The Idea Factory

Between the 1920s and the 1980s, Bell Labs produced the transistor, the laser, information theory, the solar cell and the communications satellite, and Gertner sets out to explain how one institution managed that. His answer is about conditions rather than genius: patient funding from a regulated monopoly, physicists seated next to metallurgists, and permission to work on problems for years. A useful corrective to the lone-inventor story of innovation.