Not far from here in the mid-20th century this place fostered pure research which yielded many innovations in science, music and the arts. As I recall, the premise was to create a haven for brilliant minds and to see what happened. Later on, scientists were more likely to be funded in labs aimed mainly at improving a company's bottom line.
To get a glimpse of Bell Labs, click here.
Maybe I have romanticized Bell Labs in my memory of its reputation for giving scientists free rein to explore their ideas. Are there any others out there who remember what it stood for in its early days?
--Bernice
Bell Labs was a creation of a government sponsored monopoly with price and profit controls, what would these days be called "socialism" but back in the day was called "pragmatic."
ReplyDeleteAT&T and the Bell System were granted the ability to operate as a monopoly by the federal government in return for guaranteeing telephone access for rural areas at affordable prices and caps on the amount of profits they could make.
In this way people off in the hinterlands were able to get cheap phone service just like people in the cities and suburbs with no cost to the government.
The second part of this were the profit caps. Any profits over a certain generous amount were to be turned over to the federal government, but the bosses at AT&T didn't want to make those payments so they reinvested those dollars in the business. That meant good salaries, good benefits, good working conditions, scholarships for kids, long vacations, etc.
It also meant the greatest pure research facility in the world, known as the Bell Labs. Many of the greatest minds in the world were brought together in New Jersey -- Murray Hill, Morristown, Holmdel, Princeton, etc. -- to solve intractable problems facing science, communications and manufacturing.
Many of these geniuses were given free reign to study esoteric and useless subjects like electric waves, sound vibrations, open source software, etc. Useless subjects that form the basis for the current Internet and cell phone technologies. Subjects that weren't entered into for profit, but have generated trillions of dollars anyway.
And this is what we have lost in the profit now, low tax, free market world we live in now. We are falling behind in technology, in manufacturing, in innovation simply because we are unwilling to be impure in our strategies to be winners like we were in the past.