Inside Bell Labs: Excitement On The Bench;
The stockholder was annoyed. Why, he demanded, was AT&T paying Thomas Gradel, a middle-aged scientist, to tromp around the Jungles of Brazil studying ants, when the dollars could be better used to fatten up Bell’s notoriously meager dividends? The irate stockholder might equally well have asked about J. Anthony Tyson the astronomer on AT&T’s payroll who ricochet, between observatories in Hawaii and Chile to peer at galaxies at the far reaches of the universe. The answer is that their employer believes in the promise of long-term payoffs provided by basic research endeavors such theirs, despite the long-term investment they require.
That, of course, has been the conventional wisdom about Bell Labs. For 62 years the Labs has been the premier corporate research facility engaging in unfettered basic and applied research.
Gradel and Tysons predecessors spawned sound motion pictures, the transistor, the solar cell, ...
