The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

by Jon Gertner

Frank Jewett, whose speeches were often long-winded and hyperbolic, found a way to explain the essential idea of his new organization. An industrial lab, he said, “is merely an organization of intelligent men, presumably of creative capacity, specially trained in a knowledge of the things and methods of science, and provided with the facilities and wherewithal to study and develop the particular industry with which they are associated.” In short, he added, modern industrial research was meant to apply science to the “common affairs” of everyday life. “It is an instrument capable of avoiding many of the mistakes of a blind cut-and-try experimentation. It is likewise an instrument which can bring to bear an aggregate of creative force on any particular problem which is infinitely greater than any force which can be conceived of as residing in the intellectual capacity of an individual.”