A Book About Bell Labs

choi

Bell Labs and innovation | The Organisation of Genius; The halcyon days of blue-sky research. Economist, Apr 21, 2012
http://www.economist.com/node/21552998
(book review on John Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. Penguin, 2012)

Note:
(a) Bell Labs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs
(headquarters  Murray Hill, New Jersey [a suburb of New York city]; The Alexander Graham Bell Laboratory was created in Washington, DC by Alexander Graham Bell; In 1925 Western Electric Research Laboratories and part of the engineering department of AT&T were consolidated to form Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc., as a separate entity; a photo of the 1947 transitor)
(b) transistor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor
(1947; two scientists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain; their boss: Solid State Physics Group leader William Shockley; The term transistor was coined by John R Pierce as a portmanteau of the term "transfer resistor")
(c) John Bardeen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bardeen
(1908-1991; the only person to have won the Nobel Prize in Physics twice: first in 1956 with William Shockley and Walter Brattain for the invention of the transistor; and again in 1972 with Leon Neil Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer for a fundamental theory of conventional superconductivity known as the BCS theory)
(d) The "blue sky" in the sentence "companies care more about short-term profits than costly blue-sky research on the scale Bell Labs once had" is an adjective (First Known Use 1906) that means
"1: having little or no value <blue–sky stock>
2: not grounded in the realities of the present : VISIONARY <blue–sky thinking>
www.m-w.com