# The famed bell labs research was a fraction of their activity When [[Bell Labs]] began, only about 15% of its employees did research. `Of the two thousand technical experts, the vast majority worked on product development. About three hundred, including Clinton Davidson and Mervin Kelly, worked under Harold Arnold in basic and applied research.` [[Bell labs was primarily not researchers]] Most of the work was to create [[Continuous technology improvements]] - better telephone poles, more efficient vacuum tubes, cheaper cable sheathing.  For curiosity, I kept track of every single named employee mentioned in [[gertnerIdeaFactoryBell2012]] - there were 64 of them. Sixty-four people over an approximately 70-year period, in an organization that employed thousands of individuals from day one. Obviously this number is skewed smaller by the narrative constraints of a book, the tendency to over-concentrate attribution on a few individuals, and the limits of historiography itself. Obviously hundreds of other people - technicians, support staff, managers - were crucial to the projects. However, it does mean that even within minority of people at Bell Labs doing research most of the work was not particularly notable. There’s a question of counterfactuals - could you have gotten the output of Shannon and Shocklee without an organization the size of Bell Labs? Some parts were presumably irrelevant (the guys trying to eke the last 1% out of vacuum tubes? The guys figuring out how to make telephone poles last 5% longer?), but it is incredibly hard to say from from the outside, and may have been hard from the inside. I can only assume they didn’t support projects they *knew* to be worthless. The issue is that even on top of having the tacit and manufacturing around to act on the ideas we today recognize as valuable, [[The work at Bell Labs that was most valuable to AT+T and the work that was most valuable to the world was fairly disjoint]]. The latter subsidized the former. This is an uncomfortable reality because it slams you in the face with the fact that [[Sturgeon’s Law]] applied even in arguably the most optimal situation possible - a monopoly whose massive profits literally depended on better technology and plowing some of the profit back into flashy research. ### Related * [[Seen vs Unseen]] <!-- #evergreen --> [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/The+famed+bell+labs+research+was+a+fraction+of+their+activity) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/The+famed+bell+labs+research+was+a+fraction+of+their+activity)