Why Bell Labs Worked

https://1517.substack.com/p/why-bell-labs-worked

by speckx • 1 year ago

87 52 1 year ago

1517.substack.com

azhenley2• 1 year ago

Discussed heavily 25 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43957010

leoc2• 1 year ago

It's also not nearly as good as Eric Gilliam's "How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions?" https://www.freaktakes.com/p/how-did-places-like-bell-labs-k... , posted here a few months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43295865 . That could almost have been written as a rebuttal to TFA's storytelling about unlimited researcher freedom at Bell Labs, though in fact it predates TFA by a couple of years.

scottyah• 1 year ago

Do the younger generations stand a chance with the current state of the internet as a dopamine force-feeder always on tap? The curiosity that drove people to create hasn't left humans, but the sheer availability of interesting things to discover makes it hard to put the phone down and do boring things for long enough to make something great. I wouldn't be surprised to see productivity (not sure if that's the right word) loss of more than 20%.

leoc2• 1 year ago

The US is packed full of foreign and domestic hard-science PhDs, so surely that isn't the issue.

pphysch• 1 year ago

For now... Even if they keep coming despite immigration crackdowns, the outflows (soft brain-drain) are trending up.

detourdog• 1 year ago

I have 2 early 20 year olds and they give me faith that we will always have a solid 5%.

bluGill• 1 year ago

Replace internet with TV, radio, or any of many other things developed over the years and the rest of your rant can be brought back in time as far as you care to go. Historians can find rants back in the Roman times about how the younger generation was only interested in dopamine. (Dopamine wasn't known 2000 years ago, but that is what they were getting at).

Despite that we have been fine.

excalibur• 1 year ago

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culi• 1 year ago

Bell Labs was more of a university than a company. It had a gov’t-mandated monopoly and basically infinite access to academic research resources. Along with the mandate that their research be made public

Noting that, was Bell Labs really much more successful than a more typical research institution like MIT or NASA?

bityard3• 1 year ago

TFA mentions why academia is not the same as Bell Labs. Most researchers spend more time writing grant proposals than doing research. And the culture of publish-or-die leads to a lot of stress to just get something out the door, which leads to a lot of bad science on top of it. Especially in the softer sciences where good experiments are hard to do right.

It is debatable whether NASA has made any great leaps of discovery or engineering over the last 3 decades or so. The Apollo missions were spectacularly successful (even accounting for setbacks) and we have a great deal of insight as to why they worked so well.

I have my own thoughts about why it doesn't work today (in the West, at least) but I'll keep them to myself because they are not organized and are likely to start a political debate or three in any case.

7thaccount• 1 year ago

I agree with your first part, but saying NASA hasn't done good work recently doesn't make sense to me with the Hubbel, Curiosity rovers, and JWST

A_Duck2• 1 year ago

This seems a little gloomy

In the UK at least, researchers have many options for research fellowships of 3-5 years, paid, many with total academic freedom to do whatever you like

My partner just got accepted to one after spending 3 months applying to 5 fellowships — an 8% ratio of application:research time.

In an Oxford or Cambridge college, you're working, eating and (for younger fellows) living in college with many other smart people. Sounds like a lot of cross-pollination of ideas happens there.

quietbritishjim• 1 year ago

In the UK at least, researchers have many options for research fellowships of 3-5 years, paid, many with total academic freedom to do whatever you like

Perhaps in theory. But surely you're not going to get the next fellowship (or other academic role) unless you have shown some demonstrable output at the end of this one? That's still at least some level of pressure to try something safer but incremental rather than risky but potentially groundbreaking.

A_Duck2• 1 year ago

I mean absolutely, but I think 5 years is a good amount of time to let people noodle!

Al-Khwarizmi• 1 year ago

In Spain, apart from the grant application, you have to write countless reports that take a lot of time, do endless bureaucracy to hire people or buy things, justify every expenditure. Probably you also need to hunt for a second simultaneous fellowship because typically they're too small to do meaningful research. And all this is on top of teaching, and endless evaluations where you need to submit various versions of your CV and supporting documentation (we often have 2-4 such evaluations a year). When all is said and done, time for actual research tends to zero. We live off PhD students who don't have to do all that.

The UK seems considerably better (much less bureaucracy and fewer hours of teaching) but still, you probably need to do reports and stuff on top of the grant applications.

tuckerpo• 1 year ago

I work at a place that's very much in the spirit of Bell Labs — CableLabs — a nonprofit R&D organization that serves the global cable industry. It’s been a pretty unique experience, especially coming from a background in product development, where everything revolves around ship dates, KPIs, roadmaps, and making your manager look good to his manager's manager :eyeroll:.

Here, there are no product managers, barely any formal management, and a remarkably flat structure. Most of the day-to-day work revolves around filing patents, writing papers, speaking at conferences, and building rapid prototypes that push the boundaries of what's technically possible, often years ahead of commercialization. In some ways, it feels like stepping into a time capsule of what R&D used to be: curiosity-driven, deeply technical, and untethered from the usual metrics, as opposed to today's modern R&D miasma aimed only at sand-bagging products/results to nab VC funding and then cash out.

But the catch: our funding rises and falls with the cable industry. When times are good, we explore bleeding-edge ideas in areas like low-latency transport, advanced Wi-Fi features like Wi-Fi sensing, quantum-key distribution over fiber, and next-gen access networks. When times are tight (like now), there’s a sharper focus on short-term, directly applicable work — sometimes even jumping in to help operators troubleshoot real-world deployment issues. It creates this strange duality where one week you're working on a speculative 10-year-out idea, and the next you're neck-deep in production firmware because a partner needs help _today_.

It's a fascinating place to work, but it does raise an interesting question: can long-term innovation really thrive when it's so tightly coupled to a volatile and risk-averse industry? Bell Labs had Ma Bell’s monopoly cash to float moonshots. We’ve got a much leaner model, and the priorities shift accordingly. Sure, we've got Comcast in our pockets, but our R&D charter states that no one member can dominate our funding or priorities: we're split among hundreds of members and vendors, and they all seem coupled to one another economically, so if the industry takes a dip, so do we. I’d be curious how others in applied R&D spaces manage that tension between visionary research and near-term deliverables.

tehjoker• 1 year ago

Very weird for this article to not mention a single time that Bell Labs was the result of a government mandate that Ma Bell invest a portion of their profits into research. You don't see things like Bell Labs anymore in the corporate world because of deregulation.

ramesh312• 1 year ago

The freedom to waste time. The freedom to waste resources. And the autonomy to decide how.

I think we massively underestimate just how much one simple fact, the absurd explosion of housing costs, have contributed to this. Take that away and just about everyone would have this kind of freedom. Look at just the gaming industry for example. Practically any great game from the past decade you can name was made in Europe or Japan; places that have kept these costs low relative to the rest of the West. When you don't have everyone terrified about how they're going to make rent next month, it frees up literally everything else. You can take these random walks and experiment when the cost of your existence doesn't necessitate bringing in huge amounts of income.

chairhairair• 1 year ago

Japanese gaming industry employees have low economic stress and high feelings of freedom? I'd be surprised. Even if that is true, can that really be connected to housing availability? Again, I'd be surprised.

ramesh312• 1 year ago

This in relation, of course, to the US/UK, where it has reached comical levels.

ido• 1 year ago

I don’t know about Japan, but housing costs in Germany (at least in the big cities) have increased massively (a lot more than wages) in the last 15 years.

intalentive• 1 year ago

the absurd explosion of housing costs

Instead of the efficient allocation of capital we have wealth transfers from producers and consumers to a financial rentier class that produces nothing. This class, which effectively owns the government and plans the economy, is responsible for not only high housing costs but high healthcare costs as well. It is gradually cannibalizing the rest of the economy and turning the population into debt slaves.

This is the real road to serfdom, which Hayek missed.

bityard3• 1 year ago

I once worked for a company that was very much like this in spirit. The whole management culture was: hire smart people, tell them the company's priorities, give them a general direction, remove any obstacles that stand in their way, actively encourage cross-team communication and collaboration, and in general leave them the fuck alone so they can work.

Unfortunately it was bought by another company whose management style was entirely the opposite and it became a shell of its former self and all the smart people left before me.

walterbell2• 1 year ago

hire smart people.. leave them.. alone so they can work

If leadership who set this policy wanted the same for themselves, then..

s/it was bought/it lost at financial warfare and had to sell/

Some companies with similar policy have lasted decades as an independent anomaly of success, some only manage a few years.

hadlock• 1 year ago

A company can sell for any number of reasons. Executives might have most of their compensation package locked up in performance shares that only pay out when the company exits. Heck, a lot of "executives" are just contractors with health insurance whose key payout is dependent on increasing the value of the company ahead of an exit.

jjtheblunt• 1 year ago

Your first paragraph described a hardware inner sanctum of Apple which I and friends thrived in. I only left after years because i wanted to change topics to genomics.

mikem170• 1 year ago

What about taxes?

The corporate tax rate was much higher during the 1950s and 1960s [0], which would seem to encourage companies to invest in research to grow their business instead of giving the government the money.

I don't have a strong opinion on this, but it seems like it could be a factor.

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

max_• 1 year ago

A more appropriate question.

Why did Bell Labs die?

Why don't they pump out as much innovation today as they did in the past?

wpm• 1 year ago

1. They don't exist. No, "Nokia Bell Labs" is not the same. Lucent is not the same.

2. Bell Telephone doesn't exist. No, AT&T is not the same.

3. Since Bell Telephone doesn't exist, the money faucet doesn't exist to pay for Bell Labs.

4. See 1.

matthewdgreen2• 1 year ago

Don't forget much higher tax rates on corporate profit, combined with big R&D tax credits. Most of this went away when tax rates were lowered in the 1980s, and the focus shifted to delivering profits back to shareholders.

marsten• 1 year ago

The standard answer is that the US government broke up Ma Bell in the early 1980s to encourage competition. Hence the quid pro quo that had existed for decades – you let us have a monopoly, we'll do research in the public interest – vanished.

In short the fact that you can now make free long distance calls is why Bell Labs died.

I wonder if we'll see a similar change now that the DOJ is going after Google for antitrust violations. Google has been very open about publishing many of their innovations (like the Transformer architecture), not to mention DeepMind's work e.g. the protein folding work that got a Nobel prize.

paulorlando• 1 year ago

Best quote: "The right question is, 'Why would you expect information theory from someone who needs a babysitter?'"

conartist6• 1 year ago

Why share this bizarre scraper copy of the article and not the original one that gives traffic to the author?

https://1517.substack.com/p/why-bell-labs-worked

The original definitely didn't include lines like

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whalesalad• 1 year ago

I noticed that too and thought it was so odd. Editing artifact? AI artifact?

wizzwizz4• 1 year ago

This one gives traffic to Substack, not the author. Nevertheless, canonical URLs remain better than scraped clones.

azhenley2• 1 year ago

It was probably auto flagged as dupe because the original was discussed recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43957010

dang3• 1 year ago

Thanks! We missed that. I've pinned a link to the other thread to the top now.

dang3• 1 year ago

Thanks—we've changed the URL to that from https://links.fabiomanganiello.com/share/683ee70d0409e6.6627... now.

Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ChrisArchitect• 1 year ago

Please fix the link: https://1517.substack.com/p/why-bell-labs-worked

Apocryphon• 1 year ago

Why is Bell Labs considered more prolific than Xerox PARC?

matthewdgreen2• 1 year ago

Because Bell Labs is older and deployed more of their inventions into practice.

dang3• 1 year ago

Recent and related:

Why Bell Labs Worked - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43957010 - May 2025 (234 comments)

bjt• 1 year ago

Recipes for the "Bell Labs Formula" seem to omit a key ingredient: The technological, economic, and cultural context of the time.

Bell Labs came along a few decades after significant numbers of people and businesses started having electricity, running water, etc. It was a time when there was a particularly large amount of low hanging fruit. You only invent the transistor once. There also weren't a lot of other great places for those folks to go, compared to today.

Why Bell Labs Worked

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