Experiment · New Jersey innovation

Five ideas that left Bell Labs

On January 1, 1925, AT&T put its engineers into one company you could not buy stock in. Over the next half century they produced the transistor, the bit, the solar cell, Unix and the cellular network. Then other people, in other places, turned each one into the modern world. Drag through the years and follow all five out of New Jersey.

Bell Labs ran on two kinds of energy. Mervin Kelly’s was proximity: hallways so long you could not walk to lunch without bumping into someone smarter than you in a different field. William Shockley’s was spite. Left off the transistor patent, he locked himself in a Chicago hotel room and invented a better one. Then he moved to California and managed so badly that his eight best engineers quit and founded Silicon Valley without him.

Why this oneMatthew KenneyDraft

I live about five miles from Thomas Edison's laboratory in West Orange. He opened it in 1887 as an invention factory, with a library, machine shops and a factory next door, and more than half of his 1,093 patents came out of it. By World War One the complex employed 10,000 people.

Thirty-eight years after Edison opened West Orange, AT&T built the same idea at a scale he never imagined, and in 1941 it moved it to Murray Hill. I have spent eleven and a half years in corporate innovation, which mostly means watching big companies try to rebuild what Bell Labs had.

California runs the table now. But for a small, crowded state, New Jersey punches way above its weight. This page follows five ideas out of one New Jersey lab and asks how each one left the building.

Sources 34, 36, 1

Drag the map, or use the arrow keys

Each row is one idea. The blue token is the idea you are following; Back and Next step through its stations, and Up and Down switch ideas. Dashed lines show where one idea fed another.

The economy they grew into

US real GDP, billions of chained 2017 dollars. Annual, from the Bureau of Economic Analysis via FRED. The series starts in 1929, four years after Bell Labs. It shows the economy the inventions grew into, not how much of it they caused. Small dots on the baseline mark the stations of the idea you are following. (source 33)

Invented here, scaled thereTexas Instruments sold the transistor radio, Hoffman sold the solar cell, Motorola made the first handheld cell call and Apple put Unix in the Mac. Bell Labs was the birthplace, almost never the factory.

Washington was a co-authorThe 1956 consent decree made 7,820 Bell patents free to use and kept AT&T out of computers. That is part of why the transistor went west and Unix went to Berkeley.

The ideas crossedFuller and Pearson found the solar cell while working on silicon transistors. In 1962 Telstar flew 3,600 solar cells and 1,000 transistors, two Bell inventions in one satellite.

The other side

The monopoly paid for the miracles. AT&T's huge resources as the phone monopoly let Bell Labs do basic research with only loose ties to phone service. When the company shrank, so did the pure research.IEEE History Center (ETHW), Bell Labs · sourced, source 35
The same monopoly sat on its own market. After 1956 innovation rose outside telecom, but not in telecom equipment, where Bell kept shutting competitors out.Watzinger, Fackler, Nagler and Schnitzer (2017) · sourced, source 10
Inventing is not scaling. Texas Instruments sold the first transistor radios, Hoffman sold the solar cells, Motorola made the first handheld cell call and Apple put Unix in the Mac. Bell often invented the thing other people turned into products.Britannica, SJSU, John Perlin, Wikipedia · sourced, sources 17, 23, 27, 31
Bell was not the only place the transistor could have come from. A point-contact transistor was invented independently in 1948.Wikipedia, Transistor · sourced, source 16. Name the 1948 inventors once checked against a primary source.

Sources

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