The definitive history of Bell Labs, Jon Gertner’s The Idea Factory, reveals the secret to the labs’ unrivaled success. It was not just the diversity of talent, and the tolerance of failure, and the willingness to make big bets—all of which were traits that Bell Labs shared with Edison’s famous lab at Menlo Park as well as other research labs around the world. What made Bell Labs fundamentally different had as much to do with antitrust law as the geniuses it attracted.
