Let us now praise a notorious monopoly: Ma Bell.
All those dreary monthly phone bills made possible Bell Laboratories, "a factory for ideas," as Arthur C. Clarke once put it. At its height, the campus in rural New Jersey employed almost 15,000, including 1,200 men and women with doctorates. Thirteen of them combined to win seven Nobel Prizes. Former staffers went off to win four more.
The jewel in the Bell Labs crown may well be the 1948 invention of the transistor, or electron semiconductor, along which so much of modern life hums.
The laboratory also bequeathed the first trans-Atlantic cable, the laser, the first photovoltaic cells, the first communications satellite and a revolution in quality control. One young engineer, Karl Jansky, created a movable antenna to research atmospheric noise, thus inventing the field of radio astronomy.
His discovery never resulted in a profitable AT&T device. But the nation still benefits from the humble wooden phone poles and wires that "were made almost absurdly durable thanks to years of research at Bell Labs."
So writes journalist Jon Gertner in his assured, hugely enjoyable new book, "The Idea Factory." Readers curious about creativity will note the auspicious nap or shower before many a breakthrough -- as Jonah Lehrer describes in "Imagine."
And fans of last year's masterful "The Information" by James Gleick will find an even better chapter here on Claude Shannon, the awkward, uncanny seer from upstate Michigan whose 1947 theoretical work became, as Scientific American later summed it, "the magna carta of the information age."
Shannon, a terrible procrastinator who refused to do any work that bored him, drifted into a temp summer job in 1940 at Bell Labs, one of the few spots in industrial history that would find a place for a quirky, rail-thin mathematician of hard-to-quantify gifts. Shannon was the first to see information not as meaning but as "binary digits," or yes-or-no bits. He and the transistor inventors laid the table for the computing revolution, and, paradoxically, the diminishment of their employer's analog telephone.
The genius of Shannon, Gertner writes, would have been lost on Thomas Edison, who once bragged that "I can always hire mathematicians, but they can't hire me." Part of the essential yeast of Bell Labs was President Mervin Kelly's radical insistence on mixing top scientists' critical understanding of basic processes with "cut and fit" experimentation.
The physical plant was laid out to foster these interactions. When lawyers in AT&T's patent department tried to figure out why certain individuals were more productive, they discerned just "one common thread: Workers with the most patents often shared lunch or breakfast with a Bell Labs electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist." His forte: asking good questions.
Lab ethos made room for tinkerers and eccentrics, but it also had rigid codes. Technical staffers "were never to seduce the secretaries. They were not to work with their doors closed. They were not to refuse help to a colleague, regardless of rank or department . . . And perhaps most important, the supervisor was authorized to guide, not interfere with, the people he (or she) managed."
On these pages, Gertner makes the science engage, the politics bruise, the treachery shock, the failures sting. He is a gifted, if light, translator of the research; he welds a novelist's touch with character. He is unafraid to identify a bully or a drunk. In particular, Gertner excels at depicting Nobelist William Shockley's decline from the world's pre-eminent solid-state physicist to a crackpot flogging a grotesque eugenics.
After Shockley broke from Bell Labs in 1950, his paranoia flowered and his scientific insight dried up. At its core, "The Idea Factory" grapples with what made Bell Labs the "country's intellectual utopia" from the 1930s to the late 1970s, before the Justice Department ordered the breakup of AT&T in 1982.
In his final chapter, Gertner suggests a Bell Labs approach might focus and help crack the nation's energy problems. He makes no stab at identifying the leaders capable of lining up lightning twice.
Karen R. Long is book editor of The Plain Dealer.