At Bell Labs, the Patent Attorneys Turned to Study the Inventors Themselves

A new essay from Surface returns to a moment at Bell Laboratories, somewhere around the midpoint of the twentieth century, when the attorneys charged with filing the company's patents started asking a different question: not what had been invented, but who was doing the inventing, and why so much of it came from there. The Labs at that point was turning out discoveries at a pace few institutions in the country could match, and the people closest to the paperwork had a front-row view of it. Their curiosity about the researchers down the hall is the thread the piece follows. For readers who care about how great American rooms get built and what comes out of them, it is a reminder that the most valuable thing a building ever held was sometimes the habit of asking the right question.

With reporting from Surface.