It’s been said that the best way to stifle creativity by researchers is to demand that they produce immediately marketable technologies and products. This is also effectively the story of Bell Labs, originally founded as Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. in January 1925. As an integral part of AT&T and Western Electric, it enjoyed immense funding and owing to the stable financial situation of AT&T very little pressure to produce results. This led to the development of a wide range of technologies like the transistor, laser, photovoltaic cell, charge-coupled cell (CCD), Unix operating system and so on. After the break-up of AT&T, however, funding dried up and with it the discoveries that had once made Bell Labs such a famous entity. Which raises the question of what it would take to create a new Bell Labs?
As described in the article by [Brian Potter], one aspect of Bell Labs that made it so successful was that the researchers employed there could easily spend a few years tinkering on something that tickled their fancy, whether in the field of semiconductors, optics, metallurgy or something else entirely. There was some pressure to keep research focused on topics that might benefit the larger company, but that was about it, as the leadership knew that sometimes new technologies can take a few year or decades to come to fruition.
All of this came to an rapid stop following the 1982 court-ordered breakup of AT&T. Despite initial optimism at Bell Labs that things could remain much the same, but over the following years Bell Labs would be split up repeatedly, with the 1996 spinning off of Western Electric into Lucent Technologies that took much of Bell Labs with it being the first of many big splits, ending for now with five pieces, with Nokia Bell Labs (formerly Lucent Bell Labs) and AT&T Labs being the largest two. To nobody’s surprise, among all these changes funding for fundamental and theoretical research effectively vanished.
![A blue LED held up by its inventor, [Shuji Nakamura].](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/shuji_nakamura_with_blue_led.jpg)
Ultimately Bell Labs would seem to have been at least partially a product of unique historical circumstances, especially the highly specialized field of telecommunications before the same transistors and other technologies that Bell Labs invented would make such technological fields something that anyone could get started in. It’s possible that even without court order, AT&T would have found itself facing stiff competition by the 1990s.
The short answer to the original question of whether Bell Labs could be recreated today is thus a likely ‘no’, while the long answer would be ‘No, but we can create a Bell Labs suitable for today’s technology landscape’. Ultimately the idea of giving researchers leeway to tinker is one that is not only likely to get big returns, but passionate researchers will go out of their way to circumvent the system to work on this one thing that they are interested in. We saw this for example with [Shuji Nakamura], who cracked the way to make efficient blue LEDs, despite every effort by his employer to make his research unnecessarily difficult.
If there’s one thing that this world needs more of, it are researchers like Nakamura-san, and the freedom for them to pursue these passions. That, ultimately could be said to be the true recreation of Bell Labs.
Unfortunately corps today are effectively run by big shareholders who demand profits every quarter and don’t give a shit about fundamental research that may turn up something interesting
I mean if this was 100% true then all biomedical research groups publicly trading on the stock market would have a near 0 value but because of the belief that some of them might become something successful a large number of them are worth a ton. Sure once the idea flops they often tank but I wouldn’t expect a company to continue working on an idea after someone went “I’ve got it this time” and then it caught fire.
Sadly true, and made worse when even techo-jesus cough Musk is trying to fleece billions out of his companies purely for his own greed (sorry, I mean ‘to keep him motivated’). Just think how much amazing reseacrh could be done with a float of $50B+
“…but passionate researchers will go out of their way to circumvent the system to work on this one thing that they are interested in…”
Hmmm… you could also state: “investing lot’s of their spare time and private funding, being considered strange and awkward pursuing a goal that nobody believes in and when its finally done ‘the hero’ gets nothing in return but a pad on the back and in very special rare occasions a Nobel prize.”
I know this, at first, all sounds pretty negative… we shouldn’t do negative comments any more, but read again, the hero won a Nobel prize, that’s pretty positive isn’t it?
3M had a philosophy that people could work on their own projects 1 day a week with no commitment to show value. One of the things that came out of it was sticky notes
Generally I find that if the slavishly follow the management requirements you waste a lot of effort going in the wrong direction, while if you give engineers time (and as important, resources) to just play, you can end up with truly innovative products, but this goes against managers who feel every minute should be logged and justified
It is however harder and harder to get companies to buy into this
http://amasci.com/weird/unusual/e-wall.html
3m had an accidental forcefield at their plant that was fixed rather than studied. can’t let new science get in the way of business i guess.
As the classic BSD fortune said:
There are in this country two very large monopolies. The larger of the
two has the following record: The Vietnam War, Watergate, double-digit
inflation, fuel and energy shortages, bankrupt airlines, and the 8-cent
postcard. The second is responsible for such things as the transistor,
the solar cell, lasers, synthetic crystals, high fidelity stereo recording,
sound motion pictures, radio astronomy, negative feedback, magnetic tape,
magnetic “bubbles”, electronic switching systems, microwave radio and TV
relay systems, information theory, the first electrical digital computer,
and the first communications satellite. Guess which one is going to tell
the other how to run the telephone business?
Very well stated. Thanks.
Here in the Netherlands we had the Philips Natlab
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philips_Natuurkundig_Laboratorium
I think it was very similar in setup and type of goals as the Bell lab and linked to a big diversity of inventions. It is for example tightly linked to the start of ASML. But there is not much left of Philips either. Natlab has been sold to some investment firm.
Up to some 20 years ago it was government policy to break up or limit big companies to prevent them from becoming monopolies. Looks like they were too successful in some area’s, while failing in other areas (google, amazon, etc) But I think I’m glad the merger between Nvidia and ARM got blocked.
I don’t do much with politics, but I’ve got a vague idea that goals and long term plans have mostly evaporated and been overwhelmed by short term prestige and damage control.
I suspect that what you need to get companies to be innovative again has little to do with the companies and more to do with the taxes.
I was reading through stuff the other day about corporate tax rates in the USA. I don’t remember where it was now, but one thing I read mentioned that while the corporate tax rate was much higher in the past, the companies at the time didn’t pay anywhere near the official tax rate.
That was not because they were cheating, but because they had a legal and publically useful way to reduce taxes:
Invest in research.
They could pour money into research, which reduced the taxable income.
The companies got a reduced tax burden and the USA got innovation. The companies preferred to invest in research because they could profit later from the new technologies as well as paying less taxes today.
Starting in the 1980s, there were reductions in the corporate tax rate, to the extent that the companies no longer feel as much of a need to (legally) reduce their tax burden by investing in research. They prefer to jack up prices and browbeat the Republicans into giving them ever more and more tax breaks.
Do you want to see more innovation and private money spent on research? Jack up the corporate tax rate and reinstate corporate tax breaks for research investments.
That’s how Bell Labs was financed back in the day, and I expect that’s what it’ll take to get research and innovation going at high speed again.