Comment by epistasis
9 hours ago
Even Bell Labs would not be doing the type of research that is necessary. Look at all the innovation in science that happened back then! Bell Labs was an outlier but it was not the primary driver of science by any means.
You're right, there were many other companies doing it too. General Electric, General Motors, Sylvania, etc.
That's not what I was saying. The foundational research that built the massive economic engine of the current US did not come from industrial research.
Did you overlook the transistor?
Built at Bell Labs in 1947, getting a Nobel prize for Bardeen, Shockley, and Brittain a few years later?
It's hard to think of a part of any economic engine that doesn't rely on transistors for the last many decades.
The "massive economic engine of the current US" is certainly the result of large companies' research. They have all been very open about that, so do you have any proof to the contrary?
More examples: IBM, Kodak, Xerox...