A Newark Star-Ledger report on this year's Nobel Prize for Physics shows how the twentieth century's greatest innovation in imaging was the indirect result of two research "failures." Wired has more details of the internal politics.
The breakthrough of Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, the charge-coupled device (CCD), had a curious motivation. What catalyzed it was the peculiar agenda of AT&T in the late 1960s. Managers of Bell Labs thought that a new technology called bubble memory was about to replace semiconductors and let researchers on the latter side know they they needed a great new idea fast to prove semiconductors were worth continued funding. Bubble memory turned out to be a bubble and is now only a memory, but pressure, based on an erroneous projection of the future, helped create another future. It also made it possible to capture the images of Apollo 13. Yet the videotube that used the first CCDs became a dead end itself. AT&T's Picturephone service was based on a very rational early fear of cable and television as rivals of the telephone in building new, high-speed networks, as the historian Kenneth Lipartito has confirmed in his standard account of the program.
Veterans of Bell Labs are rightly proud of the organization's record. To quote the Star-Ledger:
Bell Labs, the research and development arm of Lucent Technologies, has now produced 13 Nobel laureates and more than 31,000 patents since 1925. During the 1960s and 1970s, the lab in Murray Hill was regarded as a crucible of some of the most innovative research in the world.
"Everything we take for granted today -- digital music, digital art, lasers -- came from Bell Labs," said A. Michael Noll, emeritus professor of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California and a former Bell Labs research scientist.
But it also noted the changes and research group closings under Lucent:
Many Bell Labs scientists, past and present, say their research community has never recovered.
"The environment that was there back then, the excitement about being around creative people who were open to talking about their work, was not duplicated during its time," said Dan Stanzione, a former director of Bell Labs.
Ironically some non-profit research laboratories like Battelle and Germany's Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft have been able to support themselves at least in part through income from the innovations they helped sponsor -- like dry photocopying and the MP3 format, respectively. I have found no information on royalties received by AT&T or Lucent for the invention of Willard Boyle and George Smith at Bell Labs -- possibly because original patents had expired before the digital imaging boom. (I'd welcome information from readers in telecommunication and imaging.)
This prize for 40-year-old work raises an intriguing question. Has something been lost from American and world science by the dispersion of so many great researchers? Some of them have profited personally; at conferences I've met former technical staff members who have made fortunes in finance and entrepreneurship. Others, like the late electrical engineer and perceptual psychologist Bela Julesz, a future MacArthur Fellow whom I met while I was a science editor, flourished in academia and became mentors to a generation of students. Still others have had the best of both worlds, with high-salaried tenured teaching jobs plus lucrative industrial ties.
But is society better off with so much talent redeployed? Are great innovations more likely to arise in the newer, decentralized, and more responsive global environment? Does everything important get discovered independently anyway, regardless of what happens to one organization? I'm not so sure. In Jeremy Bernstein's Three Degrees above Zero, Bela Julesz said Bell Labs had no counterpart in Europe or elsewhere and was "an absolutely unique treasure . . . for the whole world," a "baroque organ" for the maestro who needs "to pull out every register." Maybe the old Bell Labs resembled the Hollywood studio system, where massive resources and depth of skills could be deployed to produce qualitative leaps. The Labs set a high standard for the reconfigured world of global science.
(Photo: Wiki Commons)
Edward Tenner
No part of the world is likely to enjoy these people's presence in anything like the degree to which we can speculate that they might have transcended the sum of their parts at Hurray Mill.
The wider world is only better off for the end of the Labs if - and I don't know how worthwhile this is - their end throws into stark relief just how few enterprises nurture researchers to fulfill anything like his and her full promise. I suspect it would be disastrous to look to universities to fill this role, and I don't see it ripe for either contract research institutes or consortia of industry majors. Nor should we hope for a patron giant enough (Google or post-Google, e.g.) to put the pieces back together, as though the giant can yet remain agile enough to do any better by them than we saw in stabler generations.
The end that met superb invention centers like this one, like Dow's Veazey research campus in Freeport, Texas, or like the NSA's decades of basic information science ('way more farseeing than Tim Berners-Lee) - it's going to happen to any other baroque organs ever built that may survive. I am not despondent for all this because there are some immensely sweet problems and tradeoffs being worked into in the world by some very committed investigators. I could present it here, but it will be more fruitful for the imagination to slog through ninety minutes http://videolectures.net/ted_goranson of cursory background. Among the outcomes of their attempt will be, well, a change in the food chain: from one in which large corps are the most comfortable home for resources and funding to one in which very many of us are asking, "How can I help?" in stead of cringing, "I've got to secure /some/ opportunity..."
And, neatly enough, it *is* kin with the modern Hollywood enterprise layout.
Actually, many universities, companies and government agencies provide research breeding grounds similar to Bell Labs. Indeed, many professors and researchers would collaborate or present their ideas at Bell Labs and elsewhere. Though I only observed this for Bell Labs second-hand, it seems to me that the biggest loss at Bell Labs was the same as elsewhere, the increasing prominence of "intellectual property" as a corporate rather than a personal right and the devastating effect it had on that collaboration. At one point, colleagues were making regular trips to Bell Labs and other research institutions and then suddenly, like so many Jackie Papers, they came no more. It is perhaps not a coincidence that intellectual property policies and agreements were the papers that did come, with increasing frequency, for they sent a chill through the network of research institutions and universities, particularly where a corporate owner was asserting its "intellectual property rights" over copyrights and patents which our Constitution assigns to Authors and Inventors.