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What would it take to recreate Bell Labs?

For most of the 20th century, AT&T was almost entirely responsible for building and operating America’s telephone infrastructure. It manufactured the phones and electrical equipment, laid hundreds of millions of miles of wire across the country, and built and operated the switchboards and exchanges that made it possible for anyone with a phone to call anyone else.

Arnold’s initial studies on a potential device, the mercury vapor tube, proved fruitless, but in 1912 he was impressed by a demonstration of the audion, invented by Lee de Forest, which was capable of amplifying an electric signal. Likewise, having a goal attached to a lab is not the same thing as an overriding, urgent need that infuses its culture; the former can simply be dictated, but the latter is dependent on outside forces (like a constantly rising demand for a product) that can’t necessarily be controlled. Even a company like Google, which spends billions on R&D and has displayed a willingness to fund speculative, longer-term moonshot projects like self-driving cars or life extension, doesn’t completely bite the Bell Labs bullet.

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