What Would It Take To Recreate Bell Labs?
What Would It Take To Recreate Bell Labs?
It’s been said that the best way to stifle creativity by researchers is to demand that they produce immediately marketable technologies and products. This is also effectively the story of Bel…
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And, yet, in that time, consumers paid more for telecommunication services and basically the main innovations they got were touchtone phones replacing rotary ones and higher bills. Bell Labs being a success story doesn’t mean Ma Bell shouldn’t have been broken up.
If consumers are paying extra to a monopoly anyway, just fund university labs and non-university research agencies (which we do). We have dozens of equivalents to Bell Labs. There’s no reason to rely on monopolists for innovation.
the main innovations they got were touchtone phones replacing rotary ones and higher bills.
That's incredibly incorrect.
Bell labs invented or laid the groundwork for, among other things:
- Movies with synchronous sound
- Text-to-speech
- Stereo broadcasts
- Radio astronomy
- The transistor
- Unix
- The C programming language
- The calculator
- Solar electricity
- Transatlantic telephone cables
- LASER
- Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (this was part of the framework for cell phones. In the 1960s)
Take your anti-research propaganda out of here. Government backed scientists who don't have shareholders holding them accountable are crucial to progress. Capitalism is toxic to scientific progress. Great for improving around existing concepts, terrible for making new ones.
I wasn’t saying Bell Labs wasn’t innovative. The “they” in that sentence was referring to average, non-tech consumers like my grandma. The monopoly AT&T had over the Bell System funded all that research and consumers paid higher rates and had worse service because it was a monopoly.
I’m not anti-research. I’m anti-monopoly.
I agree with almost all of it. Surely your grandmother or eldest living non-troglodyte relative has benefitted from transistors and calculators. Even lasers. Probably even Unix, if they use a Mac, as most tech-illiterate do.
However, the silver lining here is that this monopoly actually invested... heavily...into R&D. You don't see that now, not to the levels that they did.