The Idea Factory Quotes

“You get paid for the seven and a half hours a day you put in here,” Kelly often told new Bell Labs employees in his speech to them on their first day, “but you get your raises and promotions on what you do in the other sixteen and a half hours.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“The first is that if you haven’t manufactured the new thing in substantial quantities, you have not innovated;”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“We have now successfully passed all our deadlines without meeting any of them.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“in any company’s greatest achievements one might, with the clarity of hindsight, locate the beginnings of its own demise.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“the future of communications will be defined by an industry yet to be created—not the kind of business that simply delivers or searches out information, but one that manages the tide of information so that it doesn’t drown us.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“The men preferred to think they worked not in a laboratory but in what Kelly once called “an institute of creative technology.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“But to an innovator, being early is not necessarily different from being wrong.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“the second is that if you haven’t found a market to sell the product, you have not innovated.34”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“radar won the war, whereas the atomic bomb merely ended it.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“The first group was research, where scientists and engineers provided “the reservoir of completely new knowledge, principles, materials, methods and art.” The second group was in systems engineering, a discipline started by the Labs, where engineers kept one eye on the reservoir of new knowledge and another on the existing phone system and analyzed how to integrate the two. In other words, the systems engineers considered whether new applications were possible, plausible, necessary, and economical. That’s when the third group came in. These were the engineers who developed and designed new devices, switches, and transmissions systems. In Kelly’s sketch, ideas usually moved from (1) discovery, to (2) development, to (3) manufacture.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“And as Morry Tanenbaum, the inventor of the silicon transistor, points out, Bell Labs’ sense of mission—to plan the future of communications—also had an incalculable value that endured for sixty years. The mission was broad but also directed. Bell Labs’ researchers, Tanenbaum notes, had a “circumscribed freedom” that proved to be liberating and practical at the same time.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“Pierce, to put it simply, was asking himself: What about Bell Labs’ formula was timeless? In his 1997 list, he thought it boiled down to four things: A technically competent management all the way to the top. Researchers didn’t have to raise funds. Research on a topic or system could be and was supported for years. Research could be terminated without damning the researcher.17”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“Those who study innovation know this as the innovator’s dilemma, a term coined by the Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. “This is a very strong force,” Mayo points out. “It’s in me. And in everybody.” Strangely enough, however, it may not have been in Mervin Kelly or in some of his disciples—perhaps because the monopoly, at least for a time, guaranteed that the phone company’s business would remain sturdy even in the face of drastic technological upheaval.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“Pierce understood that the big new ideas—satellites, transistors, lasers, optical fibers, cellular telephony—could create an entirely new industry. “You may find a lot of controversy over how Bell Labs managed people,” John Mayo, the former Bell Labs president, says. “But keep in mind, I don’t think those managers saw it that way. They saw it as: How do you manage ideas? And that’s very different from managing people.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“Pierce later remarked that one thing about Kelly impressed him above all else: It had to do with how his former boss would advise members of Bell Labs’ technical staff when they were asked to work on something new. Whether it was a radar technology for the military or solid-state research for the phone company, Kelly did not want to begin a project by focusing on what was known. He would want to begin by focusing on what was not known. As Pierce explained, the approach was both difficult and counterintuitive. It was more common practice, at least in the military, to proceed with what technology would allow and fill in the gaps afterward. Kelly’s tack was akin to saying: Locate the missing puzzle piece first. Then do the puzzle.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“Kelly could perceive the obvious differences between IBM and Bell Labs. IBM was a computer company, first and foremost, and not a communications company. “We were moving faster than Bell Labs would,” Gunther-Mohr says, noting that Bell Labs had a thirty-year schedule for applying its inventions to the phone network.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“Drucker saw two possible roads ahead. On the one hand, Bell Labs could become a standard industrial lab, much like the ones that supplied technology to General Electric or RCA. Or the Labs could take a “far bolder, but also far riskier course” by going into business for itself, making money from its patents and products. It could become a kind of unique and monolithic brain trust, one that did research for AT&T but also for any company or part of the government that was willing to pay for access to its people and resources. “Nothing like this has ever been done,” Drucker noted. “And no one knows whether it could succeed.” It was a tantalizing idea: Bell Labs would remain intact as a citadel for problem-solving. And it would be a citadel of capitalism, too. But perhaps this was too tantalizing. Drucker wondered if the notion was simply too experimental and too radical, and that it therefore could not actually come to pass. A conventional future, he concluded, seemed far more likely.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“The thing about Bell Labs, Frenkiel remarks, was that it could spend millions of dollars—or even $100 million, which was what AT&T would spend on cellular before it went to market7—on a technology that offered little guarantee it would succeed technologically or economically.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“During World War II, radio communications took a great leap. Bell Labs, at the military’s behest, had worked on compact and sophisticated communications systems for tanks and airplanes. Meanwhile, Motorola, a small company out of Chicago, built a rugged “handie-talkie” for soldiers.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“In the early 1970s, Corning and Bell Labs struck an agreement to share their patents on fiber production. Over the next few years, both companies came up with sophisticated ways to reduce absorption and scattering.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“At Bell Labs, Bill Baker, though loath to concede that a mature industry like his should be deregulated, agreed with this assessment. “I think that the era of having to demonstrate new technical communications functions is largely behind us,” he said.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“AS LEGAL MANEUVERS BEGAN in late 1974—the trial, most observers agreed, would take years, perhaps a decade, to resolve—one of the points of discussion had to do with whether telecommunications was now a “mature” industry. A mature industry shouldn’t need the protective hug of federal regulations. A mature industry was ready for jolts of competition.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“The strength of Bell Labs, Baker declared, was in its links with other parts of the monopoly. It was what allowed the Labs’ scientists and engineers to “think of new digital networks, or new telephone instruments, of new modes of distribution like satellites and fiber optics.” It was, Baker added with a typical flourish, what allowed “human creativity [to be] converted to human benefits.” The arrangement must continue.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“FOR MORE THAN FIFTY YEARS, AT&T had remained intact at the pleasure of the United States government—always, as the economist Peter Temin points out, “operating at the limit of what the antitrust laws would allow.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“For all these reasons, the technology couldn’t attract enough users to attract even more users. “To start up a service, you have to think about: I have one, you don’t have one—so I can’t talk to you,” Irwin Dorros says. “So I can only talk to you if you have one. So how do you get a critical mass of people that have them?” Many years later, a computer engineer named Robert Metcalfe would surmise that the value of a networked device increases dramatically as the number of people using the network grows. The larger the network, in other words, the higher the value of a device on that network to each user.36 This formulation—sometimes known as Metcalfe’s law—can help explain the immense appeal of the telephone system and Internet. However, the smaller the network, the lower the value of a device to each user. Picturephone’s network was minuscule.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“According to Irwin Dorros, one of the Bell Labs executives involved in the launch, the team working on the Picturephone had never doubted its eventual success. “Groupthink,” as Dorros puts it, had infiltrated the endeavor.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“Mistakes of perception are not the same as mistakes of judgment, though. In the latter, an idea that developers think will satisfy a need or want does not. It may prove useless because of its functional shortcomings, or because it’s too expensive in relation to its modest appeal, or because it arrives in the marketplace too early or too late. Or because of all those reasons combined. The Picturephone was a mistake in judgment.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“The waveguide, for instance, might be considered a mistake of perception. It was an instance where a technology of legitimate promise is eclipsed by a breakthrough elsewhere—in another corporate department, at another company, at a university, wherever—that solves a particular problem better.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“During those same years, there were other achievements at Bell Labs that would, in time, alter the world. One occurred when several computer scientists at Murray Hill got together to write a revolutionary computer operating system they called Unix, which was written in a new computer language called C.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“Innovations are to a great extent a response to need. Phone engineers in Europe—Kao included—weren’t looking for a complex new technology, such as the waveguide, for intercity communication. They needed intracity communication”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation