able to fund basic research with no payoff for decades. Modern equivalents include Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, which captured some of the young talent but with the expectation of profit in a few years. Nothing equivalent has the same level of funding for basic research. Overall, the book is a well written narrative of Bell Labs and its influence and operating philosophy, much of which is seen as a precursor to modern-day labs like DeepMind. These anecdotes are an important part of understanding the modern-day tech ecosystem and the roots of Silicon Valley.
