What would it take to recreate Bell Labs?

It would require Ma Bell. As the article correctly deduces (IMO), it was related to their quasi-monopoly. It was a partial and insecure monopoly; they did need to innovate or they would eventually be eaten. Telecoms was their business, in the very broadest sense. New ways of drawing wire more efficiently would benefit their bottom line. New forms of amplifier technology would almost certainly benefit them ten or twenty years down the line. Same with a new kind of treatment to make telephone poles last longer. So basic metallurgy, forestry, and cutting-edge semiconductor physics were all within the remit. In hindsight it's almost like a public/national research laboratory, that happened to be privately held.

Google already did this. Google X, Google Brain, Deepmind...

The invention of the transformer architecture that underpins modern AI, dozens of core papers in the field.

What they haven't revolutionized is materials science. Memristor technology for example, is still grossly underdeveloped.

I liked Bell Labs ever since 1986 or 1987 or so. I was considering developing a C++ compiler, but was concerned about:

1. would I need a license to develop a C++ compiler?

2. would I need a license to call it C++?

So I called up their head intellectual property lawyer. He laughed, and said feel free, and thanked me for asking. He said other people just went ahead and copied things hoping BL wouldn't notice.

So thank you, Bell Labs! You guys were the best.

None of this addresses perhaps the main issue. Bell Labs predated the venture capital revolution of the 1970s.

The key insight of venture capital was that firms like Bell Labs were holding on to very valuable resources at compensation rates that were far below what those resources could generate if they were empowered to create their own firms.

This was tremendously successful. While we have no counterfactual, innovation in the US blosomed ove the last 50 years. The fundamental research may have languished (I would probably disagree, moore's law didn't happen through magic for example) a tremendous number of companies, and all of the large companies we know of today, which provide all of the services of the modern world were a result of venture capital.

You will not "recreate" it, as everything now is short term shareholder profit/dividend driven. As others and the article notes, they held the long view on innovation.

We could really use a large number of bell labs today. It will not happen.

Lots of innovation came from Bell Labs or other national laboratories that are foundations of many modern technologies. I always thought that private sector alone cannot make technological progress fast without the help of the government sponsored science facilities. It is incredible to see what came out of those facilities because the scientists worked really hard because of their genuine interest in working on such projects because they either like the process of figuring things out or their curiosity cannot be quenched until they get it.

Many outfits have tried to reinvent the Lockheed Skunk Works, but to no avail, because they always tried to improve on it by removing its core principles.

Though I must say, SpaceX may be its worthy successor.

The key thing is time horizon.

Bell Labs invested in research that would bring payoff 20+ years in the future. That's in part because they were a quasi-monopoly. (Also because there was less pressure back then on execs to focus on short-term stock prices.)

It's also because Bell Labs ran a lot on government contracts and grants. The government CAN look 20+ years in the future. And it does.

You can see the same effect in pharma today. Pharma R&D develops drugs that will hit the clinic in the next 5-10 years at most. The true basic research of identifying targets and understanding cancer/Alzheimer's mechanisms to launch future drugs -- that's all funded by the government.

Bell Labs and things like it were around when the primary purpose of a business was to make money, and do it healthily, rather than to find a bigger fish. It's no wonder many of these companies were quite old. They created sound businesses.

For the giants of today it's all about milking existing products for all their worth. Not finding new revenue avenues. The modern stock market is to blame. If number goes down then the earth is on fire apparently.

The other aspect is, why try and innovate yourselves when you can wait for someone else to do it and then try and acquire them? It's short term thinking but that's what business is largely about these days.

Maybe this will change with time. I suspect it will as the world is on a track to become more insular again. This may drive innovation at home.

The gent in the photo was my postdoctoral advisor at Murray Hill. He's standing by the first CO2 laser which he invented and that was still in the lab I worked in when I was there.

From a non-tech perspective, IKEA, as a private company, shares a similar focus with Bell Labs on enhancing individual components to improve the overall system.

Dunno. Essentially AT&T founding is no different than tax founding. Any uni lab could recreate the conditions.

I believe the academic system is way too gamed nowadays for these kind of institutions to not drown. Like, there is focus on metrics and numbers rather than fundamentals.

People who are more familiar with Bell Labs — what was the compensation and life was like when one worked there? Were there any extremely alluring alternatives like FAANG of the day, where even a bottom line individual contributor can save a decent chunk of money after half a decade of work?

It’s hard to convince extremely talented and motivated people to go into research nowadays when ad-tech and adjacent products pay so much more. Can’t even blame them, as it’s extremely high risk with very low reward. Obviously there are a lot of exceptions, but still.

Big oil arguably had some of the closest up until the past ~10 years.

I think folks may not realize how large Exxon and Shell's pure R&D labs are/were. The other majors have cut much more heavily on pure R&D in the past 20 years, but Exxon and Shell have always focused on pure research fairly heavily. It's been cut back in the past 10-ish years, but the R&D labs at both are still present. The breadth of it is significant, and while sure, it's geology, metallurgy, chemistry, etc (i.e. it's not what folks here likely think of as "tech"), it is fundamental research as opposed to applied research. A lot doesn't sure up under their R&D best because it's combined with internal consulting, but it's still a large group of folks hired to do r&d with diverse backgrounds.

Those labs still exist today, but they're not as large as what they were in the recent past (e.g. 2010), and especially compared to their heyday in the 70's.

Technicians in the lead instead marketing men.

Public money instead short fad hunting venture capital

I've seen this question pop up periodically, usually addressed in the context of a single, usually historical, example. Bell Labs seems to most often get the nod as the canonical "Blue Sky" corporate R&D lab, though Xerox, DuPont, and IBM are others. DuPont specifically is the subject of a book by David A. Hounshell, Corporate Strategy: DuPont R&D, 1902--1980.

I'd suggest a broader consideration:

- What are examples of extant or historical commercial R&D labs?

- What large monopolistic companies haven't developed a significant R&D reputation, either for failure to establish a significant such operation, or a failure to develop awareness of their operation?

- What business sectors generally have failed to establish a strong R&D tradition?

I'm not going to go into a full answer for obvious reasons (a full response would be an interesting PhD thesis or course of study, not an HN comment), but we can outline some interesting aspects...

The companies which did establish large R&D labs have tended to be in high-tech areas, largely information technology though also chemical and hardware fields (DuPont, arguably Xerox).

Specifically I'm aware of: Bell Labs (AT&T), PARC (Xerox), IBM Research, Kodak Research Laboratories, DuPont Central Resource, RCA Labs, General Electric Research Lab, Westinghouse Research Labs.

Notably absent from singificant US industrial history: Railroads, shipbuilding, Steelmaking (e.g., US Steel), oil (Standard Oil), electric power utilities generally, and the financial services industry.

The aerospace sector stands out for having far less major corporate R&D research (or prominence) than one might otherwise expect. That's not to say that there are no such operations: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman all have R&D operations. A possibly explanation is that to a major extent Nasa and US military branches effectively provide R&D cover for the sector.

My general sense is that there's less such activity in the sourcing sectors --- agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and livestock --- than might be expected, though Bayer (including Monsanto), Syngenta, DuPont, BASF, Cargill, and John Deere do have some activity. Again government research is significant (e.g., USDA, Fisheries & Oceans Canada (DFO), and significiant academic research (land grant universities in the US).

Manufacturing, construction, and transportation generally seem to have a weak presence. To the extent that auto safety labs exist, many are strongly supported by the insurance sector. Device certification (e.g., Underwriters Laboratories) are strongly similar. Both also see government consumer / product safety operations.

Healthcare research tends to be organised around government units, academic research, and specifically-organised new-product (mostly pharmaceuticals, though also devices and processes) commercial operations, the latter often spin-offs of larger established pharmaceutical companies as a risk-isolation / diversification process. (Organisation of Novo Nordisk, recently notably for Ozempic, is its own fascinating story.)

My general sense is that wholesale, retail, and financial services have little R&D in in the spirit of Bell Labs and similar Blue Skies research. There's quite a bit of tightly-focused product development, applied, and targeted research, but in scope, spirit, and freedom that's quite a different approach. There's some R&D in academic settings (retail/shopping behaviours, e.g.), or by government (the US Federal Reserve and the monetary system, adjunct to the financial sector).

Teasing out some general trends, corporate Blue Sky research seems to be favoured by:

- High tech fields, notably information technology, electronics, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and to a lesser extent aerospace and energy research.

- Less favourable sectors: traditional manufacturing, utilities, wholesale & retail trade, heavy industry, extractive industries, and transportation.

- A strong and long-term stable corporate structure. Note that AT&T was initially founded in 1885, whilst Bell Labs wasn't established until 1925, 40 years later. DuPont preexisted its own labs by a century (founded in 1803 and 1903 respectively). RCA (1919) predated its labs (1942) by 23 years. Xerox (1906) predated PARC (1970) by 64 years. Labs don't spring up overnight, and even large and technical companies might not form labs if their tenure is short.

- Monopolistic tendencies. Labs tend to form around monopolies, though this may be derivative of longevity. Not all monopolies form labs.

- Payoffs to R&D. In Hounshell's book on DuPont, much is made of the comparative fecundity and sterility of early (1930s) and later (1960s, 1970s) research. Effectively, the viable product search space had much early low-hanging fruit, particularly in the 1930s (most plastics we know of today were discovered over roughly a decade), and the failure to find marketable products or enhancements by the 1960s (notably a synthetic "leather" product, "Corfam").

- Insufficient or ineffective government-lead or academic research. In numerous fields, the most significant R&D still occurs in government / academic settings.

- Corporate mentality and mindset, possibly. There seem to be fields,

What would it take? Two world wars leading a protracted cold war between two "superpowers."

No surprise that the end of the cold war brought about the end of our collective need of a closely held quasi-national entity like AT&T.

I think the real question is "What would it take to recreate it in the abstract, from the disparate components we have attached to the internet today?" Or to rephrase it "What happened to the early promise of the internet when it was mostly available only through Universities?"

A time machine.

These places (Xerox Parc is the other obvious example) existed because recent breakthroughs opened up the possibilities and they exploited almost inevitable inventions.

I think the mistake is thinking that the flurry of creation is linked to the company or the institution rather than the general state of progress.

As soon as someone invents viable Human-Machine Interfaces or whatever there will be some company that invents a load of seminal stuff around that.

At the most basic level it's all about money. ATT had a monopoly on telecom in the US and had the money to set up the research labs. After that you need people that can recognize and fine brilliant people in their respective fields and giving them the resources they need.

I'll leave this here. AT&T Labs is still doing interesting things.

https://about.att.com/sites/labs

I'm the last relative of William Shockley (cited in the story) who's still in the industry.

I like the way this story portrays his success in solving open-ended problems as long as they aligned with the company direction. I've personally never made that connection between us, but it resonates with where I've personally found success, and currently am, in my career as well.

Fortunately, a lot of our beliefs about the world are quite different.

I would like to ask Col.Karl Nell (ret.) who was working there during Bell Labs' trivestiture: (timestsmped): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w9cIcWWsH0c&t=75

Lol, i think C++ is main reason of decline for Bell Labs due to crash.

Corporate dominance.......Sorry!

Didn't high top marginal tax rates in the 1960s-1970s era give a lot of corporations an incentive to put profits back into R & D as it would avoid high taxation on those profits (and I think the R & D outlay was a tax writeoff, too). E.g.

https://slate.com/business/2012/07/xerox-parc-and-bell-labs-...

Everyone talks about the monopoly – don't forget the pressure to Do Good Deeds and to look like You're Bringing New Tech to avoid the general public's grumbling about, well, having to rent your phone from Ma Bell for $$$$$ and to live with their restrictions on what you could hook up to their lines. An expensive PR operation, but a good one for sure.

I prefer cynical explanations for why the C-suite would like to keep Bell Labs around, and other posters have also mentioned managing perceived profits, and avoiding anti-trust.

Being a subsidiary of a government-sanctioned, vertically integrated monopoly gave Bell Labs a broad research scope and freedom to pursue long-term research projects unavailable to most other industrial labs.

This feels like a big-hitter. In the UK, most government expenditure these days is subject to a sort of KPI management process. It's very difficult to do long-term work when the team has short-term targets to fulfill. That said, I wonder if security-critical organisations like GCHQ work that way. Obviously Bell labs was a US phenomenon, but I'd be surprised if the same problem doesn't persist over there to some degree.

Probably a top ten mistake by the government to break up bell labs.

An important early impetus for research at AT&T was the immense labor component of contemporary switching technology. Hiring the number of qualified operators needed to scale out to a fully national phone system wasn't clearly possible, let alone sound business.

The scale of the challenge over time is described pretty well here:

https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus...

AT&T thus had both a clear long-term goal, national phone service, and multiple long-term research challenges needed to make that goal possible (amplification) and economically feasible (switching).

For folks interested in delving further into Labs history, this recent paper has a wealth of relevant citations, while also clarifying some important corporate cultural framing that might otherwise be confusing:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365365963_BELL_LABS...

I wrote a review of a book which describes to me the best strategy for recreating Bell Labs like phenomena [0]

[0]: https://asindu.xyz/posts/the-nature-of-technology-book-revie...

What made Bell Labs so successful is simple:

- public funds

- researchers free to research instead of producing something marketable in 6 months or less

- long term projects and goals as a NORMAL thing instead of being considered folly

- a school system designed to make citizens not useful idiots https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-usef...

Unfortunately the last point in the present time demand IN THEORY at least some new generations to be achieved, in practice the ruling class do not want at all anything like that so it's mere utopia.

As a bottomline: EU was the most advanced countries of the world, when it do public funded research and industry, it commit suicide with WWI, the USA have copied and advance the EU model after WWII, then commit suicide as well with finaciarisation of anything, now it's China who rule, but the model, the substance is the same: countries grow and prosper with public funded research with long terms goals and researchers free to master themselves with the industry picking marketable research from them instead of commanding research. Countries might vary, populations might vary, implementations might vary a bit, but the principle so far have proved to be the same.

As a result we are in a decline phase, which probably result in a series of LOST wars, and a long era of poverty and destruction before a new start.

Bell Labs R&D budget in today's dollars would be about $1.5 billion. Google is closer to $10 billion, with DARPA around $3 billion and NASA at $10-15 billion. The total budget for all national labs is $12 billion.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2015/08/comparing-research-bud...

I was thinking about a very small version of this topic the other day--how can you re-create the intrinsic motivation of a startup in a large company? My conclusion was you just can't. The combination of scarcity, urgency, and potential opportunity present in startups seems to catalyze something that can't (at least maybe not ethically) be simulated.

Maybe in the large what we really need to get it together and pull these things off is immediate existential threat e.g. a world war or crisis of similar magnitude.

To a degree, SpaceX is modern equivalent of Bell Labs when it comes to space technology. They attracted a lot of frighteningly smart people and untied their hands.

When thinking about Bell Labs etc., I often come to the conclusion that barriers matter more than anything else. If you force your engineers and scientists to hold long pointless conferences and produce some papers on regular schedule, plus submit their various work-related demands to an arbitrary set of rules and decision-makers, the result is similar to throwing sand into a mechanical machine.

But these limitations usually exist because of money shortage / funding, and few people or organizations have enough money to just shower them on their eggheads, like Bell Labs once did.

I'm not convinced you'd be able to replicate because it was a product of time and place. Mike Lesk, who worked at Bell (he implemented uucp, his motivation was purely to provide patch distribution according to what he told me) said one of the key experiences he took from Bell was how easy it is to occupy a vacuum and how hard it is to push aside established state.

Unix exists. X11 exists. Kuberbetes exists. Gmail exists. Recreating a small team of highly accomplished experts with motivations which are not aimed at VC ipo, who are mutually trusting, and who have a beneficent employer with nation scale infrastructure they can burn to support you, and you still have the problem there's no vacuum, you're pushing aside other stuff.

Giving birth to C and Unix in the ashes of BCPL and multics with the pdp11 as an architecture, that's a huge one time thing. Invent a time machine and it might not happen the same the second time round.

a ranch and infinite money

Another alien crash.

Crystals! (Tangent, but fun)

Lab Grown Quartz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcu8Lz5PHMw

Alan Holden https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp6bN9vN6e4

Bell Labs is not unique though.

We had NatLab (Natuurkundig laboratorium, physics laboratory) at Philips. It's the birth place of the compact cassette and compact disk and did a lot of fundamental research. The main reason for its closure is usually cited as decentralized funding techniques icw economic downturn, though the betting in the wrong technique in the '90s sure didnt help (e.g. better flat crts instead of lcd).

We don’t need to recreate Bell Labs.

We have SpaceX and Starlink - that’s where innovation is happening. Compare Dishy to the Starlink Mini (which can run off a power bank), or the first live-feed (no radio blackout period) on orbital re-entry. And they costed much less than ULA and provided much more to the public. Practically saved Ukraine (try defending your country with no communications). Or Tesla who has made EVs (and charging stations) an actual thing. Or Neuralink who’s allowed a quadriplegic to use a computer like you and I.

We don’t need giant monopolies like Microsoft who - what did they deliver over the past 3 decades? A knockoff of the Mac. OSes full of vulnerabilities that require antivirus and firewalls. Clippy. Nearly killed Apple (who gave us the first usable GUI, all our songs in our pocket, and the first actually smart smartphone.)

What does Microsoft do that is innovative? They buy actual innovative companies (they “own” OpenAI for all intents and purposes). But also open source dotnet. Typescript. LINQ and EF. And I hate to hand them the trophy, but the Surface Pro is a real computer - the iPad Pro can’t do real work like build you an App or site with VS Code - it can’t even run Apple’s own XCode.

We don’t need giant monopolies. Plenty that smaller companies can do to outmaneuver incumbents. SpaceX will figure out passenger planes before anyone at the ULA will figure out how to make their spacecraft not leak.

A marginal tax rate that discourages profit hoarding.

Any other answer is just wrong.

Lots of companies recreated Bell Labs.

It's not the 20th century though.

Thomas Edison invented the first commercial invention laboratory.

The Wright Bros invented the first directed research and development program, where theories are developed and tested on a series of prototypes, leading towards the objective.

It would require dismantling, or at least scaling down, fintech, because that's where many smart people end up - the ones who would have been inventing Cool New Stuff if they hadn't been co-opted into working as quants.

There have been at least two lost generations of fundamental research because of this.

For those who would like to read more about Bell Labs, I highly recommend "The Idea Factory" by Jon Gertner[0] - one of my all time favorite books.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idea_Factory

If you haven't you HAVE to read "The Idea Factory" by Gertner which was linked in the article.

I think the conditions that led to Bell Labs contrast quite well with the "Shareholder Supremacy" episodes of Ed Zitron's "Better Offline" that just played. You can read pre-Welch GE (or 10x better Bell Labs) as the opposite of the aspects of business that Zitron rails against there.

Timing + Infinite Money

This was only possible during what was an unprecedented revolutionary time in scientific discovery which allowed for the possibility 1925 - 2000 was the most revolutionary time across all fields of science, probably ever. It's mind boggling the progress made in that period.

We will likely not see a repeat until someone comes up with a quantum-classical unifying law and the resultant blowing open of all possibilities of engineering

1. LSD hippie culture/aftermath 2. Pre-privatised/embryonic technology industry 3. A few geniuses

The question implies time travel, better to look to the future