The sad, slow, decline of corporate research labs

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I really wanted to write a eulogy to Bell Labs, but they aren’t dead just yet.

That’s a weird statement. It doesn’t make much sense, I mean, how do I give a eulogy to a lab? And beyond that, if it isn’t dead, what’s the point? And moreover, what is Bell Labs?

Nokia Bell Labs, nee AT&T Bell Laboratories, Inc., was the research division of the massive American telecom giant, American Telegraph and Telephone. Ma Bell, as she was called, had so much cash to burn that Bell Labs was, essentially, given a blank check to do whatever they felt like. Bell Labs invented, Western Electric built, and that was how AT&T remained at the top.

And boy, did Bell Labs invent. The lab is known for its 10 Nobel Prizes, the most of any private company (they’re only outdone by public research universities). Bell Labs has their fingers in every single modern invention that runs the internet. From the transistors to the wires to the operating systems that run our servers themselves, Bell Labs built the modern telecom giant.

And by the late 2000s, Bell Labs was not only no longer under the control of AT&T (well, AT&T had pushed Bell to a subsidiary, Lucent) but no longer American, after Lucent got bought by the French and then later, sold to the Finns. Nokia Bell Labs is what’s left of the greatest research environment in the history of the world. Then, it was killed, because at the end of the day, research for research’s sake just isn’t that profitable.

Essentially, Ma Bell was a monopoly. When you’re a monopoly, you can’t differentiate your product based on just price, you need to add some quirk or flair to your system. Enter: research. Producing new technology that only you can capitalize on means instead of driving down costs, you just make better tech. Enter: corporate research lab, where you make your own research and keep it out of the hands of your competitors.

Ma Bell and the Bell Labs weren’t the only ones doing this. DuPont, a chemicals company, had one of the highest performing chemistry labs, on site, in their Central Research & Development Lab. Xerox spun their Palo Alto Research Center into its own institute, as did General Electrics research and Westinghouse Research. In short, as antitrust laws and the collapse of the American Industry Giant coincided, research labs died.

If you can’t tell, that’s why I want a eulogy. I still love those research labs, the stories about Nortel or Bell or the work where work didn’t exist and it was all just learning. It’s something available at universities, sure, but publish or perish and tenure and drama but at Bell? You just did science for science’s sake and you discovered.

The death of those labs has hurt the innovation and the new discoveries made by American industry. While some is still being done, and there are still plenty of labs in the works, especially corporate ones, the biggest science for science’s sake labs are now entirely based in universities, or among the national lab system. Bell and its brethren are part of a dying generation, a last gap for when research ruled industry and science was king.