While I can summarize the book in few sentences saying it discusses the flood of innovations that came out of this institution (that forms the foundations of the modern communication system, and thus has touched practically every human being on the planet), the book is even more than that. So, I'd strongly encourage you to put it on your reading list. Though there were tens of thousands of employees who worked for Bell Labs at its peak, the author has intentionally chosen the approach of telling the story via a selected set of characters that ran the labs or were the leading scientists that delivered the stunning array of innovative products and ideas out of the lab. Mervin Kelly, Jim Fish, William Shockley, Claude Shannon, John Pierce and WIlliam Baker are the main characters that stand in for more than 1,200 PhDs and 15,000 workers it employed as early as in the 1960's. (Reminds me of the 4-part HBO miniseries Chernobyl I saw last year, in which hundreds of engineers & scientists were represented by one fictional female scientist to make the story telling easier. Interesting troupe.)
In the early parts of the 20th century, the American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) was a US Govt approved monopoly that provided telephone service to customers all over the country. It was vertically integrated with Bell Labs at the bottom and Western Electric company in between, with AT&T at the top. Bell Labs did the research to design & develop the needed equipment, right from telephone cables/poles all the way up to the various incarnations of the switching systems. Western Electric is the manufacturing arm of the conglomerate that produced everything from individual telephone sets to switches, cables to provide an end-to-end telephone system solution, while AT&T ran the operation. The DoJ (Department of Justice) of the US Govt often looked at this monopoly with suspicion and had sued it to break it up periodically, i.e., every other decade. But the company will appease the Govt with some changes/concession to allow it to continue as this one massive organization. As a result, the money generated from the business could fund Bell Labs to support its research efforts exceedingly well, with stellar characters managing the labs and producing inventions that certainly benefited the public that wouldn't be possible otherwise.
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Huge business houses that are supported by Govts is not that unusual. From many public sectors companies (including telephone companies) in India to Chaebols in South Korea can be sighted as examples of this model. But none of them come anywhere close to the level of inventions/products Bell Labs delivered over the years. Can you believe vacuum tubes, transistors, electronic telephone switching systems, lasers, Telstar satellite, the whole field of Information Theory, Unix operating system, the programming language C, cell phone system, were a small subset of just this one institution's contributions to the world? Book tells this story amazingly well. Chapter where a very primitive satellite (that is just a spherical structure covered in a thin metallic wrapper to reflect any electrical signal coming in back towards earth) circling the planet is being tracked for the first time by Bell Labs scientists to test its viability to serve as a communication channel gave me goosebumps! It is humbling to realize ideas like cell phones should NOT have a dial tone like landline phones, so as to make more efficient use of the cell phone bandwidth, originated from here and subsequently proved to be a great fit for SMS texting. Naturally the transistor invented in Bell Labs is the backbone of the semiconductor industry even today and so I also saw my current employer Intel mentioned in multiple parts of the book (e.g. latest Intel devices that are size of a postage stamp come with about 2 billion transistors, and Intel manufactures about 10 billion transistors every second of every day!).
Eventually in the 1980s the conglomerate was split up. The local telephone companies formed what are called Baby Bells, while AT&T focused on the long-distance telephone service. The Western Electric company along with Bell Labs became Lucent Technologies that I joined after grad school. During my time, its stock price dropped from a high of about $80 to less than $2, which is all solemnly covered in the last chapter, including the formation of the spin off company Agere Systems that I belonged to in the early 2000's. Though it is sad to see such a great institution practically vanishing (now the name Bell Labs belongs to Alcatel-Lucent) along with most of its staff, with its buildings where I have worked in Murray Hill, NJ practically empty (and even worse the Holmdel, NJ facility, which was architecturally stunning when I had worked occasionally, totally abandoned), author argues that the model had served its purpose and is not sustainable in today's age for various reasons. Concluding chapters are touching. Even if you are not in the field of telecom/computers, the content/prose/narration are all extremely accessible for anyone interested in reading this book. As the author says in the acknowledgments, the material, time span, stories are all unwieldy but have been put together in a nice and balanced manner.
The organization I belong to in our office sends out internal email newsletter discussing interesting details/factoids about one team each month. Just by happenstance, yesterday they asked me for titbits about my team/site that they can include in next month's newsletter that would interest other employees in our company dispersed all over the world. I provided this small write-up closely tied to this book, along with the attached photos of a brick I have at home!
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Allentown, PA is a smaller Intel site with about 230 team members. Two decades back, the division we belonged to in Lucent Technologies (called Lucent Microelectronics) got spun off as a separate company called Agere Systems (in 2002). After few more M&A, some of us belong to Intel for the past 8 years, with blue blood running in our veins! The Western Electric manufacturing facility, which was part of AT&T/Lucent conglomerate had a manufacturing facility located in Allentown. It was the first facility to produce transistors on a large scale in the entire world. Silicon Valley in CA followed. About 15 years back when that building was taken down for new construction, the bricks were given out as souvenirs (and pen holder) to employees. Many of the old timers, like yours truly, have one of these at home!
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If you found this material interesting, you may enjoy this series of videos related to the birth & growth of the Japanese semiconductor industries. You can see Bell Labs and AT&T inventions discussed in multiple places.
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