David Bodanis

Conductors of Progress

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

By

The Penguin Press 422pp £18.75 order from our bookshop

November 1947, and William Shockley is in a frenzy. He’s head of a research team at Bell Labs, just outside New York, and he’s a very intelligent man (as anyone who speaks to him is quickly informed). But somehow, two hicks – the Midwesterner John Bardeen, and the Oregon rancher Walter Brattain – look like they’re going to outwit him.

They’re on the verge of finding what many in the Labs have been seeking for years: a device that could be made out of what’s basically solid rock yet could handle electrical signals, switch them, hustle them, and – most miraculously of all – magnify them, so that what was a weak, feeble Clark Kent stream of electrons upon entering emerges as a Superman torrent.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • One woman 'travelled round the south of India with a retinue of 750 people, fourteen elephants, two racing camels f… ,
    • Stuck for a gift idea for Father's Day? Subscribe to Literary Review and get a FREE copy of 'An Impeccable Spy' –… ,
    • 'Gone. All gone. The ease, the pleasure, the effortless eloquence' From May 1995, Margaret Forster's withering rev… ,
    • RT : SO excited to tell you about this event! 😆 The amazing digital colourist, will be joining w… ,
    • 'Peters was unashamed and evidently unshamable, an impostor who wholly inhabited his fabrications and who indignant… ,
    • ‘At every waking moment Barbara Hepworth was aware of herself as a woman paving the way in a man’s world’ From the… ,
    • The entertaining Howard Jacobson is in conversation with Prof John Mullan at the Queen’s Park Book Festival on Sund… ,
    Follow Us