Attendance was allowed by invitation only. “And there was, finally, another place on West Street where new ideas could now spread. The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation Here, too, was a relatively low-risk opportunity to confront and solve the practical challenges of this new technology-“to get one’s hands dirty”-before making a slew of big and expensive mistakes.” Ten years earlier, Pierce had witnessed how problems with the transistor didn’t show up until the device entered the development and production stage. A passive satellite, in other words, was an experiment. But it tested the possibility of orbiting relays before they were developed into something more.

“You begin to see what the problems are when you set out to do things, and that’s why we thought would be a good idea.” A passive satellite, he added, probably wouldn’t be useful in terms of the business of communications. “There’s a difference, you see, in thinking idly about something, and in setting out to do something,” he explained to an interviewer in the early 1960s. He also knew that the small research department at Bell Labs, unlike the huge development department, lacked the manpower and budget necessary for an active project. He wasn’t certain that Bell engineers knew enough yet to build a foolproof and durable active satellite-one that could operate for more than a few weeks or months. Here, too, was a relatively low-risk opportunity to confront and solve the practical challenges of this new technology-“to get one’s hands dirty”-before making a slew of big and expensive mistakes.“Pierce considered himself conservative about any satellite gambit.

“Pierce considered himself conservative about any satellite gambit.

The idea factory by jon gertner