Comment

The Idea Factory

Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
ProtectEndangeredSpecies
Nov 03, 2012
Shockley went over the edge? Maybe he was a bad parent? Through observation alone: “It don't take any brains at all to be a good parent,” sounds plausible. A fascinating book about decision making, and a certain type of decision maker. If ever a reader of this comment has been around such people ask yourself, “don't they often appear ill-equipped?” A lame comment about wearing eye glasses is only a lame comment about eye glasses, or a humorous reference to a test used to detect subversive intellectuals reportedly used while selecting for the killing fields – laughed at depending on the capriciousness of the audience. This was a good read that often reminded the this reader that the foot solders of the Bell System always toiled. People recently cobbled together a mass transit system while the rage of Sandy subsided, and implemented the system with the wreckage remaining from the storm. It was marvelous to watch the rising star of a monopoly, the Metropolitan Transit Authority so quickly dispatch buses and drivers to Manhattan streets that had never before been their domain. Motormen on the IRT 6 are still at the top of their game several weeks after the crisis has subsided much as they were weeks after the Christmas snow emergencies of several years past. Where was the tooling done? Who did the tooling? Who put the machine together? Did the machine that took us to and from work for those few days after Sandy exist in an emergency plan before hand? What about the conference rooms and cubicles, was there much yelling? “Shockley was human and perhaps fallible,” is a safe and polite statement. With age and experience decisions oft become reflex and the courage to make decisions deceptive bravado, and with said that the narrative tells of key Bell personal scheduling the introduction of transistorized telephone switching equipment in a timely fashion foreshadowing the decline and fall of Ma Bell while cell technology was proliferating. America accepted Ma Bell for security provided by a monopoly. Is there a lesson here about mass transit as well?