Recipes for the "Bell Labs Formula" seem to omit a key ingredient: The technological, economic, and cultural context of the time. Bell Labs came along a few de

Recipes for the "Bell Labs Formula" seem to omit a key ingredient: The technological, economic, and cultural context of the time. Bell Labs came along a few decades after significant numbers of people and businesses started having electricity, running water, etc. It was a time when there was a particularly large amount of low hanging fruit. You only invent the transistor once. There also weren't a lot of other great places for those folks to go, compared to today.