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A nicely organized blog post at https://www.construction-physics.com/p/what-would-it-take-to-recreate-bell [construction-physics.com] reviews the history of Bell Labs (going back into the late 1800s). It ends with a section that wonders if re-creating a research monster like Bell Labs (peak employment = 25,000 people) is possible today...or even needed. A sample from the middle:

Though it had many successes in the first 25 years of its life, the crowning achievement of Bell Labs research (and its strategy of leveraging early-stage scientific research to create new products) is undoubtedly its development of the transistor, along with its various derivatives (the MOSFET, the solar PV cell) and associated manufacturing technologies (including crystal pulling, zone melting, and diffusion furnaces). The transistor is a classic case of Bell Labs’ strategy: wide research freedom, circumscribed by the requirement to produce things useful for the Bell System. The telephone network required enormous amounts of vacuum tubes [Bell Labs developed de Forest's tube into a useful amplifier] and mechanical relays to act as switches, but these were far from ideal components. ... Mervin Kelly, physicist and head of the Bell Labs vacuum tube department in the early 1930s (and later the president of Bell Labs), dreamed of replacing them with solid-state components with no moving parts. Advances in quantum mechanics, and novel materials known as semiconductors, suggested that such components might be possible.

Bell Labs had studied semiconductors since the early 1930s; Walter Brattain, who would eventually share the Nobel Prize for inventing the transistor, was hired in 1929 and had begun to study an early semiconductor device called the copper oxide rectifier. A Depression hiring freeze stymied more serious semiconductor efforts until 1936, when Mervin Kelly (now Bell Labs’ director of research) was finally able to start building a more robust solid-state physics department and hired physicist William Shockley (the second of the three transistor inventors). While not giving Shockley any specific research tasks (indeed, the entire solid-state group had “unprecedented liberty to follow their own research noses as long as their work dovetailed with general company goals”), Kelly emphasized to Shockley the potential value of a solid-state component to replace tubes and mechanical relays.

The solid-state physicists continued their research over the next several years, studying the behavior of semiconductors and attempting to create a semiconductor amplifier. This research was interrupted by the war but resumed in 1945, the same year physicist John Bardeen was hired. Bardeen proved to be the catalyst the solid-state group needed, and over the next several years Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley made progress in understanding semiconductor behavior. In December 1947, they unveiled their semiconductor amplifier: the transistor. By 1950, Western Electric was making 100 transistors a month for use in Bell System equipment. A few years later, in 1954, another Bell Labs solid-state research effort yielded the world’s first silicon solar PV cell.

One of the kids in my neighborhood (1960s) became a physicist and worked at Bell Labs for years--seemed to really like it there. Anyone else have a connection to tell about?

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