The idea factory

Great history of Bell Labs:
- I enjoyed the detailed accounts on how the technology was invented. Jon Gertner did not skimp on the scientific details
- I also enjoyed how the book followed the personal histories of Bell Lab's greatest minds. It was fascinating to learn about their lives and follow their development over the course of the story
- However, the latter part of the book dragged on

This is a really fascinating look into the history of Bell Labs and the lives of its most notable scientists and administrators. It's easy to overlook just how much of our modern infrastructure came directly out of this one industrial lab in just half a century: the transistor, information theory, and communications satellites, and so on. The book misses a few --- for example, Bell Labs' impact on software is relegated to two sentences that mention Unix, one of them wrong, which seems a bit scant for something that garnered its creators Computer Science's equivalent of the Nobel Prize --- but the big hits are more than enough.

The book highlights the very interesting fact that the flood of innovations from Bell Labs happened while AT&T held a legally-sanctioned monopoly on the national telephone system, which would seem to refute the free market fundamentalist belief that competition is necessary for innovation. This idea is explored further as part of the book's conclusion, a fairly long post-mortem on Bell after the breakup.