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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.
Didn't Edison (the "Wizard of Menlo Park") leave New Jersey and set up in Menlo Park, California?
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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?
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.
What an unfortunate and malodorous outcome.
You aren't a nerd. You are a dork.
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."
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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H and P.
The first long distance telephone line was in California. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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
But for the movie industry the weather actually mattered. Instead of shooting the cliffhangers on the cliffs of Fort Lee for half a year, they could should cliffhangers on the cliffs of Hollywood most of the year. This had a direct effect on the bottom line.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
I prefer to call it I95. :)
Just the stretch through Burlington, MA -- look at all of the marquees on the buildings, it's pretty impressive. However, commuting there from where I lived (Swampscott) would've been an exercise in road rage.