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Before Silicon Valley, New Jersey Was Tech Capital (npr.org)
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?
The weather was and continues to be better.
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.
Didn't Edison (the "Wizard of Menlo Park") leave New Jersey and set up in Menlo Park, California?
#DeleteChrome
Shockley wanted to move out there.
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.
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.
Those schools don't like white people at all. But that's not racist. No sireee.
In fact, it's now news at all, considering that Silicon Valley has dominated the tech industry for decades. This isn't stuff that matters, either, because it's a long time ago and doesn't contain useful information for present day nerds.
What an unfortunate and malodorous outcome.
The reason California became the tech hub was because of non-compete laws in New Jersey. Shockley couldn't build a lab in New Jersey to compete with Bell Labs because it would have been against state law, but California didn't have such laws.
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.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'm going to be contrarian here and say that, Thomas Edison was a great man. At the very least, setting up a lab for inventing was very impressive, and clearly a predecessor to Bell Labs.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The price of real estate and rents rose too fast?
Not only Edison. New Jersey is the place where Curtis-Wright (the manufacturer of Lindberg trans-Atlantic flight airplane engine), this is biopharmaceutical hub and the place of one of the largest ports in the worlds. AT&T and its offspring Verizon have/had headquarters here. The departure of the cinema business to Los Angeles has always been attributed to the availability of sun. I will take a great risk of being downvoted, but I have to bring what is obvious: 1. The unions. 2. Property taxes. Probably one of the most expensive property taxes in the middle-class communities. 3. NJ income taxes. One of the highest state income taxes, while deductions and exemptions are not significant. As an additional evidence serves the fact that solidly blue state has been electing Republican governors who only promise lower taxes. Even with the highest property taxes and income taxes, the state is technically bankrupt, yet cops routinely make $130K and more. http://www.nj.com/bergen/index... 4. Congested road and bad commutes. 5. Corruption, in the form of regulation, sweet deals to certain service providers. Locally the euphemism of "cost of doing business" is used. All of the above require high and higher salaries to compensate high-cost living expenses. At the same time, high salaries become a low hanging fruit to relocate job to lower jurisdiction (such as Florida, or India). Here comes the answer: NJ is bleeding mid-level jobs from all the high-tech industries, while at the same time serving as a suburb for those commuting to the New York City.
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.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Two words - Internet bubble.
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.
Now it's just fist-pumping orange skinned guidos. Wtf happens?
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. :)
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.
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/
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
William Shockley and the Traitorous Eight, 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...
TNA
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.
Used to Bridgeport's one claim to fame. Now, amazingly, that icon is now gone.
Largely due to lack of innovation.
Around Boston, MA runs a highway called Rte 128, along this highway are former tech giants as well. MIT's famed RAD LAB, which has morphed into MIT's Lincoln Labs and MITRE are just two examples of these tech giants. These two still exist as do hundreds more. .
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...
(for reference, blacks compose 12.3% of the population of America)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
... is what happened.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Terman
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.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
He was a dick.
#DeleteFacebook
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.
Oh yes let's forget all about J&J turning New Brunswick into a biotech center.
New Jersey that Thomas Edison invented sound recording, motion pictures, and the light bulb
Wait, what? Edison invented none of those things.
why do people never allude to random chance ?
Shockley, H and P, a couple other guys...maybe it was just random variation in where some guys were located
people have this need to invent complex storys about why
doesn't mean storys are right
...Detroit
he didnt invent the light bulb.
H and P.
Early in the 20th century, Lee DeForest set up shop in Menlo Park. Not in Menlo Park, New Jersey, but Menlo Park California, all the way across the continent from Edison. The Varian brothers also set up shop near Lee DeForest. Philo Farnsworth set up shop in San Francisco and environs. Hiller Helecopters also set up shop south of San Francisco, as did Jennings Labs, which made high-energy relays, among other things.
But accroding to the majority of history books, none of that acually happened. For example, almost every single history of Lee DeForest mentions that he set up shop in Menlo Park. Period. "Menlo Park", without making the disctinction between Menlo Park New Jersey and Menlo Park California.
There are quite a few tehcnology firsts that California can claim credit for as far back as the 19th century. That goes for electronics, aviation and other fields.
As a result of the deliberate omissions and "errors" of historians, California does not get it's full due in tech history. And it looks as if the NPR story insists on perpetuating that.
https://steveblank.com/secret-history/
This gives insight to how the West coast become the technology center it is today.
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. ;-)
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
>Thomas Edison invented sound recording, motion pictures,
wat
The US UN Headquarters Agreement of 1947 drove technology out of the metro New York region for security reasons. New Jersey had a strong union movement which the administration wished to weaken.
Back in the 1960's, if I remember correctly, Marty Goetz sued IBM and won the ability to open their vaults to developers. Prior to Mr. Goetz's suit, the software that ran the big iron of IBM was proprietary and closely guarded. Marty created AutoFlow and a string of successful mainframe products with his company Applied Data Research, in the Princeton, NJ area. MetaCobol, Librarian, Roscoe, Ideal, DatacomDB and more were deployed all across the country and were top notch products. (ADR was first swallowed by Ameritech - spawn of NJ's AT&T, and then the evil empire of Charles "Wang, not Wang" Wang of CA.) New Jersey was also home to Online Software International (also swallowed by CA) and others. It was, in my opinion, the birthplace of software as we know it.
My user name was a mistake. Input wasn't restricted, my bad.
The Jersey Shore, then The Real Housewives of New Jersey.*
* = Alternative History!
And regulation the likes of which has never been seen before in the history of the universe...
Then it moved to Minneapolis where there was Control Data with Plato, Honeywell, and Cray Super Computers.
Helping create a great tech climate?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
He invented practical sound recording, practical motion pictures, and the practical incandescent light bulb.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Joseph Swan invented the practical incandescent light bulb, not Edison, and even had the patent for it.
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.
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
His company did all of the above, not the man himself.
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.
NJ was a big center in the 50s and 60s. So was Dallas (TI), Boston (rte 128, MIT), and a variety of other metastases of entrepeneurs, including Palo Alto and the Santa Clara Valley.
But, the Bay Area had a confluence of two factors: (1) Stanford, equalled or exceeded only by MIT, and (2) the "counterculture" (hippies, LSD, whatever). Those combined into the freewheeling entrepeneurship of Silicon Valley. The other places may have had the tech savvy, but were too staid and hidebound to take the risks that led to the digital revolution. In the Bay Area, iconoclasm and nonconformism were not only tolerated but even celebrated, while in NJ and the other metastases nonconformism was crushed. Well, MIT was nonconformist, but most people couldn't deal with 8 months of winter, and the nonconformism did not extend to capital, other than -- amazingly -- ARPA, but ARPA funded stuff all over.