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

by Jon Gertner

That entailed a litany of durability tests at the West Street plant on even the most trifling of system components. Labs engineers invented a “dropping machine” to simulate “the violence of impact” of a receiver dropped into its cradle tens of thousands of times.

Luck seems to matter, and so does timing, for it tends to be the case that the right answers, the right people, the right place—perhaps all three—require a serendipitous encounter with the right problem.

Scientists who worked on radar often quipped that radar won the war, whereas the atomic bomb merely ended it.

“On the contrary, all buildings have been connected so as to avoid fixed geographical delineation between departments and to encourage free interchange and close contact among them.”

but these might be in different corridors, therefore making it necessary to walk between the two, and all but assuring a chance encounter or two with a colleague during the commute.

Physical proximity, in Kelly’s view, was everything. People had to be near one another. Phone calls alone wouldn’t do. Kelly had even gone so far as to create “branch laboratories” at Western Electric factories so that Bell Labs scientists could get more closely involved in the transition of their work from development to manufacture.