12 ms·

Why Bell Labs Worked

336 points by areoform 1y ago

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
LeoPanthera 1y ago
If you haven't already, check out the "AT&T Archives" on the AT&T Tech Channel on YouTube. It's an absolutely remarkable collection of American technology history. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDB8B8220DEE96FD9 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDB8B8220DEE96FD9
kevmo314 1y ago
> The reason why we don't have Bell Labs is because we're unwilling to do what it takes to create Bell Labs — giving smart people radical freedom and autonomy. My observation has been that smart people don't want this anymore, at least not within the context of an organization. If you give your employees this freedom, many will take advantage of it and do nothing. Those that are productive, the smartest who thrive in radical freedom and autonomy, instead choose to work independently. After all, why wouldn't they? If they're putting in the innovation the equity is worth way more than a paycheck. Unfortunately, that means innovation that requires a Bell Labs isn't as common. Fortunately, one person now can accomplish way more than a 1960's engineer could and the frontier of innovation is much broader than it used to be. I used to agree with the article's thesis but it's been nearly impossible to hire anyone who wants that freedom and autonomy (if you disagree, <username>@gmail.com). I think it's because those people have outgrown the need for an organization.
- musicale 1y ago
  > If you give your employees this freedom, many will take advantage of it and do nothing This was addressed in the article > Most founders and executives I know balk at this idea. After all, "what's stopping someone from just slacking off?" Kelly would contend that's the wrong question to ask. The right question is, "Why would you expect information theory from someone who needs a babysitter?" also this hilarious quote from Richard Hamming: > "You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as [Tukey] did that many years." I simply slunk out of the office!
  - kevmo314 1y ago
    Yeah, that's the point of my next sentence. Why would someone who comes up with information theory want to give it to an employer? I think an answer to that was a lot clearer in the 1960's when going from idea to product was much harder.
    - wbl 1y ago
      "The only secret worth keeping is out: the damn things work". What products could Shanon have made only knowing information theory? Or CSRO knowing only ODFM solved multipath? Did Bob Metcalf make more money when everyone had Ethernet or if he'd licensed it much more exclusively? It's very hard for a single fundamental result to be a durable competitive advantage compared to wider licensing on nicer terms. That's particularly true when much else goes into the product.
      - kevmo314 1y ago
        Shannon did a lot more than just information theory. In fact, anyone who fits the autonomy persona does because that was part of the definition. Sure, licensing information theory is a bit of a stretch, but Shannon literally built one of the first artificial intelligence machines [1]. 2025 Shannon would've been totally fine building his own company. If you see these idols through their singular achievements, then yes of course it's hard to imagine them outside the context of a lab, but rarely are these innovators one trick ponies. By the way, Bob Metcalfe did indeed start his own company and became pretty successful in doing so. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon#Artificial_Intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon#Artificial_Inte...
        foobarian 1y ago
        Maybe the 2025 Bell Labs is the wider ecosystem of VCs and free floating innovators who end up starting startups instead of doing things in house. I do think there is a lot less low hanging fruit which makes the comparison apples and oranges. Google is like Bell Labs today, and what did they invent? LLMs? Compare that to information theory, the transistor, Unix, etc.
- smj-edison 1y ago
  > it's been nearly impossible to hire anyone who wants that freedom and autonomy Interesting, this is something that I'd love to do! I'm already planning on pursuing custom chip design for molecular simulation, but I don't really want to handle the business side of things. I'd much rather work in a paid lab than get rich and sell it off. Plus, you can do so much more with a team vs being independent. I was also homeschooled though (unschooling and tjed philosophy) so I've always been picking my own projects. Sometimes I wonder if the lack of generalist researchers comes down to education (another thing I'd love to pursue).
- chrsw 1y ago
  Hypothetical slackers didn't stop great work from coming out of the lab. I'm not sure why today would be any different.
- tikhonj 1y ago
  This has not been my experience at all. I worked on a team with substantial autonomy and agency for a few years, and most people—not everyone, sure, but almost—naturally rose to the occasion. People want to do good work and people want to feel like they're doing good work. If you create an environment where they feel trusted and safe, they will rise to your expectations. I had way more trouble with people working too hard but with misaligned ideas of what "good" meant—and stepping on each other's toes—than with anyone slacking off. It's easy to work around somebody who is merely ineffectual! And, sure, a bunch of stuff people tried did not work out. But the things that did more than made up for it. Programming and quantitative modeling are inherently high-leverage activities; unless leadership manages out all the leverage in the name of predictability, the hits are going to more than make to for the flubs.
  - kevmo314 1y ago
    Doing work on a team isn't really what the article is discussing though. I'm referring to the very research-y skunkworks-style autonomy. I am well aware that people in companies can work effectively on teams and that people rise to the occasion in that context. If it didn't work, companies wouldn't hire. But that's not what the article is about.
- Zorass 1y ago
  “Smart people don’t need organizations anymore.” I get it—going solo is more appealing now than ever. But I can’t help thinking: some things really only happen in a kind of shared magnetic field. Not because you can’t do it alone, but because that moment when another smart person lights you up— that doesn’t happen in solo mode.
  - kevmo314 1y ago
    Yeah I completely agree. I see it more like the benefits of going solo have eclipsed the benefits of a team in an organization. I don't think it's a strictly better environment but in many dimensions going solo is now better than any company. I do often long for that shared magnetic field though.
    - Zorass 1y ago
      [dead]
  - OutOfHere 1y ago
    Eh. AI can empower the solo worker more than anyone else.
- jltsiren 1y ago
  Hiring smart people who want freedom and autonomy is easy. Just give them freedom, autonomy, stability, and a good enough salary. The hard part is getting them to contribute to your business. Maybe they will contribute if they find it interesting. But if you expect them to contribute, you are clearly not giving them autonomy. Many of the smartest people I know are good at ignoring bureaucratic requirements, or at least handling them with the minimum effort necessary. And that often includes business, which many of them see as a subcategory of bureaucracy.
- hermitShell 1y ago
  Coming at it the other way, someone is intellectually and philosophically free if they choose to be that way, full stop. They bend their neck to the yoke of an organization in order to gain what they could not gain themselves without access to capital. For a small few, they can access capital and work for equity while themselves being maintained as they work. But I think it's very common that smart people chafe at the restrictions of their organization, not being able to find a more favorable situation.
- insane_dreamer 1y ago
  > If you give your employees this freedom, many will take advantage of it and do nothing. This is 1) untrue, and 2) exactly the kind of cynical "humans-are-untrustworthy" thinking that is one of the reasons why Bell Labs don't exist today. > After all, why wouldn't they? If they're putting in the innovation the equity is worth way more than a paycheck. Because not everyone is driven by a need to make tons of money or the promise of a golden pot at the end of the rainbow. If they're well compensated and have enough to live comfortably (and/or care for their family) while being able to use their talents and innovate within their field, that itself is sufficient. This perverted VC-fueled mantra of "I must continually maximize the amount of money I make from my efforts at the expense of all else" is also part of the reason we don't have Bell Labs today. > it's been nearly impossible to hire anyone who wants that freedom and autonomy (if you disagree ...) I'm one of those people, but given the thinking that you articulate in your post, I'm not surprised you're unable to hire such people.
musicale 1y ago
> The freedom to waste time. The freedom to waste resources. And the autonomy to decide how. As the article notes, several companies (Apple, Google, etc.) could (currently) afford to fund such a lab, but there is no way their management and shareholders would approve. There's a reason for this: research labs seem to benefit competitors as much as (or more than) the companies that fund them. This wasn't an issue for AT&T when it was a monopoly, but it is now. Personally I don't see it as a problem (since one home run innovation could pay for the entire lab) but company managers and shareholders do. On the other hand, Apple does seem to have a de facto AI lab with a good deal of resource waste, so maybe that's good.
- querez 1y ago
  >> The freedom to waste time. The freedom to waste resources. And the autonomy to decide how. > As the article notes, several companies (Apple, Google, etc.) could (currently) afford to fund such a lab, but there is no way their management and shareholders would approve. Google did set up such a lab. The mission of Google Brain was literally to hire smart people and let them do work on whatever they want. ("Google Brain team members set their own research agenda, with the team as a whole maintaining a portfolio of projects across different time horizons and levels of risk." -- https://research.google.com/teams/brain/ https://research.google.com/teams/brain/). Unsurprisingly, Google Brain is the place that originated the Transformer that powers the current AI craze (and many, many, many other AI innovations).
  - areoform 1y ago
    And they shut it down. In 2023. The current tech giants spend a lot of money on "research," where research means optimizing parts of the product line to the 10^nth order of magnitude. Arguably, Google Brain was one such lab. Albeit with more freedom than normal. Which is fine, it's their money. But then they (and the broader public) shouldn't bemoan the lack of fundamental advances and a slowdown in the pace of discovery and change.
    - sidibe 1y ago
      "And they shut it down. In 2023" You mean they renamed it/merged it with another group that has similar freedom and focus on research
musicale 1y ago
> I’m so excited about programs like 1517’s Flux that invests $100k in people, no questions asked and lets them explore for a few months without demanding KPIs or instantaneous progress. If Bell Labs let people xplore for multiple years, a few months probably isn't enough time.
- areoform 1y ago
  That's absolutely true! But we aren't a multi-billion dollar corporation with a war chest in the billions so sadly this is the best we can do. :(
WalterBright 1y ago
A related program was Lockheed's Skunkworks. There have been many attempts to replicate the success of the Skunkworks, but they've all failed because the organizers thought they could improve on it.
- dingaling 1y ago
  McDonnell's Phantom Works is still running, as a division of Boeing now, and seems to be doing innovative work despite the lack of innovation in the name. They were responsible for the tailless X-36, the X-37 space plane and, allegedly, much of the groundwork for the winning NGAD design.
fsckboy 1y ago
>During WW2, Bell Labs reversed engineered and improved on the British Magnetron within 2 months. um... the UK sent the magnetron they had recently invented (1940) to the US in a spirit of wartime cooperation and because their own research and industrial base was already maxed out at the time. pretty sure they sent an owners manual and schematics too. probably even some people? (magnetrons, for generating microwaves, were the essential component for radar)
- areoform 1y ago
  I'm quoting their research summary. By reverse engineering, it means that they figured out why the magnetron worked and then optimized it. They X-Rayed it, found a deviation from plans, then developed a model to understand why there was a deviation in performance. However examples No. 11 and 12 had the number of resonators increased to 8 in order to maximise the efficiency of the valve with the magnetic field provided by the then available permanent magnet, E1189 also incorporated cooling fins to enable the device to be air rather than water cooled. Sample No.12 was taken to the USA by E. Bowen with the Tizard mission and upon testing at Bell Labs produced 10 times the power at 5 times the frequency of the best performing American triodes. A certain amount of confusion arose as the drawings taken by Bowen still showed the 6 resonator anode but an X-Ray picture taken at Bell Labs revealed the presence of 8 resonators. The E1189 or its Navy equivalent NT98 was used in the Naval radar type 271 which was the Allies first operational centimetric radar. The early RCM’s like the E1189 were prone to mode jumping (frequency instability) under pulse conditions and the problem was solved in by means of strapping together alternate segments a process invented by Sayers in 1942. Strapping also considerably increased the magnetron’s efficiency. via, https://www.armms.org/media/uploads/06_armms_nov12_rburman.pdf https://www.armms.org/media/uploads/06_armms_nov12_rburman.p... and another account, https://westviewnews.org/2013/08/01/bell-labs-the-war-years/gcapsis/ https://westviewnews.org/2013/08/01/bell-labs-the-war-years/...
  - fsckboy 1y ago
    >the problem was solved in by means of strapping together alternate segments a process invented by Sayers in 1942 UK physicist James Sayers was part of the original team that developed the magnetron in the UK. He did join the Manhattan Project in 1943, so perhaps before that he came over to the US (to Bell Labs) as part of the radar effort: in that case strengthening Bell Labs contributions, weakening any claim to reverse engineering :) When Lee de Forest "invented" the triode tube amplifier, he had no idea how it worked. When Shockley "invented" the transistor, his team grumbled that he had stolen their work (similar to Steve Jobs, the boss, taking over the Macintosh project when his own Lisa project failed) but in any case, it was not actually understood yet how transistors worked. "How the First Transistor Worked: Even its inventors didn’t fully understand the point-contact transistor" https://spectrum.ieee.org/transistor-history https://spectrum.ieee.org/transistor-history In these cases, the bleeding edge of R and the bleeding edge of D were the same thing. A certain amount of "reverse engineering" would have been mandatory, but it's really "reverse sciencing", "why did my experiment turn out so well", rather than "reverse engineering a competitor's product to understand how did they make it work so well." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Radiation_Laboratory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Radiation_Laboratory In early 1940, Winston Churchill organized what became the Tizard Mission to introduce U.S. researchers to several new technologies the UK had been developing. Among these was the cavity magnetron, a leap forward in the creation of microwaves that made them practical for use in aircraft for the first time. GEC made 12 prototype cavity magnetrons at Wembley in August 1940, and No 12 was sent to America with Bowen via the Tizard Mission, where it was shown on 19 September 1940 in Alfred Loomis’ apartment. The American NDRC Microwave Committee was stunned at the power level produced. However Bell Labs director Mervin Kelly was upset when it was X-rayed and had eight holes rather than the six holes shown on the GEC plans. After contacting (via the transatlantic cable) Dr Eric Megaw, GEC’s vacuum tube expert, Megaw recalled that when he had asked for 12 prototypes he said make 10 with 6 holes, one with 7 and one with 8; and there was no time to amend the drawings. No 12 with 8 holes was chosen for the Tizard Mission. So Bell Labs chose to copy the sample; and while early British magnetrons had six cavities American ones had eight cavities... By 1943 the [Rad Lab] began to deliver a stream of ever-improved devices, which could be produced in huge numbers by the U.S.'s industrial base. At its peak, the Rad Lab employed 4,000 at MIT and several other labs around the world, and designed half of all the radar systems used during the war. that seems to be the source of the reverse engineering idea, and I think Bell Labs' role (which is quite important) was more toward perfecting the devices for manufacture at scale, as it was an arm of a giant leading edge industrial company. I'm not diminishing Bell Labs nor anybody there, it was a lot of smart people.
WalterBright 1y ago
If I was a billionaire, that would be a fun thing to do: 1. find 100 highly motivated scientists and engineers 2. pay them each $1m/year 3. put them in a building 4. see what happens!
- Temporary_31337 1y ago
  To be fair you only need to pay sustenance or opportunity cost so closer to 100k per person should be fine especially outside of USA
  - WalterBright 1y ago
    I figured the $1m would also fund the equipment and supplies they'd need.
    - fuzzfactor 1y ago
      Here's what works for me: 1. Already found X highly motivated scientists and engineers. - in my case people that must like chemicals, electronics, software, stuff like that 2. $1Mil funding x X but it's got to be paid back in 5 years so a viable business model needs to be initiated right away even if the technology is as much as a year out from possible release or commercialization. - each person needs to be worth a million over 5 years, that's hard enough to find, it would be more of a needle in a haystack to find experimentalists where it's good to sink a million per year for a decent length of time, but that can be worked up to. If serious research is involved, stealth must be an option 3. Put them in X number of buildings. - works better than you think, and "nobody's" doing it 4. Some of these are profit centers from day 1, so you could even put franchising on the table ;) - you'd be surprised what people who've already invented a lifetime of stuff could do with the kind of resources that can enable a motivated creator who has yet to make very remarkable progress, so leverage both
      - whywhywhywhy 1y ago
        > but it's got to be paid back in 5 years What happens if they don't though?
johnea 1y ago
Bell Labs wasn't the only loss. HP Labs was another victim of LBO cannibalism.
- ForOldHack 1y ago
  And Xerox, and IBM went through spits and bumps, IBM Boca Raton, IBM Tully Road. Fairchild. Colombia Physics. The Manhattan project. Princeton. Cornell. Bleachey Park.
  - ForOldHack 1y ago
    MIT Media lab.
- bradchris 1y ago
  Do we think that Bell Labs, if it were to avoid being broken up, would have existed in any way the same way today ? Cynically, it likely would have ended up a zombie shell of itself, like IBM Topically, assuming it avoided such a fate and was held in high regard by the industry and employees, this current administration would likely be meddling with every single grant, contract, or project that did not align with the administrations' priorities (see: colleges and research grants)
porridgeraisin 1y ago
A close family member worked at Bell labs during the cold war era. According to them, <paraphrase> The reason is very simple. There was a big picture motivation: the war, followed by the cold war. Once the big picture motivation wasn't there anymore, that sort of organizational structure(or lack of it) does not work the same way. What ends up happening is what a sibling comment has noted: > My observation has been that smart people don't want this anymore, at least not within the context of an organization. If you give your employees this freedom, many will take advantage of it and do nothing. </paraphrase> You might say, but `grep` wasn't used for war! Correct, but it came up as a side effect of working on much larger endeavours that tied into that bigger picture. This has been true for most of recent human history. You might know this already, but Fourier was part of most of Napoleon's expeditions, and his work on decomposing waveforms arose out of his work on the "big picture": ballistics.
- kevinventullo 1y ago
  So what you’re saying is it will take a war fought by autonomous robots on behalf of two massively wealthy adversarial nations in order to finally get us a robot that can do the dishes?
  - ForOldHack 1y ago
    They are called 'Dishwashers'
  - porridgeraisin 1y ago
    Any big picture motivation works, war is just the most timeless human activity. But, the space programs of various countries are also good examples. However, one could of course argue that the space program arose out of competing in the cold war.
- ativzzz 1y ago
  War is simultaneously the best and worst thing humanity can do. Killing each other is a pointless activity, yet the imminent threat of death and the idea of destroying your enemy is the strongest motivator to work together and accomplish innovative and seemingly impossible tasks.
ghaff 1y ago
I think it's complicated. A lot of large US tech corporations do have sizable research arms. Bell Labs is certainly celebrated as part of a telephone monopoly at the time though AT&T actually pulled out of operating system development related to Multics and Unix was pretty much a semi-off-hours project by Ritchie and Thompson. It's true that you tend not to have such dominant firms as in the past. But companies like Microsoft still have significant research organizations. Maybe head-turning research advancements are harder than they used to be. Don't know. But some large tech firms are still putting lots of money into longer-term advances.
- coolcase 1y ago
  Yeah F# and Typescript are very impressive. We just got used to tonnes of innovation. It ain't UNIX but I'd say Typescript is as impressive. An exoskeleton for JS that rivals Haskell. See also VSCode and WSL. And if we ain't impressed with LLMs then wtf! I mean maybe it is just nostalga for the old times. Lots of great stuff is coming out. Quantum computing. Open source revolution producing Tor, Bitcoin, Redis, Linux. I think we are in the Golden age! And it is not all from one place. Which is better.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    The way SQL Server was ported to Linux for example, makes use of DrawBridge. .NET and Java also started as research projects, as did GraalVM, Maxime, LLVM, many GHC features, OCaml improvements,....
- hermitShell 1y ago
  It makes sense that fundamental advances have become more rare as our cumulative scientific progress grows bigger. In order to contribute something fundamentally new, people have to travel further / climb higher in order to see past what has already been done. But US tech corps are probably not as free to pursue lines of thinking with no link to financial benefit. Academia is pretty broken. People are generally not free, they are economically bound to think about things more grounded in practical needs. The shackles of the almighty dollar. So maybe more rare as a function of multiple reasons?
nine_k 1y ago
In a way, it's similar to the connection between "boredom" and creativity. When you don't have much to do, you can do anything, including novel and awesome things. It, of course, takes the right kind of person, or a right group of persons. Give such people a way to not think about the daily bread, and allow them to build what they want to build, study what they want to study, think about what they want to think about. It feels anti-efficient. It looks wasteful. It requires faith in the power of reason and the creative spirit. All these things are hard to pull off in a public corporation, unless it's swimming in excess cash, like AT&T and Google did back in the day. Notably, a lot of European science in 16-19 centuries was advanced by well-off people who did not need to earn their upkeep, the useless, idle class, as some said. Truth be told, not all of them advanced sciences and arts though. OTOH the rational, orderly living, when every minute is filled with some predefined meaning, pre-assigned task, allows very little room for creativity, and gives relatively little incentive to invent new things. Some see it as a noble ideal, and, understandably, a fiscal ideal, too. Maybe a society needs excess sometimes, needs to burn billions on weird stuff, because it gives a chance to to something genuinely new and revolutionary to be born and grow to a viable stage. In a funny way, the same monopolies that gouge prices for the common person also collect the resources necessary for such advances, that benefit that same common person (but not necessarily that same monopoly). It's an unsetllting thought to have.
- conception 1y ago
  This is what I think the biggest benefit to having a significant UBI. Sure, lots of folks who currently are in “bullshit jobs” would sit around and watch one screen or another but! A lot, probably more than we imagine, would get bored and… do something. Often that something would be amazing. But lizard brains gotta keep folks under their thumb and horde resources. Alas.
  - mjevans 1y ago
    UBI isn't going to get us there. Give everyone more cash and the rent-seeking _WILL_ suck harder. Same problem with blindly raising the minimum wage and not instead addressing the root issue. Basic econ 101: inelastic demand means supply can be as expensive as the limited number who are lucky enough to get it are able to afford. Bell Labs, generally think tanks, they work by paying _enough_ to raise someone to the capitalist society equivalent of a Noble. Want to fix the problem for everyone in society, not just an 'intellectual elite'? Gotta regulate the market, put enough supply into it that the price is forced to drop and the average __PURCHASE POWER__ raises even without otherwise raising wages.
detourdog 1y ago
The birthed an industry based on electrical properties that were barely understood. They also ended up needing a very dynamic metering and accounting system. Apple can get away with a more unified workforce because their needs are known and not unique.
- nine_k 1y ago
  If your needs are known, they are also known to competitors. I know that Elon Musk is not a popular figure nowadays, but he very correctly stated that competition is for losers, and the real innovators build things that competitors are just unable to copy for a long time, let alone exceed. SpaceX did that. Google, arguably, did that, too, both with their search and their (piecemeal acquired) ad network. Apple did that with iTunes. Strive to explore the unknown when you can, it may contain yet-unknown lucrative markets. (There is, of course, an opposite play, the IBM PC play, when you create a market explosion by making a thing open, and enjoy a segment of it, which is larger than the whole market would be if you kept it closed.)
  - detourdog 1y ago
    Part of what makes an industry is a shared problem statement. This statement would be based on needs and constraints. I don't believe that the needs are a secret sauce for a company. The approach at solving the shared needs is the secret sauce. I think a better approach is to competition is that it should be irrelevant. One should be developing a solution that solves the problem statement.
alganet 1y ago
What if it's a trick? You start by creating a myth: "this place breeds innovation". Then, ambitious smart people wanting to innovate are drawn to it. Once there, there are two ways of seeing it: "it was just a myth, I'll slack off and forget about it" or "the myth is worthwhile, I'll make it real". One mistake could end it all. For example, letting who doesn't believe outnumber or outwit those who "believe the myth". So, small pieces: A good founding myth (half real, half exaggerated), people willing to make it more real than myth, pruning off who drags the ship down. Let's take that "productivity" from this myth perspective. Some people will try to game it to slack off, some people will try to make the myth of measuring it into reality (fully knowing it's doomed from the start). A sustainable power of belief is quite hard to put into a formula. You don't create it, you find it, feed it, prune it, etc. I suspect many proto Bell Labs analogues exist today. Whenever there's one or two people who believe and work hard, there is a chance of making it work. However, the starting seed is not enough by its own. If you ask me, the free software movement has plenty of supply of it. So many companies realized this already, but can't sequester the myth into another thing (that makes monry), even though free software already makes tons of (non monetary) value.
userbinator 1y ago
The focus on investing in what actually matters instead of being distracted by virtue signaling for ideological culture wars no doubt also had a huge influence.
scrlk 1y ago
As an interesting counterpoint to the idea of "just hire smart people and give them a lab", Ralph Gomory, head of IBM Research (a peer of Bell Labs in its day) from 1970-86 said: > There was a mistaken view that if you just put a lab somewhere, hired a lot of good people, somehow something magical would come out of it for the company, and I didn't believe it. That didn't work. Just doing science in isolation will not in the end, work. [...] It wasn't a good idea just to work on radical things. You can't win on breakthroughs - they're too rare. It just took me years to develop this simple thought: we're always going to work on the in-place technology and make it better, and on the breakthrough technology. [0] [0] https://youtu.be/VQ0PBve6Alk?t=1480 https://youtu.be/VQ0PBve6Alk?t=1480
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- bluGill 1y ago
  Every breakthrough needs many 'man years' of effort to bring to market. research is good but for every researcher we need several thousand who are doing all the hard work of getting the useful things to market in volumn.
  - leoc 1y ago
    Speaking of which https://substack.com/home/post/p-115930233 https://substack.com/home/post/p-115930233 : > John Pierce once said in an interview, asserting the massive importance of development at Bell: >> You see, out of fourteen people in the Bell Laboratories…only one is in the Research Department, and that’s because pursuing an idea takes, I presume, fourteen times as much effort as having it.
    - kqr 1y ago
      It gets even more nuanced. As I understand it, Pierce was not great at the pursuing part and often managed to enthuse others to follow his ideas instead of doing it himself. So maybe it is only natural that someone like Pierce would notice how much effort it takes to follow up.
majormajor 1y ago
You have to be willing to not have things guaranteed to "work." Don't just look at the best case. Investigate and discuss how many versions of Bell Labs didn't "work." If you just look at the success stories, you could say that today's VC model works great too - see OpenAI's work with LLMs based on tech that was comparatively stagnating inside of Google's labs. Especially if nobody remembers Theranos in 50 years. Or you could say that big government-led projects are "obviously" the way to go (moon landing, internet). On paper, after all, both the "labs" and the VC game are about trying to fund lots of ideas so that the hits pay for the (far greater) number of failures. But they both, after producing some hits, have run into copycat management optimization culture that brings rapid counter-productive risk-aversion. (The university has also done this with publish-or-perish.) Victims of their own success. So either: find a new frontier funding source that hasn't seen that cycle yet (it would be ironic if some crypto tycoon started funding a bunch of pure research and that whole bubble led to fundamental breakthroughs after all, hah) or figure out how to break the human desire for control and guaranteed returns.
- p_v_doom 1y ago
  > If you just look at the success stories, you could say that today's VC model works great too Well, thing is actually it is kind of horrible. You are basically handing the choice of what to develop where - something that is actually kind of important to society in general in the hands of unelected rich farts that look into making more money. Doesn't help when many of those farts have specific views and projects of society in the future as a technofascist hellscape. And you could argue the vast majority of what the VC model has given us is scam and services that are very ethically dubious, surveil everyone everywhere, try to squeeze as much money/value out of people, without actually solving many real problems. There is also the thing that the very model is antitethical to solving problems - solving problems costs money, and doesnt bring anything back. Its inherently unprofitable, so any solution is doomed to become more and more enshitified.
- surfingdino 1y ago
  Bell Labs had infinite money. Their owners made money every time someone picked up a phone. Not all businesses are that embedded in the society and those that have boards that might like the idea of funding their own labs have to answer to the higher power--the Wall Street crowd, who will force you to optimise for maximum profit in the shortest amount of time. You get there fastest by cutting costs, especially the costs of long-term research that may not bear fruit. BTW. Why wait 50 years to forget Theranos? https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/10/business/elizabeth-holmes-partner-blood-testing-startup.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/10/business/elizabeth-holmes...
saboot 1y ago
ctrl+f "national lab" = 0 results Hello? We have 17(!) federally funded national labs, full of scientists doing the work this article waxes nostalgic about. Through the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program they afford employee scientists the ability to pursue breakthrough research. However, they are facing major reductions in funding now due to the recent CR and the upcoming congressional budget!
- mepian 1y ago
  From this blog's About page: "In 2010, our team cofounded the Thiel Fellowship with Peter Thiel..." Make of that what you will.
- raziel2701 1y ago
  I was a post doc and applied to an LDRD. It's not a free for all, they, the institution, already knows what topics want to fund and you write your proposal to cater to that. Very similar to tacking "AI" to your pitch these days. It's an illusion that no-strings-attached funding exists. The government has an agenda and you're free to research anything you want, as long as it is one of the pre-determined topics. It's a very political process.
motohagiography 1y ago
really interested in 1517 now. if i could build a new bell labs i would use a hedge fund structure instead of vc. the lab would attract talent and some of it might get invovled in the fund, but the lab would stay afloat on fund profits. the idea is to just let smart people cook for a tryout year, with great incentives. (not too unlike 1517's program as it turns out) the difference with this lab idea and a vc like YC is that vc portfolio companies need products and roadmaps to raise investment and for driving revenue. whereas an asset manager is just investing the money and using the profits to fund engineering research and spinoff product development. firms like this must already exist, maybe i just never hear about their spinoffs or inventions? if not, maybe a small fund could be acquired to build a research division onto it
- potamic 1y ago
  How large a fund would you need to sustain employing like a hundred scientists full time?
  - motohagiography 1y ago
    Assume the average FTE costs $250k all in, so the 100 scientist salary bill is ~$25M. If the fund charges investors 2% of AUM and 20% of profits, factoring in the actual fund costs, hypothetically I'd estimate you'd need an AUM of 2.5B-5B to fund the scientists just on half the management fees. Practically, you wouldn't do it on mgmt fees and you could do it much smaller, distributed differently, and grow/shrink the research division using fund profits instead of management fees. Using fund money to invest in a seed venture arm for the spinoff startups would just be another investment theme. the main question would be, if you're making money on the investment side, what do you need the researchers for, and does that research mission (and their expenses) conflict with being a fiduciary. speculatively you'd need to have the fund as a separate entity owned by a partnership who took profits and invested in the research side separately. at that point, you're back to the original basic problem, where instead of using the profits of a single private fund to support a research team, just make it a bluesky company of researchers who also generate investment strategies, and use venture funding. the essential pattern is: make a large low-risk financial economic engine to fuel a small high risk one. if a VC firm put 80% of their LP's money in an index fund and just did a bunch of small seed investments, the effect could be similar. I'm not an expert in this, but nobody has invented another bell labs since, so the field seems open to new ideas and it's fun to think about.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
teleforce 1y ago
If you want to know the research culture and the environment of Bell Labs from author's first hand experiences, I'd highly recommended this book by Hamming [1]. [1] The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard W. Hamming: https://press.stripe.com/the-art-of-doing-science-and-engineering https://press.stripe.com/the-art-of-doing-science-and-engine...
- badlibrarian 1y ago
  It's been out of stock for nearly a year. Interesting in a post talking about AT&T and Bell Labs to point out that Stripe struggles to maintain an inventory of niche printed books.
  - nemild 1y ago
    You're welcome to borrow my copy, feel free to ping me.
  - nar001 1y ago
    Has it? It seems to be available on Amazon at least.
    - badlibrarian 1y ago
      Not in stock on Amazon. Just a bunch of third party sellers with varying ship dates months out. Nor Powells, other vendors, nor any used copies, nothing by ISBN search either. Google says "in stock" in the search result. I do a search about once a month and click around. I've been doing it long enough that I can actually watch things get worse. No AI result yet, so there's still room to fall.
      - genewitch 1y ago
        Have you checked the art of using the library and other data services?
        1y ago
ArthurStacks 1y ago
[flagged]
ziofill 1y ago
I left a tenured position after getting fed up with several things, among which the same grant proposal getting a “it’s too visionary” from a reviewer and “it’s trivial” from another. If it’s such a coin toss, F off will ya?
- fuzzfactor 1y ago
  See the picture of Bell Labs, 1966? Each person, "principal investigator", has a lab which they built. They only have so much space, and so much budget, but they get a clean slate. And they're all different. But they all have brilliant ideas they need to work out. Advantages of doing it like this were proven earlier, and it was still going strong like this in the 1970's. It was still kind of an academic model. In these decades there was sometimes special schooling where students were groomed to take their place in this exact lab, starting as pre-teens. Nobody imagined it would ever dwindle in any way. This is what places like Exxon and DuPont still looked like in 1979 too. Without being quite an actual monopoly, one thing that's in common is that anything you invent that could be the least bit useful to an employer that size, they can surely afford to make the most of it like few others can. So the scientists could go wild to a certain extent as long as they were guided by the same "north star" that the org as a whole recognized. Whether it feels like you're getting closer or not, that's the direction you must be drawn to. You should have seen some of the stuff they built. Oil companies can have an amazing budget sometimes. When somebody had a breakthrough, or OTOH scuttled a project or transferred to a different technical center, their lab would be cleared out so a completely different project could get underway with a new investigator building from the ground up. This could take a while, but eventually some very well-equipped labs having outstanding capabilities can develop. As an entrepreneur, I liked it down in the basement where they would auction off the used gear from about a dozen of those labs at once, after it had sat in storage for a period of time. After critical mass was achieved, then I had way more fairly current equipment at my immediate disposal than any dozen of my institutional counterparts could benefit from the mainstream way. Turns out I really could get more accomplished and make more progress my own way than if I was actually at a well-funded institution instead. Using equipment they once owned and were successful with to a certain extent, and I usually became only a little bit more advanced, and only some of the time. Most things are truly the "least bit useful" anyway ;)
Apocryphon 1y ago
What was greater, Bell Labs or Xerox PARC?
YouWhy 1y ago
Bell Labs grew to be a dominant player in an age that was characterized by an oversupply of a manageable number highly capable scientists who did not all have a chance for getting anything resembling funding. Today we have a huge oversupply of scientists, however there's too many of them to allow judging for potential, and many are not actually capable of dramatic impact. More generally, a standard critique for "reproducing a golden age" narratives are that the golden age existed within a vastly different ecosystem and indeed - stopped working due to systemic reasons, many of which still apply. In particular, just blaming 'MBA Management' does little to explain why MBAs appeared in the first place, why they were a preferable alternative to other types of large scale management, and indeed how to avoid relapsing to it over a few years and personnel shifts. Overall I am afraid this post, while evocative , did not convince me what makes 1517 specifically so different.
- gsf_emergency 1y ago
  >there's too many of them to allow judging Agree with this in particular as a good symptom of the "tectonic shifts". I usually blame the Baumol effect, i.e., the increasing difficulty of the inherently human task: keeping science education/science educators up-to-date. Especially when faced with the returns on optimizing more "mechanical" processes (including the impressive short term returns on "merely" improving bean-counting or, in Bell Lab's/IBM's later eras, shifting info-processing away from paper) I doubt AI or VCs* have any significant role to play in reducing the friction in the college-to-self-selling-breakthrough pipeline, but they should certainly channel most of their efforts to improving the "ecosystem" first TFA has right ideas such as >Make sure people talk to each other every day. Which already happens here on HN! (Although it's mostly different daily sets of people but.. the same old sets of ideas?) *Not if the main marketable usecase for college students is to game existing metrics. And I don't see no Edtech in the RFS either
  - gsf_emergency 1y ago
    Update: apologies! I see Edtech in YC's latest RFS. They probably think that Edtech targeted at (self-)teachers would be less controversial & more likely to gain organic traction as well!
PicassoCTs 1y ago
So MBA culture would have to go away. Which only happens in wartimes, do or die times. The MBAs get send to the front, the employees get send to the front, the madmen get a chance at being mad and after that its back to building little paper-forts and the madmen in gardensheds or asylums. What a world. If the MBAs would at least not done the cloths and manners of the mad men, parading themselves in skinsuits as "innovative", that would be something.
pmb 1y ago
It was forcibly funded as part of a consent decree from the US government that allowed AT&T to continue as a monopoly as long as they invested a percent of their yearly revenue (or profit? I forget) in research. AT&T, having no interest in changing their incredibly profitable phone network, then proceeded to do fundamental research, as required as a condition of their monopoly. Decades later, AT&T was broken up into the baby bells and the consent decree was removed at that time. Bell Labs' fate was then sealed - it no longer had a required legal minimum funding level, and the baby bells were MBA-run monstrosities that were only interested in "research" that paid dividends in the next 6 months in a predictable fashion. The funding model is an integral part of the story.
- kqr 1y ago
  That sounds plausible, but is not how it is told in The Idea Factory, where the authors explain that both AT&T (running the phone system) and Western Electric (manufacturing equipment for the phone system) had separate research divisions even before this. They then discovered that they were duplicating a lot of research, so they set up one entity to perform research for both the harder and the softer sides of the communication system.
- speleding 1y ago
  The baby bells actually took with them part of Bell Labs, renamed to Bellcore, that survived for another decade or so. I interned there whilst doing my MSc, it was still a great place for a while, with serious research. Wikipedia tells me it still exists in some form, albeit under a different name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconectiv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconectiv
- dsjoerg 1y ago
  Citation needed. What I'm seeing: No evidence of a legal requirement to spend a % of revenue on research: There was no line-item mandate in the consent decree forcing AT&T to invest a specific percentage into Bell Labs. The support for research was strategic and reputational: AT&T used Bell Labs to fend off antitrust pressure and maintain regulatory goodwill.
- whatdhack 1y ago
DonHopkins 1y ago
[flagged]
- ArthurStacks 1y ago
  [flagged]
noosphr 1y ago
>And while a VC fund is limited in what it can do in providing open-ended freedom. It can try to provide a meaningful simulacrum of that space and community, which is why I’m so excited about programs like 1517’s Flux that invests $100k in people, no questions asked and lets them explore for a few months without demanding KPIs or instantaneous progress. >>You can move to the United States. (We will help with visas.) This is no longer viable for anyone who isn't already a US citizen. Not sure how serious about investing in individuals that VC is, but from talking to 16 to 22 year olds _none_ of them want to move to the US with ICE deporting students for saying the wrong thing online - or the perception they do. US universities and businesses are suffering from brain drain that unless reversed in the next 3 years will be a drag on the US economy for decades.
snickmy 1y ago
Shameless plug: I see few people in the comment that have been working there, or have had some first hand experience of that environment. I'd love the chance to interview them. This has been one of my main area of interest for a very long period. Anyone up for it ?
DonHopkins 1y ago
[flagged]
jimnotgym 1y ago
>During WW2, Bell Labs reversed engineered and improved on the British Magnetron within 2 months. Reverse[d] engineered with the benefit of the drawings and technical documents! It is not that complicated a device to reverse engineer anyway, the genius step was inventing it. > invented an acoustic homing torpedo Co-invented > proximity fuzes, They might have got it working effectively, but they didn't invent them > echo-ranging SONAR, A scientist on leave from Bell Labs did very important work on an invention from 20 years earlier > pulse code modulation Not that either >the first anti-aircraft missile (the Nike) The first guided anti-aircraft missile >and the klystron. ...was invented at Stanford Not a great article...
YossarianFrPrez 1y ago
In "The Utopia of Rules" David Graeber (author of "On Bullshit Jobs") suggests that one reason why "bell labs worked" is because the corporate tax rate was relatively high during the golden age of bell labs. This meant that forced with the choice of either a) sending a decent chunk of revenue to the government or b) reinvesting it in R&D as a business expense, AT&T chose the latter. This seems to me to be under-discussed re: Bell Labs.

336 points by areoform 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

If you haven't already, check out the "AT&T Archives" on the AT&T Tech Channel on YouTube. It's an absolutely remarkable collection of American technology history. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDB8B8220DEE96FD9 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDB8B8220DEE96FD9

kevmo314 1y ago

> The reason why we don't have Bell Labs is because we're unwilling to do what it takes to create Bell Labs — giving smart people radical freedom and autonomy. My observation has been that smart people don't want this anymore, at least not within the context of an organization. If you give your employees this freedom, many will take advantage of it and do nothing. Those that are productive, the smartest who thrive in radical freedom and autonomy, instead choose to work independently. After all, why wouldn't they? If they're putting in the innovation the equity is worth way more than a paycheck. Unfortunately, that means innovation that requires a Bell Labs isn't as common. Fortunately, one person now can accomplish way more than a 1960's engineer could and the frontier of innovation is much broader than it used to be. I used to agree with the article's thesis but it's been nearly impossible to hire anyone who wants that freedom and autonomy (if you disagree, <username>@gmail.com). I think it's because those people have outgrown the need for an organization.

musicale 1y ago
> If you give your employees this freedom, many will take advantage of it and do nothing This was addressed in the article > Most founders and executives I know balk at this idea. After all, "what's stopping someone from just slacking off?" Kelly would contend that's the wrong question to ask. The right question is, "Why would you expect information theory from someone who needs a babysitter?" also this hilarious quote from Richard Hamming: > "You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as [Tukey] did that many years." I simply slunk out of the office!
- kevmo314 1y ago
  Yeah, that's the point of my next sentence. Why would someone who comes up with information theory want to give it to an employer? I think an answer to that was a lot clearer in the 1960's when going from idea to product was much harder.
  - wbl 1y ago
    "The only secret worth keeping is out: the damn things work". What products could Shanon have made only knowing information theory? Or CSRO knowing only ODFM solved multipath? Did Bob Metcalf make more money when everyone had Ethernet or if he'd licensed it much more exclusively? It's very hard for a single fundamental result to be a durable competitive advantage compared to wider licensing on nicer terms. That's particularly true when much else goes into the product.
    - kevmo314 1y ago
      Shannon did a lot more than just information theory. In fact, anyone who fits the autonomy persona does because that was part of the definition. Sure, licensing information theory is a bit of a stretch, but Shannon literally built one of the first artificial intelligence machines [1]. 2025 Shannon would've been totally fine building his own company. If you see these idols through their singular achievements, then yes of course it's hard to imagine them outside the context of a lab, but rarely are these innovators one trick ponies. By the way, Bob Metcalfe did indeed start his own company and became pretty successful in doing so. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon#Artificial_Intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon#Artificial_Inte...
      - foobarian 1y ago
        Maybe the 2025 Bell Labs is the wider ecosystem of VCs and free floating innovators who end up starting startups instead of doing things in house. I do think there is a lot less low hanging fruit which makes the comparison apples and oranges. Google is like Bell Labs today, and what did they invent? LLMs? Compare that to information theory, the transistor, Unix, etc.
smj-edison 1y ago
> it's been nearly impossible to hire anyone who wants that freedom and autonomy Interesting, this is something that I'd love to do! I'm already planning on pursuing custom chip design for molecular simulation, but I don't really want to handle the business side of things. I'd much rather work in a paid lab than get rich and sell it off. Plus, you can do so much more with a team vs being independent. I was also homeschooled though (unschooling and tjed philosophy) so I've always been picking my own projects. Sometimes I wonder if the lack of generalist researchers comes down to education (another thing I'd love to pursue).
chrsw 1y ago
Hypothetical slackers didn't stop great work from coming out of the lab. I'm not sure why today would be any different.
tikhonj 1y ago
This has not been my experience at all. I worked on a team with substantial autonomy and agency for a few years, and most people—not everyone, sure, but almost—naturally rose to the occasion. People want to do good work and people want to feel like they're doing good work. If you create an environment where they feel trusted and safe, they will rise to your expectations. I had way more trouble with people working too hard but with misaligned ideas of what "good" meant—and stepping on each other's toes—than with anyone slacking off. It's easy to work around somebody who is merely ineffectual! And, sure, a bunch of stuff people tried did not work out. But the things that did more than made up for it. Programming and quantitative modeling are inherently high-leverage activities; unless leadership manages out all the leverage in the name of predictability, the hits are going to more than make to for the flubs.
- kevmo314 1y ago
  Doing work on a team isn't really what the article is discussing though. I'm referring to the very research-y skunkworks-style autonomy. I am well aware that people in companies can work effectively on teams and that people rise to the occasion in that context. If it didn't work, companies wouldn't hire. But that's not what the article is about.
Zorass 1y ago
“Smart people don’t need organizations anymore.” I get it—going solo is more appealing now than ever. But I can’t help thinking: some things really only happen in a kind of shared magnetic field. Not because you can’t do it alone, but because that moment when another smart person lights you up— that doesn’t happen in solo mode.
- kevmo314 1y ago
  Yeah I completely agree. I see it more like the benefits of going solo have eclipsed the benefits of a team in an organization. I don't think it's a strictly better environment but in many dimensions going solo is now better than any company. I do often long for that shared magnetic field though.
  - Zorass 1y ago
    [dead]
- OutOfHere 1y ago
  Eh. AI can empower the solo worker more than anyone else.
jltsiren 1y ago
Hiring smart people who want freedom and autonomy is easy. Just give them freedom, autonomy, stability, and a good enough salary. The hard part is getting them to contribute to your business. Maybe they will contribute if they find it interesting. But if you expect them to contribute, you are clearly not giving them autonomy. Many of the smartest people I know are good at ignoring bureaucratic requirements, or at least handling them with the minimum effort necessary. And that often includes business, which many of them see as a subcategory of bureaucracy.
hermitShell 1y ago
Coming at it the other way, someone is intellectually and philosophically free if they choose to be that way, full stop. They bend their neck to the yoke of an organization in order to gain what they could not gain themselves without access to capital. For a small few, they can access capital and work for equity while themselves being maintained as they work. But I think it's very common that smart people chafe at the restrictions of their organization, not being able to find a more favorable situation.
insane_dreamer 1y ago
> If you give your employees this freedom, many will take advantage of it and do nothing. This is 1) untrue, and 2) exactly the kind of cynical "humans-are-untrustworthy" thinking that is one of the reasons why Bell Labs don't exist today. > After all, why wouldn't they? If they're putting in the innovation the equity is worth way more than a paycheck. Because not everyone is driven by a need to make tons of money or the promise of a golden pot at the end of the rainbow. If they're well compensated and have enough to live comfortably (and/or care for their family) while being able to use their talents and innovate within their field, that itself is sufficient. This perverted VC-fueled mantra of "I must continually maximize the amount of money I make from my efforts at the expense of all else" is also part of the reason we don't have Bell Labs today. > it's been nearly impossible to hire anyone who wants that freedom and autonomy (if you disagree ...) I'm one of those people, but given the thinking that you articulate in your post, I'm not surprised you're unable to hire such people.

musicale 1y ago

> The freedom to waste time. The freedom to waste resources. And the autonomy to decide how. As the article notes, several companies (Apple, Google, etc.) could (currently) afford to fund such a lab, but there is no way their management and shareholders would approve. There's a reason for this: research labs seem to benefit competitors as much as (or more than) the companies that fund them. This wasn't an issue for AT&T when it was a monopoly, but it is now. Personally I don't see it as a problem (since one home run innovation could pay for the entire lab) but company managers and shareholders do. On the other hand, Apple does seem to have a de facto AI lab with a good deal of resource waste, so maybe that's good.

querez 1y ago
>> The freedom to waste time. The freedom to waste resources. And the autonomy to decide how. > As the article notes, several companies (Apple, Google, etc.) could (currently) afford to fund such a lab, but there is no way their management and shareholders would approve. Google did set up such a lab. The mission of Google Brain was literally to hire smart people and let them do work on whatever they want. ("Google Brain team members set their own research agenda, with the team as a whole maintaining a portfolio of projects across different time horizons and levels of risk." -- https://research.google.com/teams/brain/ https://research.google.com/teams/brain/). Unsurprisingly, Google Brain is the place that originated the Transformer that powers the current AI craze (and many, many, many other AI innovations).
- areoform 1y ago
  And they shut it down. In 2023. The current tech giants spend a lot of money on "research," where research means optimizing parts of the product line to the 10^nth order of magnitude. Arguably, Google Brain was one such lab. Albeit with more freedom than normal. Which is fine, it's their money. But then they (and the broader public) shouldn't bemoan the lack of fundamental advances and a slowdown in the pace of discovery and change.
  - sidibe 1y ago
    "And they shut it down. In 2023" You mean they renamed it/merged it with another group that has similar freedom and focus on research

musicale 1y ago

> I’m so excited about programs like 1517’s Flux that invests $100k in people, no questions asked and lets them explore for a few months without demanding KPIs or instantaneous progress. If Bell Labs let people xplore for multiple years, a few months probably isn't enough time.

areoform 1y ago
That's absolutely true! But we aren't a multi-billion dollar corporation with a war chest in the billions so sadly this is the best we can do. :(

WalterBright 1y ago

A related program was Lockheed's Skunkworks. There have been many attempts to replicate the success of the Skunkworks, but they've all failed because the organizers thought they could improve on it.

dingaling 1y ago
McDonnell's Phantom Works is still running, as a division of Boeing now, and seems to be doing innovative work despite the lack of innovation in the name. They were responsible for the tailless X-36, the X-37 space plane and, allegedly, much of the groundwork for the winning NGAD design.

fsckboy 1y ago

>During WW2, Bell Labs reversed engineered and improved on the British Magnetron within 2 months. um... the UK sent the magnetron they had recently invented (1940) to the US in a spirit of wartime cooperation and because their own research and industrial base was already maxed out at the time. pretty sure they sent an owners manual and schematics too. probably even some people? (magnetrons, for generating microwaves, were the essential component for radar)

areoform 1y ago
I'm quoting their research summary. By reverse engineering, it means that they figured out why the magnetron worked and then optimized it. They X-Rayed it, found a deviation from plans, then developed a model to understand why there was a deviation in performance. However examples No. 11 and 12 had the number of resonators increased to 8 in order to maximise the efficiency of the valve with the magnetic field provided by the then available permanent magnet, E1189 also incorporated cooling fins to enable the device to be air rather than water cooled. Sample No.12 was taken to the USA by E. Bowen with the Tizard mission and upon testing at Bell Labs produced 10 times the power at 5 times the frequency of the best performing American triodes. A certain amount of confusion arose as the drawings taken by Bowen still showed the 6 resonator anode but an X-Ray picture taken at Bell Labs revealed the presence of 8 resonators. The E1189 or its Navy equivalent NT98 was used in the Naval radar type 271 which was the Allies first operational centimetric radar. The early RCM’s like the E1189 were prone to mode jumping (frequency instability) under pulse conditions and the problem was solved in by means of strapping together alternate segments a process invented by Sayers in 1942. Strapping also considerably increased the magnetron’s efficiency. via, https://www.armms.org/media/uploads/06_armms_nov12_rburman.pdf https://www.armms.org/media/uploads/06_armms_nov12_rburman.p... and another account, https://westviewnews.org/2013/08/01/bell-labs-the-war-years/gcapsis/ https://westviewnews.org/2013/08/01/bell-labs-the-war-years/...
- fsckboy 1y ago
  >the problem was solved in by means of strapping together alternate segments a process invented by Sayers in 1942 UK physicist James Sayers was part of the original team that developed the magnetron in the UK. He did join the Manhattan Project in 1943, so perhaps before that he came over to the US (to Bell Labs) as part of the radar effort: in that case strengthening Bell Labs contributions, weakening any claim to reverse engineering :) When Lee de Forest "invented" the triode tube amplifier, he had no idea how it worked. When Shockley "invented" the transistor, his team grumbled that he had stolen their work (similar to Steve Jobs, the boss, taking over the Macintosh project when his own Lisa project failed) but in any case, it was not actually understood yet how transistors worked. "How the First Transistor Worked: Even its inventors didn’t fully understand the point-contact transistor" https://spectrum.ieee.org/transistor-history https://spectrum.ieee.org/transistor-history In these cases, the bleeding edge of R and the bleeding edge of D were the same thing. A certain amount of "reverse engineering" would have been mandatory, but it's really "reverse sciencing", "why did my experiment turn out so well", rather than "reverse engineering a competitor's product to understand how did they make it work so well." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Radiation_Laboratory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Radiation_Laboratory In early 1940, Winston Churchill organized what became the Tizard Mission to introduce U.S. researchers to several new technologies the UK had been developing. Among these was the cavity magnetron, a leap forward in the creation of microwaves that made them practical for use in aircraft for the first time. GEC made 12 prototype cavity magnetrons at Wembley in August 1940, and No 12 was sent to America with Bowen via the Tizard Mission, where it was shown on 19 September 1940 in Alfred Loomis’ apartment. The American NDRC Microwave Committee was stunned at the power level produced. However Bell Labs director Mervin Kelly was upset when it was X-rayed and had eight holes rather than the six holes shown on the GEC plans. After contacting (via the transatlantic cable) Dr Eric Megaw, GEC’s vacuum tube expert, Megaw recalled that when he had asked for 12 prototypes he said make 10 with 6 holes, one with 7 and one with 8; and there was no time to amend the drawings. No 12 with 8 holes was chosen for the Tizard Mission. So Bell Labs chose to copy the sample; and while early British magnetrons had six cavities American ones had eight cavities... By 1943 the [Rad Lab] began to deliver a stream of ever-improved devices, which could be produced in huge numbers by the U.S.'s industrial base. At its peak, the Rad Lab employed 4,000 at MIT and several other labs around the world, and designed half of all the radar systems used during the war. that seems to be the source of the reverse engineering idea, and I think Bell Labs' role (which is quite important) was more toward perfecting the devices for manufacture at scale, as it was an arm of a giant leading edge industrial company. I'm not diminishing Bell Labs nor anybody there, it was a lot of smart people.

WalterBright 1y ago

If I was a billionaire, that would be a fun thing to do: 1. find 100 highly motivated scientists and engineers 2. pay them each $1m/year 3. put them in a building 4. see what happens!

Temporary_31337 1y ago
To be fair you only need to pay sustenance or opportunity cost so closer to 100k per person should be fine especially outside of USA
- WalterBright 1y ago
  I figured the $1m would also fund the equipment and supplies they'd need.
  - fuzzfactor 1y ago
    Here's what works for me: 1. Already found X highly motivated scientists and engineers. - in my case people that must like chemicals, electronics, software, stuff like that 2. $1Mil funding x X but it's got to be paid back in 5 years so a viable business model needs to be initiated right away even if the technology is as much as a year out from possible release or commercialization. - each person needs to be worth a million over 5 years, that's hard enough to find, it would be more of a needle in a haystack to find experimentalists where it's good to sink a million per year for a decent length of time, but that can be worked up to. If serious research is involved, stealth must be an option 3. Put them in X number of buildings. - works better than you think, and "nobody's" doing it 4. Some of these are profit centers from day 1, so you could even put franchising on the table ;) - you'd be surprised what people who've already invented a lifetime of stuff could do with the kind of resources that can enable a motivated creator who has yet to make very remarkable progress, so leverage both
    - whywhywhywhy 1y ago
      > but it's got to be paid back in 5 years What happens if they don't though?

johnea 1y ago

Bell Labs wasn't the only loss. HP Labs was another victim of LBO cannibalism.

ForOldHack 1y ago
And Xerox, and IBM went through spits and bumps, IBM Boca Raton, IBM Tully Road. Fairchild. Colombia Physics. The Manhattan project. Princeton. Cornell. Bleachey Park.
- ForOldHack 1y ago
  MIT Media lab.
bradchris 1y ago
Do we think that Bell Labs, if it were to avoid being broken up, would have existed in any way the same way today ? Cynically, it likely would have ended up a zombie shell of itself, like IBM Topically, assuming it avoided such a fate and was held in high regard by the industry and employees, this current administration would likely be meddling with every single grant, contract, or project that did not align with the administrations' priorities (see: colleges and research grants)

porridgeraisin 1y ago

A close family member worked at Bell labs during the cold war era. According to them, <paraphrase> The reason is very simple. There was a big picture motivation: the war, followed by the cold war. Once the big picture motivation wasn't there anymore, that sort of organizational structure(or lack of it) does not work the same way. What ends up happening is what a sibling comment has noted: > My observation has been that smart people don't want this anymore, at least not within the context of an organization. If you give your employees this freedom, many will take advantage of it and do nothing. </paraphrase> You might say, but `grep` wasn't used for war! Correct, but it came up as a side effect of working on much larger endeavours that tied into that bigger picture. This has been true for most of recent human history. You might know this already, but Fourier was part of most of Napoleon's expeditions, and his work on decomposing waveforms arose out of his work on the "big picture": ballistics.

kevinventullo 1y ago
So what you’re saying is it will take a war fought by autonomous robots on behalf of two massively wealthy adversarial nations in order to finally get us a robot that can do the dishes?
- ForOldHack 1y ago
  They are called 'Dishwashers'
- porridgeraisin 1y ago
  Any big picture motivation works, war is just the most timeless human activity. But, the space programs of various countries are also good examples. However, one could of course argue that the space program arose out of competing in the cold war.
ativzzz 1y ago
War is simultaneously the best and worst thing humanity can do. Killing each other is a pointless activity, yet the imminent threat of death and the idea of destroying your enemy is the strongest motivator to work together and accomplish innovative and seemingly impossible tasks.

ghaff 1y ago

I think it's complicated. A lot of large US tech corporations do have sizable research arms. Bell Labs is certainly celebrated as part of a telephone monopoly at the time though AT&T actually pulled out of operating system development related to Multics and Unix was pretty much a semi-off-hours project by Ritchie and Thompson. It's true that you tend not to have such dominant firms as in the past. But companies like Microsoft still have significant research organizations. Maybe head-turning research advancements are harder than they used to be. Don't know. But some large tech firms are still putting lots of money into longer-term advances.

coolcase 1y ago
Yeah F# and Typescript are very impressive. We just got used to tonnes of innovation. It ain't UNIX but I'd say Typescript is as impressive. An exoskeleton for JS that rivals Haskell. See also VSCode and WSL. And if we ain't impressed with LLMs then wtf! I mean maybe it is just nostalga for the old times. Lots of great stuff is coming out. Quantum computing. Open source revolution producing Tor, Bitcoin, Redis, Linux. I think we are in the Golden age! And it is not all from one place. Which is better.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  The way SQL Server was ported to Linux for example, makes use of DrawBridge. .NET and Java also started as research projects, as did GraalVM, Maxime, LLVM, many GHC features, OCaml improvements,....
hermitShell 1y ago
It makes sense that fundamental advances have become more rare as our cumulative scientific progress grows bigger. In order to contribute something fundamentally new, people have to travel further / climb higher in order to see past what has already been done. But US tech corps are probably not as free to pursue lines of thinking with no link to financial benefit. Academia is pretty broken. People are generally not free, they are economically bound to think about things more grounded in practical needs. The shackles of the almighty dollar. So maybe more rare as a function of multiple reasons?

nine_k 1y ago

In a way, it's similar to the connection between "boredom" and creativity. When you don't have much to do, you can do anything, including novel and awesome things. It, of course, takes the right kind of person, or a right group of persons. Give such people a way to not think about the daily bread, and allow them to build what they want to build, study what they want to study, think about what they want to think about. It feels anti-efficient. It looks wasteful. It requires faith in the power of reason and the creative spirit. All these things are hard to pull off in a public corporation, unless it's swimming in excess cash, like AT&T and Google did back in the day. Notably, a lot of European science in 16-19 centuries was advanced by well-off people who did not need to earn their upkeep, the useless, idle class, as some said. Truth be told, not all of them advanced sciences and arts though. OTOH the rational, orderly living, when every minute is filled with some predefined meaning, pre-assigned task, allows very little room for creativity, and gives relatively little incentive to invent new things. Some see it as a noble ideal, and, understandably, a fiscal ideal, too. Maybe a society needs excess sometimes, needs to burn billions on weird stuff, because it gives a chance to to something genuinely new and revolutionary to be born and grow to a viable stage. In a funny way, the same monopolies that gouge prices for the common person also collect the resources necessary for such advances, that benefit that same common person (but not necessarily that same monopoly). It's an unsetllting thought to have.

conception 1y ago
This is what I think the biggest benefit to having a significant UBI. Sure, lots of folks who currently are in “bullshit jobs” would sit around and watch one screen or another but! A lot, probably more than we imagine, would get bored and… do something. Often that something would be amazing. But lizard brains gotta keep folks under their thumb and horde resources. Alas.
- mjevans 1y ago
  UBI isn't going to get us there. Give everyone more cash and the rent-seeking _WILL_ suck harder. Same problem with blindly raising the minimum wage and not instead addressing the root issue. Basic econ 101: inelastic demand means supply can be as expensive as the limited number who are lucky enough to get it are able to afford. Bell Labs, generally think tanks, they work by paying _enough_ to raise someone to the capitalist society equivalent of a Noble. Want to fix the problem for everyone in society, not just an 'intellectual elite'? Gotta regulate the market, put enough supply into it that the price is forced to drop and the average __PURCHASE POWER__ raises even without otherwise raising wages.

detourdog 1y ago

The birthed an industry based on electrical properties that were barely understood. They also ended up needing a very dynamic metering and accounting system. Apple can get away with a more unified workforce because their needs are known and not unique.

nine_k 1y ago
If your needs are known, they are also known to competitors. I know that Elon Musk is not a popular figure nowadays, but he very correctly stated that competition is for losers, and the real innovators build things that competitors are just unable to copy for a long time, let alone exceed. SpaceX did that. Google, arguably, did that, too, both with their search and their (piecemeal acquired) ad network. Apple did that with iTunes. Strive to explore the unknown when you can, it may contain yet-unknown lucrative markets. (There is, of course, an opposite play, the IBM PC play, when you create a market explosion by making a thing open, and enjoy a segment of it, which is larger than the whole market would be if you kept it closed.)
- detourdog 1y ago
  Part of what makes an industry is a shared problem statement. This statement would be based on needs and constraints. I don't believe that the needs are a secret sauce for a company. The approach at solving the shared needs is the secret sauce. I think a better approach is to competition is that it should be irrelevant. One should be developing a solution that solves the problem statement.

alganet 1y ago

What if it's a trick? You start by creating a myth: "this place breeds innovation". Then, ambitious smart people wanting to innovate are drawn to it. Once there, there are two ways of seeing it: "it was just a myth, I'll slack off and forget about it" or "the myth is worthwhile, I'll make it real". One mistake could end it all. For example, letting who doesn't believe outnumber or outwit those who "believe the myth". So, small pieces: A good founding myth (half real, half exaggerated), people willing to make it more real than myth, pruning off who drags the ship down. Let's take that "productivity" from this myth perspective. Some people will try to game it to slack off, some people will try to make the myth of measuring it into reality (fully knowing it's doomed from the start). A sustainable power of belief is quite hard to put into a formula. You don't create it, you find it, feed it, prune it, etc. I suspect many proto Bell Labs analogues exist today. Whenever there's one or two people who believe and work hard, there is a chance of making it work. However, the starting seed is not enough by its own. If you ask me, the free software movement has plenty of supply of it. So many companies realized this already, but can't sequester the myth into another thing (that makes monry), even though free software already makes tons of (non monetary) value.

userbinator 1y ago

The focus on investing in what actually matters instead of being distracted by virtue signaling for ideological culture wars no doubt also had a huge influence.

scrlk 1y ago

As an interesting counterpoint to the idea of "just hire smart people and give them a lab", Ralph Gomory, head of IBM Research (a peer of Bell Labs in its day) from 1970-86 said: > There was a mistaken view that if you just put a lab somewhere, hired a lot of good people, somehow something magical would come out of it for the company, and I didn't believe it. That didn't work. Just doing science in isolation will not in the end, work. [...] It wasn't a good idea just to work on radical things. You can't win on breakthroughs - they're too rare. It just took me years to develop this simple thought: we're always going to work on the in-place technology and make it better, and on the breakthrough technology. [0] [0] https://youtu.be/VQ0PBve6Alk?t=1480 https://youtu.be/VQ0PBve6Alk?t=1480

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
bluGill 1y ago
Every breakthrough needs many 'man years' of effort to bring to market. research is good but for every researcher we need several thousand who are doing all the hard work of getting the useful things to market in volumn.
- leoc 1y ago
  Speaking of which https://substack.com/home/post/p-115930233 https://substack.com/home/post/p-115930233 : > John Pierce once said in an interview, asserting the massive importance of development at Bell: >> You see, out of fourteen people in the Bell Laboratories…only one is in the Research Department, and that’s because pursuing an idea takes, I presume, fourteen times as much effort as having it.
  - kqr 1y ago
    It gets even more nuanced. As I understand it, Pierce was not great at the pursuing part and often managed to enthuse others to follow his ideas instead of doing it himself. So maybe it is only natural that someone like Pierce would notice how much effort it takes to follow up.

majormajor 1y ago

You have to be willing to not have things guaranteed to "work." Don't just look at the best case. Investigate and discuss how many versions of Bell Labs didn't "work." If you just look at the success stories, you could say that today's VC model works great too - see OpenAI's work with LLMs based on tech that was comparatively stagnating inside of Google's labs. Especially if nobody remembers Theranos in 50 years. Or you could say that big government-led projects are "obviously" the way to go (moon landing, internet). On paper, after all, both the "labs" and the VC game are about trying to fund lots of ideas so that the hits pay for the (far greater) number of failures. But they both, after producing some hits, have run into copycat management optimization culture that brings rapid counter-productive risk-aversion. (The university has also done this with publish-or-perish.) Victims of their own success. So either: find a new frontier funding source that hasn't seen that cycle yet (it would be ironic if some crypto tycoon started funding a bunch of pure research and that whole bubble led to fundamental breakthroughs after all, hah) or figure out how to break the human desire for control and guaranteed returns.

p_v_doom 1y ago
> If you just look at the success stories, you could say that today's VC model works great too Well, thing is actually it is kind of horrible. You are basically handing the choice of what to develop where - something that is actually kind of important to society in general in the hands of unelected rich farts that look into making more money. Doesn't help when many of those farts have specific views and projects of society in the future as a technofascist hellscape. And you could argue the vast majority of what the VC model has given us is scam and services that are very ethically dubious, surveil everyone everywhere, try to squeeze as much money/value out of people, without actually solving many real problems. There is also the thing that the very model is antitethical to solving problems - solving problems costs money, and doesnt bring anything back. Its inherently unprofitable, so any solution is doomed to become more and more enshitified.
surfingdino 1y ago
Bell Labs had infinite money. Their owners made money every time someone picked up a phone. Not all businesses are that embedded in the society and those that have boards that might like the idea of funding their own labs have to answer to the higher power--the Wall Street crowd, who will force you to optimise for maximum profit in the shortest amount of time. You get there fastest by cutting costs, especially the costs of long-term research that may not bear fruit. BTW. Why wait 50 years to forget Theranos? https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/10/business/elizabeth-holmes-partner-blood-testing-startup.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/10/business/elizabeth-holmes...

saboot 1y ago

ctrl+f "national lab" = 0 results Hello? We have 17(!) federally funded national labs, full of scientists doing the work this article waxes nostalgic about. Through the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program they afford employee scientists the ability to pursue breakthrough research. However, they are facing major reductions in funding now due to the recent CR and the upcoming congressional budget!

mepian 1y ago
From this blog's About page: "In 2010, our team cofounded the Thiel Fellowship with Peter Thiel..." Make of that what you will.
raziel2701 1y ago
I was a post doc and applied to an LDRD. It's not a free for all, they, the institution, already knows what topics want to fund and you write your proposal to cater to that. Very similar to tacking "AI" to your pitch these days. It's an illusion that no-strings-attached funding exists. The government has an agenda and you're free to research anything you want, as long as it is one of the pre-determined topics. It's a very political process.

motohagiography 1y ago

really interested in 1517 now. if i could build a new bell labs i would use a hedge fund structure instead of vc. the lab would attract talent and some of it might get invovled in the fund, but the lab would stay afloat on fund profits. the idea is to just let smart people cook for a tryout year, with great incentives. (not too unlike 1517's program as it turns out) the difference with this lab idea and a vc like YC is that vc portfolio companies need products and roadmaps to raise investment and for driving revenue. whereas an asset manager is just investing the money and using the profits to fund engineering research and spinoff product development. firms like this must already exist, maybe i just never hear about their spinoffs or inventions? if not, maybe a small fund could be acquired to build a research division onto it

potamic 1y ago
How large a fund would you need to sustain employing like a hundred scientists full time?
- motohagiography 1y ago
  Assume the average FTE costs $250k all in, so the 100 scientist salary bill is ~$25M. If the fund charges investors 2% of AUM and 20% of profits, factoring in the actual fund costs, hypothetically I'd estimate you'd need an AUM of 2.5B-5B to fund the scientists just on half the management fees. Practically, you wouldn't do it on mgmt fees and you could do it much smaller, distributed differently, and grow/shrink the research division using fund profits instead of management fees. Using fund money to invest in a seed venture arm for the spinoff startups would just be another investment theme. the main question would be, if you're making money on the investment side, what do you need the researchers for, and does that research mission (and their expenses) conflict with being a fiduciary. speculatively you'd need to have the fund as a separate entity owned by a partnership who took profits and invested in the research side separately. at that point, you're back to the original basic problem, where instead of using the profits of a single private fund to support a research team, just make it a bluesky company of researchers who also generate investment strategies, and use venture funding. the essential pattern is: make a large low-risk financial economic engine to fuel a small high risk one. if a VC firm put 80% of their LP's money in an index fund and just did a bunch of small seed investments, the effect could be similar. I'm not an expert in this, but nobody has invented another bell labs since, so the field seems open to new ideas and it's fun to think about.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

teleforce 1y ago

If you want to know the research culture and the environment of Bell Labs from author's first hand experiences, I'd highly recommended this book by Hamming [1]. [1] The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard W. Hamming: https://press.stripe.com/the-art-of-doing-science-and-engineering https://press.stripe.com/the-art-of-doing-science-and-engine...

badlibrarian 1y ago
It's been out of stock for nearly a year. Interesting in a post talking about AT&T and Bell Labs to point out that Stripe struggles to maintain an inventory of niche printed books.
- nemild 1y ago
  You're welcome to borrow my copy, feel free to ping me.
- nar001 1y ago
  Has it? It seems to be available on Amazon at least.
  - badlibrarian 1y ago
    Not in stock on Amazon. Just a bunch of third party sellers with varying ship dates months out. Nor Powells, other vendors, nor any used copies, nothing by ISBN search either. Google says "in stock" in the search result. I do a search about once a month and click around. I've been doing it long enough that I can actually watch things get worse. No AI result yet, so there's still room to fall.
    - genewitch 1y ago
      Have you checked the art of using the library and other data services?
      - 1y ago

ArthurStacks 1y ago

[flagged]

ziofill 1y ago

I left a tenured position after getting fed up with several things, among which the same grant proposal getting a “it’s too visionary” from a reviewer and “it’s trivial” from another. If it’s such a coin toss, F off will ya?

fuzzfactor 1y ago
See the picture of Bell Labs, 1966? Each person, "principal investigator", has a lab which they built. They only have so much space, and so much budget, but they get a clean slate. And they're all different. But they all have brilliant ideas they need to work out. Advantages of doing it like this were proven earlier, and it was still going strong like this in the 1970's. It was still kind of an academic model. In these decades there was sometimes special schooling where students were groomed to take their place in this exact lab, starting as pre-teens. Nobody imagined it would ever dwindle in any way. This is what places like Exxon and DuPont still looked like in 1979 too. Without being quite an actual monopoly, one thing that's in common is that anything you invent that could be the least bit useful to an employer that size, they can surely afford to make the most of it like few others can. So the scientists could go wild to a certain extent as long as they were guided by the same "north star" that the org as a whole recognized. Whether it feels like you're getting closer or not, that's the direction you must be drawn to. You should have seen some of the stuff they built. Oil companies can have an amazing budget sometimes. When somebody had a breakthrough, or OTOH scuttled a project or transferred to a different technical center, their lab would be cleared out so a completely different project could get underway with a new investigator building from the ground up. This could take a while, but eventually some very well-equipped labs having outstanding capabilities can develop. As an entrepreneur, I liked it down in the basement where they would auction off the used gear from about a dozen of those labs at once, after it had sat in storage for a period of time. After critical mass was achieved, then I had way more fairly current equipment at my immediate disposal than any dozen of my institutional counterparts could benefit from the mainstream way. Turns out I really could get more accomplished and make more progress my own way than if I was actually at a well-funded institution instead. Using equipment they once owned and were successful with to a certain extent, and I usually became only a little bit more advanced, and only some of the time. Most things are truly the "least bit useful" anyway ;)

Apocryphon 1y ago

What was greater, Bell Labs or Xerox PARC?

YouWhy 1y ago

Bell Labs grew to be a dominant player in an age that was characterized by an oversupply of a manageable number highly capable scientists who did not all have a chance for getting anything resembling funding. Today we have a huge oversupply of scientists, however there's too many of them to allow judging for potential, and many are not actually capable of dramatic impact. More generally, a standard critique for "reproducing a golden age" narratives are that the golden age existed within a vastly different ecosystem and indeed - stopped working due to systemic reasons, many of which still apply. In particular, just blaming 'MBA Management' does little to explain why MBAs appeared in the first place, why they were a preferable alternative to other types of large scale management, and indeed how to avoid relapsing to it over a few years and personnel shifts. Overall I am afraid this post, while evocative , did not convince me what makes 1517 specifically so different.

gsf_emergency 1y ago
>there's too many of them to allow judging Agree with this in particular as a good symptom of the "tectonic shifts". I usually blame the Baumol effect, i.e., the increasing difficulty of the inherently human task: keeping science education/science educators up-to-date. Especially when faced with the returns on optimizing more "mechanical" processes (including the impressive short term returns on "merely" improving bean-counting or, in Bell Lab's/IBM's later eras, shifting info-processing away from paper) I doubt AI or VCs* have any significant role to play in reducing the friction in the college-to-self-selling-breakthrough pipeline, but they should certainly channel most of their efforts to improving the "ecosystem" first TFA has right ideas such as >Make sure people talk to each other every day. Which already happens here on HN! (Although it's mostly different daily sets of people but.. the same old sets of ideas?) *Not if the main marketable usecase for college students is to game existing metrics. And I don't see no Edtech in the RFS either
- gsf_emergency 1y ago
  Update: apologies! I see Edtech in YC's latest RFS. They probably think that Edtech targeted at (self-)teachers would be less controversial & more likely to gain organic traction as well!

PicassoCTs 1y ago

So MBA culture would have to go away. Which only happens in wartimes, do or die times. The MBAs get send to the front, the employees get send to the front, the madmen get a chance at being mad and after that its back to building little paper-forts and the madmen in gardensheds or asylums. What a world. If the MBAs would at least not done the cloths and manners of the mad men, parading themselves in skinsuits as "innovative", that would be something.

pmb 1y ago

It was forcibly funded as part of a consent decree from the US government that allowed AT&T to continue as a monopoly as long as they invested a percent of their yearly revenue (or profit? I forget) in research. AT&T, having no interest in changing their incredibly profitable phone network, then proceeded to do fundamental research, as required as a condition of their monopoly. Decades later, AT&T was broken up into the baby bells and the consent decree was removed at that time. Bell Labs' fate was then sealed - it no longer had a required legal minimum funding level, and the baby bells were MBA-run monstrosities that were only interested in "research" that paid dividends in the next 6 months in a predictable fashion. The funding model is an integral part of the story.

kqr 1y ago
That sounds plausible, but is not how it is told in The Idea Factory, where the authors explain that both AT&T (running the phone system) and Western Electric (manufacturing equipment for the phone system) had separate research divisions even before this. They then discovered that they were duplicating a lot of research, so they set up one entity to perform research for both the harder and the softer sides of the communication system.
speleding 1y ago
The baby bells actually took with them part of Bell Labs, renamed to Bellcore, that survived for another decade or so. I interned there whilst doing my MSc, it was still a great place for a while, with serious research. Wikipedia tells me it still exists in some form, albeit under a different name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconectiv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconectiv
dsjoerg 1y ago
Citation needed. What I'm seeing: No evidence of a legal requirement to spend a % of revenue on research: There was no line-item mandate in the consent decree forcing AT&T to invest a specific percentage into Bell Labs. The support for research was strategic and reputational: AT&T used Bell Labs to fend off antitrust pressure and maintain regulatory goodwill.
whatdhack 1y ago

DonHopkins 1y ago

[flagged]

ArthurStacks 1y ago
[flagged]

noosphr 1y ago

>And while a VC fund is limited in what it can do in providing open-ended freedom. It can try to provide a meaningful simulacrum of that space and community, which is why I’m so excited about programs like 1517’s Flux that invests $100k in people, no questions asked and lets them explore for a few months without demanding KPIs or instantaneous progress. >>You can move to the United States. (We will help with visas.) This is no longer viable for anyone who isn't already a US citizen. Not sure how serious about investing in individuals that VC is, but from talking to 16 to 22 year olds _none_ of them want to move to the US with ICE deporting students for saying the wrong thing online - or the perception they do. US universities and businesses are suffering from brain drain that unless reversed in the next 3 years will be a drag on the US economy for decades.

snickmy 1y ago

Shameless plug: I see few people in the comment that have been working there, or have had some first hand experience of that environment. I'd love the chance to interview them. This has been one of my main area of interest for a very long period. Anyone up for it ?

DonHopkins 1y ago

[flagged]

jimnotgym 1y ago

>During WW2, Bell Labs reversed engineered and improved on the British Magnetron within 2 months. Reverse[d] engineered with the benefit of the drawings and technical documents! It is not that complicated a device to reverse engineer anyway, the genius step was inventing it. > invented an acoustic homing torpedo Co-invented > proximity fuzes, They might have got it working effectively, but they didn't invent them > echo-ranging SONAR, A scientist on leave from Bell Labs did very important work on an invention from 20 years earlier > pulse code modulation Not that either >the first anti-aircraft missile (the Nike) The first guided anti-aircraft missile >and the klystron. ...was invented at Stanford Not a great article...

YossarianFrPrez 1y ago

In "The Utopia of Rules" David Graeber (author of "On Bullshit Jobs") suggests that one reason why "bell labs worked" is because the corporate tax rate was relatively high during the golden age of bell labs. This meant that forced with the choice of either a) sending a decent chunk of revenue to the government or b) reinvesting it in R&D as a business expense, AT&T chose the latter. This seems to me to be under-discussed re: Bell Labs.