Before Silicon Valley, New Jersey Was Tech Capital (npr.org) 91
New submitter artmancc writes: It was in New Jersey that Thomas Edison invented sound recording, motion pictures, and the light bulb in what is considered the first modern corporate R&D facility. In other words, Edison invented the modern lab -- teams of people working together, sharing ideas and perfecting devices. In the century after Edison, New Jersey became the place to set up shop if you wanted to invent. On top of all the other assets, the state had lots of inexpensive land available. The transistor and cellular communications came out of AT&T's Bell Labs, also in New Jersey. If it was 1955 and you had to bet on where the next half-century of technical innovation would emerge, the Garden State would be the most likely winner, not some farmland south of San Francisco. As a couple of Jersey natives at NPR note, it didn't quite work out that way. What happened?
Re:The same reason the movie industry moved. (Score:5, Informative)
The weather was and continues to be better.
Actually, the movie industry set up shop in California for a much bigger reason: When movies first came out, New York was the movie -making capital. However, Edison held all the patents, would only rent (not sell) cameras and development gear, and demanded a *very* expensive rental fee. Early producers ran off to Los Angeles and used foreign-made cameras/equipment primarily to avoid paying Edison. Now, Edison could have chased them down and hauled them into court, but back then, the logistics were too onerous, and not all movie producers bolted for California... so the budding industry was largely left alone on the West Coast. In a couple of decades, most (if not practically all) of the creative talent wound up in California, and by then the patents expired.
Kind of funny how the MPAA of today, who screams about 'piracy', got its very start by ripping off Edison's intellectual property, no?
Real reason? (Score:1)
Shockley wanted to move out there.
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it was really the success of Fairchild and the companies that spun off of it
Sure, but the Traitorous Eight [wikipedia.org] were only in California because they had gone there with Shockley. If not for Bill Shockley, they would have stayed in New Jersey. Silicon Valley may have grown up around Princeton instead of Stanford.
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... and Shockley moved from New Jersey to Palo Alto because his mom lived there and she was sick.
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New Jersey tends to have many green plants that grow naturally and without being a part of the landscaping. Even even rains there on a regular basis as well. Stay away from the industrial blight and it's a very nice state. I'm saying this as a native and life long California resident.
In a word, patents (Score:5, Informative)
Back in those days the only way to escape Edison's patent lawsuits was to flee to the West Coast. Long story short, we have been fighting the patent system in order to progress for the entirety of the history of the United States.
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Which is, incidentally, not only why we have Silicon Valley but also why we have Hollywood.
Re:In a word, patents (Score:4, Insightful)
No mod points, but this.
Creative people fled the corporate IP ownership that Edison fathered. To a place where employees could move back and forth without having their knowledge and experience effectively stripped from them.
Is it any wonder that at the far end of this philosophical spectrum New Jersey became one of the centers of mob activity? Where you have to cut the big boys in on the action if you want to play in their markets.
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White is very out of favor right now.
Try applying to any New England school right now. If you're not brown or black, you'll dropped to the bottom of the list.
I can't verify that statement using statistics. Here's the black enrollment at Ivy league universities:
http://www.jbhe.com/features/6... [jbhe.com]
(for reference, blacks compose 12.3% of the population of America)
Ford, not Edison (Score:3)
He was a very evil man. He was white. He supported the Third Reich and personally met with Hitler.
I believe you are confusing Thomas Edison with Henry Ford. Ford personally met Hitler.
Ford was a friend of Edison, but I don't think you can ascribe all of Ford's ideas to Edison.
http://listverse.com/2015/05/04/10-facts-that-will-change-how-you-view-thomas-edison/
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And it all matters about as much as Joe Kennedy's love for Hitler. Not at all.
They're all dead.
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I don't think there is much chance of Joe Kennedy, Henry Ford or Thomas Edison coming back and supporting anyone.
So what are we supposed to remember?
Wait, what? (Score:2)
Didn't Edison (the "Wizard of Menlo Park") leave New Jersey and set up in Menlo Park, California?
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Menlo Park is in NJ.
Oh, haha, I only knew about Menlo Park, California [wikipedia.org]! My whole life I thought Edison had moved there...
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For what it's worth, I also thought this.
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I am glad I wasn't the only one!
Menlo Park, New Jersey [Re:Wait, what?] (Score:2)
Didn't Edison (the "Wizard of Menlo Park") leave New Jersey and set up in Menlo Park, California?
No, he was the wizard of Menlo Park, New Jersey.
There is a town in California called Menlo Park-- it was named after the one in New Jersey after Edison made it famous.
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"Thomas Edison invented" (Score:1)
Thomas Edison didn't invent shit. He found existing inventions that weren't properly patented and did so in his name. He also patented everything invented by his employees under his name.
The guy was a genius, but a genius at management and thievery. The myth that he invented hundreds of things all by himself needs to die.
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The Bay Area had a bit of a tech background already before Silicon Valley. There were several companies working with the military on research or development. There was also Ampex, Varian, and Hewlett-Packard which were some of the first "high tech" companies in the region. There was SRI which was a magnet for research as well. The "Silicon" part didn't come about until Fairchild Semiconductors started the trend towards chip companies.
Today there's very little silicon anymore, there are too many startups
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Easy to see why he was a hero to Steve Jobs.
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Yes and no. He did a lot of very hard work perfecting the inventions, many inventions were his own or from his labs. It was a time when everyone was building upon everyone else's work. No one invented a full blown product all on their own, the patents were all incremental modifications. Don't let an online comic strip fool you into thinking he was evil personified.
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You aren't a nerd. You are a dork.
Ain't that a stinker! (Score:2)
tl;dr (Score:5, Informative)
In California, anyone who had an idea could quit their job and start a new company. So people did it. In New Jersey, they expected you to stay with the company for life, and had laws to enforce that paradigm. I'm saying this based on what the article presented. If you want to know the answer, skip to the bottom, the rest of the article is just entertaining filler.
Contrarianism (Score:2)
Cost of Living (Score:2)
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Boston, and Route 128 (Score:3)
What happened is the tech industry moved to Boston, around Route 128. From there we had technology giants like DEC, Polaroid, Thermo Electron, Bolt Beranek and Newman, Raytheon, Wang, Honeywell, MITRE, Analog Devices, etc.
Minneapolis Minnesota (Score:1)
Then it moved to Minneapolis where there was Control Data with Plato, Honeywell, and Cray Super Computers.
I can tell you in one word or two (Score:3)
One word - Lucent.
Bell Labs and innovation died because AT&T spun off Lucent in the internet bubble days and put Bell Labs in it. I went to Murray Hill maybe a couple of years before Lucent existed and it still had really smart people there who were interested in doing cool things. Lucent didn't really know what it was doing and it basically killed Bell Labs through incompetence. Lucent doesn't really exist any more. It's passed through 2 more owners and now is some part of Nokia. I was in an investment club during the Internet bubble and I remember we bought Lucent stock and we kept getting stock in spin off companies as Lucent tried desperately to spin off the crap parts of its business, like old school analog phone service, to save the high tech part of it, but nothing they did worked.
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Lucent was yet another Carly legacy.
And now it's more like Bridgeport CT. (Score:1)
To take quote from Family Guy : "I'll have you know that Bridgeport is among the world leaders in abandoned buildings, shattered glass, boarded-up windows, wild dogs and gas stations without pumps." .... Yeah. :)
Barnum & Bailey, Wringling Brothers Circus (Score:2)
Used to Bridgeport's one claim to fame. Now, amazingly, that icon is now gone.
Largely due to lack of innovation.
Money and attitude (Score:2)
It's hard to make new things in an environment that values stability and incrementalism, which pretty much defines the attitude of the Northeastern US.
Even the Liberals in the Northeast are conservative.
What happened... (Score:5, Informative)
William Shockley and the Traitorous Eight [wikipedia.org], that's what happened.
The article alludes to this: William Shockley, one of those brilliant Nobel laureates who invented the transistor, moved to California to open his lab in Mountain View, the current home of Google. His employees also left to found their own companies.
In a nutshell, Silicon Valley gave birth to this innovation, because New Jersey and Bell Labs demanded loyalty to the company. If the company didn't agree with your ideas, then they wanted those ideas tossed into the garbage can so that you had time to work on their ideas. Shockley thought his ideas were better, so he went out to California to develop them (where New Jersey's anti-competitive laws didn't apply), and brought the Traitorous Eight with him. And then the Traitorous Eight left Shockley to form Fairchild Semiconductor. And so on...
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TAXES AND UNIONS (Score:1)
TNA
New Jersey and You (Score:2)
New Jersey tech was doing fine, doing boring, staid, telecomm work until AT&T was broken up; the remnants continued on until the recovery of NYC, which really finished off NJ tech.
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> Oh yes let's forget all about J&J turning New Brunswick into a biotech center.
I'm talking about silicon based tech, not that squishy carbon-and-water junk.
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Thomas Edison?! (Score:3)
He was a dick. [youtube.com]
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It's kind of like saying Al Gore invented the internet. There's no point trying to turn either into some sort of lone hero instead of making it possible for a successful team to get things done.
Two guys with the initials (Score:2)
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No, the transister ws NOT invented at Bell Labs (Score:3)
The common misconception is that Bell Labs invented the transistor, but it actually invented the bipolar transistor. The field effect transistor predates the bipolar by a bit, but was not practical for most existing tube (valve) applications.
I read an editorial in EEE (now IEEE) Magazine from the time Bell announced the bipolar transistor and it was not nice to Bell or that device that changed the world. It described several issues with bipolar transistors that FETs didn't have and concluded with the assertion (paraphrased) that Bell should stick to telephones and leave solid state research to those who know what they were doing.
While bipolar transistors led the way to the solid-state revolution with devices like the transistor radio, the first common household application, most of today's integrated circuits are, in fact, mostly or entirely based on Field Effect technology. Maybe EEE was right. ;-)
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I could easily be wrong, but my recollection is that FETs require a degree of purity of ingredients and process that were not practically achievable back then. In addition, early transistors were pretty feeble, and it's easier to make a high current bipolar transistor than a high current FET.
Most early FETs were junction FETs, a different technology from the MOSFETS that dominate digital circuits.
Re: No, the transister ws NOT invented at Bell Lab (Score:2)
The main issue was that FETs worked much like a tube with very high input impedance. Practically a drop-in replacement while bipolar were really current regulated devices with low impedance which required a very different mindset.
My father, educated in the 20s, never really understood them.
Software Development Started in NJ (Score:2)
No mention of Bill and Dave? (Score:2)
Helping create a great tech climate?