Comment by ZeroGravitas

What's the rationale for thinking that Bell Labs is special?

Reading a general history of science, it's remarkable how often the "inventor" of something is a rich amatuer who happened to have the time and money to spend on looking into the next big thing, and often the connections to publicize it.

Like, invent the microscope, then the people who can afford a microscope use it to look at things and discover them.

How do we know Bell Labs isn't the institutional version of that? And if it is, then the modern version would just to be to build really expensive machines and give some smart people time to play with them.

edit: looked up the invention of radio telescopy at Bell Labs:

> Karl Jansky made the discovery of the first astronomical radio source serendipitously in the early 1930s. As a newly hired radio engineer with Bell Telephone Laboratories, he was assigned the task to investigate static that might interfere with short wave transatlantic voice transmissions. Using a large directional antenna, Jansky noticed that his analog pen-and-paper recording system kept recording a persistent repeating signal or "hiss" of unknown origin. Since the signal peaked about every 24 hours, Jansky first suspected the source of the interference was the Sun crossing the view of his directional antenna. Continued analysis, however, showed that the source was not following the 24-hour daily cycle of the Sun exactly, but instead repeating on a cycle of 23 hours and 56 minutes. Jansky discussed the puzzling phenomena with his friend, astrophysicist Albert Melvin Skellett, who pointed out that the observed time between the signal peaks was the exact length of a sidereal day; the time it took for "fixed" astronomical objects, such as a star, to pass in front of the antenna every time the Earth rotated.[2] By comparing his observations with optical astronomical maps, Jansky eventually concluded that the radiation source peaked when his antenna was aimed at the densest part of the Milky Way in the constellation of Sagittarius.[3]

edit: similar story with laser, they were just building a new type of Maser, which several people and places were doing at the same time. Bell Labs controversially got the patent though:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser#Maser

> The question of just how to assign credit for inventing the laser remains unresolved by historians