Meet Jon Gertner, Author of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

Jon Gertner, the author of a new bestselling book from Penguin called The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation will appear at the Washington Twp. Public Library, 37 E. Springtown Rd, Long Valley, NJ on Wednesday, June 20, 2012 at 7 p.m.

This book looks at the history of where most of American innovation came from in the era before Silicon Valley.  Bell Labs was THE place for innovation from lasers and the transistor to digital communications and cellular telephony. 

Bell Laboratories, which thrived from the 1920s to the 1980s, was the most innovative and productive institution of the twentieth century. Long before America's brightest scientific minds began migrating west to Silicon Valley, they flocked to this sylvan campus in the New Jersey suburbs built and funded by AT&T. At its peak, Bell Labs employed nearly fifteen thousand people, twelve hundred of whom had PhDs. Thirteen would go on to win Nobel prizes. It was a citadel of science and scholarship as well as a hotbed of creative thinking. It was, in effect, a factory of ideas whose workings have remained largely hidden until now.

Jon Gertner grew up in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey—just a few hundred yards away from Bell Labs. He has been a writer for the New York Times Magazine since 2004 where he writes about business, technology, and society and is currently an editor at Fast Company magazine. He has also served as a senior editor for Money and The American Lawyer.

 Call the Library at 908-876-3596 or go to www.wtpl.org to sign up for this program!