About:
The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner is a well-researched history of Bell Labs and a few of the people who changed our lives. Mr. Gertner is an author and editor at Fast Company magazine.
- 432 pages
- Publisher : Penguin Press
- Language : English
- ISBN-10 : 1594203288
My rating for The Idea Factory — 5
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Thoughts:
Bell Labs, the research arm of the phone company giant, was a critical part of advances in technology in general, and specifically telecommunication. The innovative giant, long gone, still touches our everyday lives.
The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner is not simply a history of the company but is filled with fun (and extremely smart) engineers but also attempts to find out how innovation happens and how might we nurture it. As opposed to many stories of start-up lore, it doesn’t happen in mom’s garage, but when experts of diverse ideas, talents, and mind-sets are able to work together, fail together, pursue passions, and allow them to innovate.
One of those colorful characters was William Shockley, who was inspired by Mervin Kelly (Bell Labs director) to find an electronic switch to replace vacuum tubes. Years, and one World War later, the transistor was invented. From there, scientists such as Claude Shannon (the father of Information Technology) came up with idea that, maybe, information could be measured in Os and 1s and changed our world forever.
Mr. Gertner does mention the amount of failures Bell Labs had, which to me were interesting but I certainly understand the smart decision not go into too many technical details into the failures, or for that matter, the innovations either. Instead, he tries to understand the environment, which allowed thousands of innovations to happen in a relatively short span of time.
In 1974 the Justice Department brought an anti-trust suite against AT&T, since they were a monopoly. Ten years later, President Ronald Reagan broke apart the company, and Bell Labs, whose sole existence was to innovate for AT&T did not survive.
Buy The Idea Factory from Amazon.com*
More Books by Jon Gertner*
Zohar — Man of la Book
Disclaimer: I bought this book.
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