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

by Jon Gertner

In Pierce’s era, the top officer at Bell Labs made about twelve times that of the lowest-paid worker; in the late 1990s, it was more typical at large American firms for the CEO to make one hundred times the salary of the lowest-paid worker. Back in the 1940s and 1950s, moreover, smart and talented graduate students could never be wooed away from the Labs by the prospect of making millions. It wasn’t even thinkable. You were in it for the adventure. “I don’t think I was ever motivated by the notion of winning prizes, although I have a couple of dozen of them in the other room,” Claude Shannon said late in life. “I was motivated more by curiosity. I was never motivated by the desire for money, financial gain. I wasn’t trying to do something big so that I could get a bigger salary.”15