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

by Jon Gertner

Scientists who worked on radar often quipped that radar won the war, whereas the atomic bomb merely ended it. This was not a minority view. The complexity of the military’s radar project ultimately rivaled that of the Manhattan Project, but with several exceptions.

Some years later, the semiconductor historians Ernest Braun and Stuart Macdonald would note that “everything in a solid happens on such a minute scale that not even a microscope, even an electron microscope, can resolve the elementary processes. The scientist must operate at a level of abstraction of which the untrained mind is not capable in order to visualize processes which cannot be seen.” So the theorists at Bell Labs worked on blackboards, attempting to “see,” at a subatomic level, the surfaces and interiors of semiconductor crystals;

the supervisor was authorized to guide, not interfere with, the people he (or she) managed. “The management style was, and remained for many years, to use the lightest touch and absolutely never to compete with underlings,”