How Bell Labs Won Its First Nobel Prize

Bell Labs, as we’ve noted before, was for years America’s premier industrial research lab. Not only did Bell Labs invent much of the technology that powers the modern world — the transistor, the solar PV cell, the first communication satellite — but it made numerous scientific breakthroughs, accumulating more Nobel Prizes than any other industrial research lab.

I’m generally skeptical of efforts to create a “modern Bell Labs,” as I think much of what made Bell Labs work was historically contingent. But I nevertheless think there’s value in understanding what exactly made Bell Labs so good, and how we might apply those lessons to modern organizations.

One way of understanding what made Bell Labs tick is to look at its early history, before it became America’s premier industrial lab. To that end, let’s take a look at how Bell Labs won its first Nobel Prize.

The prize was awarded to physicist Clinton Davisson in 1937 for demonstrating the existence of electron diffraction — the fact that, in some circumstances, electrons act like waves rather than particles. This discovery was based on research done by Davisson that began in 1920, just a few years after Theodore Vail (the first general manager of AT&T) returned to the company and set it on a more technology-focused trajectory, and before Bell Labs as a formal organization even existed.

Clinton Davisson and Western Electric

Clinton Davisson was born in Illinois in 1881. While he displayed an aptitude for math and science from an early age, he had a somewhat fitful journey into physics. When Davisson graduated high school in 1902, he attended the University of Chicago, but after a year was forced to drop out due to lack of funds. One of his professors, Robert Millikan (who would later win the Nobel Prize for discovering the charge of the electron with his oil drop experiment), arranged for Davisson to work at Purdue University as an assistant instructor in physics. Davisson returned to University of Chicago later that year, only to leave again to work as a part-time instructor at Princeton. Davisson finally graduated from University of Chicago with his bachelors in 1908, and received his PhD from Princeton in 1911.

After graduating from Princeton, Davisson got a job as an instructor of physics at Carnegie Institute of Technology (today known as Carnegie Mellon). While at Carnegie, most of Davisson’s time was occupied ...