End of an era. These will probably be the last two Nobel Laureates from Bell Labs.

[NNadir]

Probably the great private research organization in the United States was Bell Labs, where the transistor was invented, the solar cell was invented, radio telescopy was invented...

Two of the three most recent winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics (2009), Willard Boyle, and George Smith, inventors of the important CCD, as well as the current Secretary of Energy (and Physics Laureate) Steven Chu all worked at Bell Labs.

Overall, the lab produced 13 Nobels.

(But let's not talk about Shockley, OK?)

Bell Labs demonstrated that basic science is essential to an outstanding commercial infrastructure, an idea that has apparently lost its luster.

Bell Labs was spun off by a bunch of MBA's as a division "Lucent" - and somehow, after a run of MBA telecom hyping - collapsed and became worthless before absorbed by the French telecom company Acatel.

In July of last year, Acatel-Lucent announced that it would no longer do basic science research at Bell Labs.

If you want to know where your country's intellectual strength was dissappated, this would be a good place to start.

Here's, for what it's worth, the Wikipedia reference on Bell Labs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs

[The_Casual_Observer]

1. It was funded by the profits of the Bell System.

[NNadir]

2. And unquestionably, the Bell System profited as well.

All of humanity profited, in fact.

[The_Casual_Observer]

5. THere was actually a time where the profits went back into the company

rather than into share holders pockets to be squandered on mansions & yachts

[NNadir]

7. True dat. I wish I had some remedy for the bland and blank consumerism of our culture, but...

...I don't.

It seems so sterile.

[jeffbr]

3. The MBA-driven atmosphere also produced frauds like Jan Hendrik Schön

and the quality of their papers went downhill in recent years anyway.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

4. This is such sad news.

What a waste of a resource...


K&R

[cliffordu]

6. The real life GENIUSES at Bell Labs are why you have an internet today -

They gave us UNIX, the finest, most stable and brilliantly executed operating system I have ever used.



If M$ had any brains, they'd put a face on LINUX and call it 'Windows, perfected..."

[truedelphi]

8. Hey I met Shockley. And when a 6 pt + earthquake rattled Intel

Corporation headquarters, in the spring of 1984, he came out in the parking lot to reprimand us employees for not returning to our desks.

"The earthquake is over. If you knew anything, you'd be back at your desks working."

I guess that:
1) he'd never heard of the theory of aftershocks
2) the entire department he was scolding was into customer service via the telephone. With the phones being OUT for the duration, there really wasn't much reason to be at our desks!

[NNadir]

11. I've heard he was a real ass in person. Of course he was a real ass in public as well.

This is not the night to say this, but many winners of the Nobel Prize have been awful people.

One of these days when I'm feeling brave in the Firestone Library I'm going to go downstairs and take a look at Johannes Stark's worshipful book on his hero, Adolf Hitler.

[Posteritatis]

9. Acatel-Lucent's announcements was one of the biggest obscenities of that whole year

I started reading up about Bell Labs when they announced they were turning it into commercial engineering and little else, and was feeling very stabby indeed by the time I was done.

The atrophy of places like that is crippling, and not just to the US either.

[Ichingcarpenter]

10. When I was growing up a scientist lived next door- worked for Bell Labs

He had a full blow lab/workshop in his basement with amazing tools, electronic equipment etc where he did some of his work and allowed us to visit him downstairs at times. He also explained things to us.

He got me interested in science at an early age.

He invented the push button phone for Bell Labs

[NNadir]

12. That must have been very cool.

[Ichingcarpenter]

13. Yes ..... it was like visiting a real 'mad' scientists den

The touch tone phone was introduced at the world's fair in 62.
He had wood lathes, metal lathes, plastic induction molding machines
electronic equipment and god knows what else

[HamdenRice]

14. The demise of Bell Labs is sad, but you've got most of the economics & business history wrong

The main reason AT&T spun off Lucent had to do with legal issues created by the consent decree that broke up AT&T into AT&T plus the baby bells, ie the local and regional telephone companies.

In the breakup, AT&T got the long distance business, plus the telephone company equipment manufacturing business and Bell Labs plus some other assets.

The baby bells and start up local telephone companies still relied on AT&T's equipment manufacturing -- equipment including everything from central switching to fiber optics -- really everything required to operate a phone company.

AT&T was legally not allowed to get into the local telephone business, but it was selling equipment to the local telephone companies. AT&T financed the sale of that equipment itself, just as many industrial companies do. In order to finance the equipment sales, however, AT&T had to take a security interest in the equipment and the companies' stock -- again, standard in industrial equipment sales.

The problem was that those security interests -- and the potential for foreclosure if the local telecom defaulted -- violated the consent decree. If AT&T had had to foreclose on a local telecom, it would automatically be in the local telecom business and in violation of the consent decree.

That's why the equipment manufacturing business had to be separated from AT&T -- so it could continue its sales to local telecoms, which were booming as an entirely new fiber optic and internet infrastructure was being built across the country.

Also, the local telecoms were allowed to get into long distance even though AT&T was not allowed to get into local, so AT&T was pissed off that under the consent decree it had to sell its technology to competitors in long distance; meanwhile the local telecoms were paranoid about having to buy equipment from AT&T and they were spinning conspiracy theories about AT&T using their equipment to snoop on their businesses.

In other words, given the structure of the industry, the equipment business would have died if it had remained part of AT&T because the local telecoms would have gone to new equipment manufacturers in the US or Europe or Asia to avoid entanglement with AT&T.

As for your contention about basic science and commercial success you are only partly right. Basic science is necessary, but it doesn't have to be in the same company. In fact, it's kind of a competitive disadvantage. Bell Labs may have done lots of research that became profitable, but it did lots of pure science that never made a dime. Meanwhile, other companies were able to license most of the profitable technology that Bell Labs developed. So the best situation for a commercial technological company to be in is to have someone else doing the basic science. After all, Microsoft did not invent DOS, and Bell Labs never sold a single mouse.

[NNadir]

16. I couldn't care less about the "business" end as I have made my contempt for MBA

mentality clear enough.

You missed the point entirely - no surprise there really - and put the consumerist amorality phrase in bold. (Thanks for that, since it reifies for me my basic assumptions about your moral level.)

I quote:

So the best situation for a commercial technological company to be in is to have someone else doing the basic science.

It's very clear to me that you do not even remotely grasp the nature of discovery and innovation and thus most likely are a part of the problem. One cannot have an imagination at all without a desultory intellectual frame work in which to work. It is well known from random walk theory that confined spaces find the same local maximum and are incapable of finding better fit maxima under any circumstances.

Bell Labs was able to invent so much precisely because they had people who discover that the entire universe was expanding, although there were no ways to charge the universe for doing so and profiting from it. These people were the intellectual foundation of their ability to discover. When they were gone, the place collapsed.

I have, by the way, always regarded Microsoft with a very jaundiced eye, regarding them as something of a mixture of thieves and bunglers even though they ended up rich, rich, rich, rich, rich. I think I realized that I was going to spend 8 years of nausea when right after the Supremes installed the wooden dummy in the White House in 2001 - within days - Steve Ballmer showed up at the White House and the anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft magically disappeared.

No one ever said a word about it. It fell down the memory hole.

AT&T was, in the hey day of Bell Labs, like Microsoft, a de facto monopoly, but there the similarity ends. Microsoft, over all, doesn't invent so much as engage in parasitism. The AT&T that funded Bell Labs, by contrast, did much to make our country great.

The real difference is between the mentality of the generations involved. The people who ran AT&T and founded Bell Labs believed in personal responsibility. We don't. They left something other than waste to our generation. Our generation is leaving only waste and empty promises.

[truedelphi]

17. You say:

Bell Labs was able to invent so much precisely because they had people who discover that the entire universe was expanding, although there were no ways to charge the universe for doing so and profiting from it. These people were the intellectual foundation of their ability to discover. When they were gone, the place collapsed.

And I agree 100%.

As someone who inadvertently lived three miles from Bell Labs, Northern Ill., it was my privilege to interact with some of the most inventive minds of my generation. A friend of mine held the world record for creating the top number of patented inventions before the age of THIRTY!

Your post sums up exactly how and why Bell Labs worked. In a sense, Bell Labs existed because Bell Telephone allowed for a creative world to be brought into existence, and Bell Telephone did not make this creative world justify its existence through short term profits. Bell Labs was about the fact that the PARENT COMPANY held the faith that employing the top intellectual, and creative engineers of our nation would more than justify the short term expenditure because of massive long term gains. Gains for which in many cases there really is not a mere economic measure of their worth.

Micro$erf is the exact opposite of that - their hold on the hard ware and software world is such that young enterprisers are put out of existence. Whereas in a Bell Lab realm, they would be invited in. That is an entire world of difference.

[HamdenRice]

18. 'I couldn't care less about the "business" end '

I suppose that says it all. The fact that AT&T operated in a context that required them to obey the law is obviously irrelevant to you. Obeying the law with Bell Labs inside AT&T would have led to the earlier destruction of the equipment business and hence of Bell Labs.

The point is that pure science needs to be conducted in a non-profit environment -- the university -- not in a corporation where its support depends on its profitability.

The fact that you cannot grasp why Lucent had to be sold tells volumes about your extraordinarily limited and immature view of the world.

[n2doc]

15. +100

[gtar100]

19. minor spelling correction - the company is "Alcatel", now Alcatel-Lucent

In case anyone wanted to do additional look-up.