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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?
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.
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?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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."
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...