Jon Gertner > Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What kind of future did the men envision? One of the more intriguing attributes of the Bell System was that an apparent simplicity—just pick up the phone and dial—hid its increasingly fiendish interior complexity. What also seemed true, and even then looked to be a governing principle of the new information age, was that the more complex the system became in terms of capabilities, speed, and versatility, the simpler and sleeker it appeared.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“At the very least, it proved that even the great technical minds at Bell Labs, Jack Morton especially, could misjudge the future. “We had all the elements to make an integrated circuit,” Tanenbaum adds. “And all the processes—diffusion, photolithography—were developed at Bell Labs. But nobody had the foresight except Noyce and Kilby.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“Labs engineers had looked beyond the current waveguide and the millimeter waves it carried to even shorter infrared and visible light waves. These waves are so tiny that they must be measured in arcane units known as angstroms. In a single millimeter, there are 10,000,000 angstroms. By 1960, the Bell engineers believed that within a few decades it might be possible to send data over such wavelengths—in other words, to send data through light itself. If they could figure out how to do that, the system would be able to transmit an unimaginably huge amount of information.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“It might have been said in 1948 that you either grasped the immense importance of the transistor or you did not. Usually an understanding of the device took time, since there were no tangible products—no proof—to demonstrate how it might someday alter technology or culture.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“Pierce added that “when something as closely related to signaling and communication as this comes along, and something is new and little understood, and you have the people who can do something about it, you’d just better do it, and worry later just about the details of why you went into it.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“As they rose to influence, the web of relationships among the Young Turks was hard to discern. There was little doubt that Baker and Fisk, the most accomplished administrators in the group, admired each other; their lengthy private memos to each other from the 1950s attest to a mutual respect and deep trust. Baker and his research deputy John Pierce were even closer, though their temperaments differed greatly: Pierce was antic and impatient, whereas Baker was poised and diplomatic. The two nevertheless discovered that they were companionable.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“Kappel, in other words, didn’t want to spend $200 million of AT&T’s money on big silver balloons. He wanted to spend it on an array of active satellites.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“When Niels Bohr—along with Einstein, the world’s greatest physicist—heard in 1938 that splitting a uranium atom could yield a tremendous burst of energy, he slapped his head and said, “Oh, what idiots we have all been!”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“To innovate, Kelly would agree, an institute of creative technology required the best people, Shockleys and Shannons, for instance—and it needed a lot of them, so many, as the people at the Labs used to say (borrowing a catchphrase from nuclear physics), that departments could have a “critical mass” to foster explosive ideas.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“But the business of communications was different than the science of communications, and in the science, Kelly’s employees could do whatever they liked to push ahead.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“MURRAY HILL’S FIRST BUILDING—Building 1, as it was eventually known—officially opened in 1942.4 Inside it was a model of sleek and flexible utility. Every office and every lab was divided into six-foot increments so that spaces could be expanded or shrunk depending on needs, thanks to a system of soundproofed steel partition walls that could be moved on short notice. Thus a research team with an eighteen-foot lab might, if space allowed, quickly expand their work into a twenty-four-foot lab. Each six-foot space, in addition, was outfitted with pipes providing all the basic needs of an experimentalist: compressed air, distilled water, steam, gas, vacuum, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. And there was both DC and AC power. From the outside, the Murray Hill complex appeared vaguely H-shaped. Most of the actual laboratories were located in two long wings, each four stories high, which were built in parallel and were connected by another wing.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“Shockley recalled later that his “first notebook entry on what might have been a working [solid-state amplifier] was as I recall late 1939.”19 It was actually December 29, 1939. Shockley had concluded by then that a certain class of materials known as semiconductors—so named because they are neither good conductors of electricity (like copper) nor good insulators of electricity (like glass), but somewhere in between—might be an ideal solid replacement for tubes.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“One study group in particular, informally led by William Shockley at the West Street labs, and often joined by Brattain, Fisk, Townes, and Woolridge, among others, met on Thursday afternoons. The men were interested in a particular branch of physics that would later take on the name “solid-state physics.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“So what was the Bell System waiting for? Kelly acknowledged that the phone company would capitalize on the transistor long after “other fields of application” such as the home entertainment industries.4 The recent Justice Department antitrust suit, which was now moving forward, was a stark reminder why: The phone company was a regulated monopoly and not a private company; it had no competitors pushing it to move forward faster. What’s more, it was obliged to balance costs against service quality in the most cautious way possible. “Everything that we design must go through the judgment of lots of people as to its ability to replace the old,” Kelly told an audience of phone executives in October 1951.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“As word spread, Shannon’s slender and highly mathematical paper, about twenty-five pages in all, would ultimately become known as the most influential master’s thesis in history.9 In time, it would influence the design of computers that were just coming into existence as well as those that wouldn’t be built for at least another generation.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

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

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

“By intention, everyone would be in one another’s way. Members of the technical staff would often have both laboratories and small offices—but these might be in different corridors, therefore making it necessary to walk between the two, and all but assuring a chance encounter or two with a colleague during the commute. By the same token, the long corridor for the wing that would house many of the physics researchers was intentionally made to be seven hundred feet in length. It was so long that to look down it from one end was to see the other end disappear at a vanishing point. Traveling its length without encountering a number of acquaintances, problems, diversions, and ideas would be almost impossible. Then again, that was the point. Walking down that impossibly long tiled corridor, a scientist on his way to lunch in the Murray Hill cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

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

“WE USUALLY IMAGINE that invention occurs in a flash, with a eureka moment that leads a lone inventor toward a startling epiphany. In truth, large leaps forward in technology rarely have a precise point of origin. At the start, forces that precede an invention merely begin to align, often imperceptibly, as a group of people and ideas converge, until over the course of months or years (or decades) they gain clarity and momentum and the help of additional ideas and actors. Luck seems to matter, and so does timing, for it tends to be the case that the right answers, the right people, the right place—perhaps all three—require a serendipitous encounter with the right problem. And then—sometimes—a leap. Only in retrospect do such leaps look obvious.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“I don’t know how history is taught here in Japan, “ he told the audience when he traveled there in 1985 to give an acceptance speech, ”but in the United States in my college days, most of the time was spent on the study of political leaders and wars – Ceasars, Napoleons, and Hitlers. I think this is totally wrong. The important people and events of history are the thinkers and innovators, the Darwins, Newtons, Beethovens whose work continues to grow in influence in a positive fashion”
― Jon Gertner