What would it take to recreate Bell Labs?

It is said that the best way to stifle researchers’ creativity is to require them to develop immediately marketable technologies and products. This is effectively the story of Bell Labs, originally founded in January 1925 as Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. As an integral part of AT&T and Western Electric, the company enjoyed enormous funding and, due to AT&T’s stable financial position, very little pressure to produce results. This led to the development of a wide range of technologies such as transistor, laser, photovoltaic cell, charge coupled cell (CCD), Unix operating system and so on. However, after AT&T broke up, the funding dried up and with it the discoveries that had made Bell Labs such a famous company. Which begs the question, what would it take to create a new Bell Labs?

As described in the article by [Brian Potter]One aspect of Bell Labs that made it so successful was that the researchers working there could easily spend a few years tinkering with something that captured their imagination, be it in the field of semiconductors, optics, metallurgy, or something completely different. There was some pressure to focus research on topics that could benefit the larger company, but that was about it, because leadership knew that it can sometimes take a few years or decades for new technologies to come to fruition.

After the court-ordered breakup of AT&T in 1982, all of this came to an abrupt end. Despite the initial optimism at Bell Labs that things could remain largely the same, the following years saw repeated break-ups of Bell Labs, with Western Electric being spun off in 1996 into Lucent Technologies, which absorbed much of Bell Labs and The first of these was many large splits, ending at five pieces for now, with Nokia Bell Labs (formerly Lucent Bell Labs) and AT&T Labs being the two largest. Unsurprisingly, amid all these changes, funding for basic and theoretical research virtually disappeared.

The article then raises the question of whether Bell Labs was a historical accident that could exist solely because of a series of historical coincidences, or whether we could create a new “Bell Labs” today. In theory, billion-dollar companies like Google and Apple are perfectly capable of doing something like this, and to some extent they are, funding a wide range of seemingly unrelated technologies and business ventures.

Ultimately, Bell Labs appears to have been, at least in part, a product of unique historical circumstances, particularly the highly specialized field of telecommunications, before the same transistors and other technologies that Bell Labs invented would make such areas of technology something that anyone could enter. That’s it It’s possible that AT&T would have faced stiff competition in the 1990s even without a court order.

So the short answer to the original question of whether Bell Labs could be recreated today is probably “no,” while the long answer would be “no, but we can create Bell Labs that are suitable for today’s technology landscape.” Ultimately, the idea of ​​giving researchers room to tinker is not only likely to have a great return on investment, but passionate researchers will do whatever they can to circumvent the system to work on the one thing they’re interested in. We have seen this example with [Shuji Nakamura]who mastered the path to producing efficient blue LEDs, despite his employer’s best efforts to unnecessarily complicate his research.

If there’s one thing this world needs more of, it’s researchers like Nakamura-san and the freedom to pursue those passions. Ultimately, you could say that this is the true replica of Bell Labs.