Optics & Photonics News

Izuo Hayashi and Mort Panish at Bell

Labs in 1970.

Courtesy of Bell Labs

DeLoach, Dixon and Hartman shared the IEEE Medal for Engineering Excellence for their work.

The end of an era

By 1976, the glory days of many other big industrial labs were history.

The wind-down of spending on the space race and military technology, combined with the economic slump of the early 1970s, took a heavy toll. America’s romance with science and technology soured as the public tired of worsening industrial and automotive pollution. The students who flocked to science and engineering schools in the post-Sputnik boom saturated the job market. In the hard times, the pendulum of management fashion swung away from heavy investment in research and development.

The conventional wisdom of the early 1960s was that research would bring long-term rewards. But scientists given a free hand “shanghaied” industrial labs, says Graham, focusing on their own interests instead of company needs. Many brilliant successes in laser development brought little tangible reward to their corporate parents. Hughes leveraged its early laser work into more defense contracts, but Sorokin’s uranium and samarium lasers never found practical uses. General Electric abandoned diode lasers because they didn’t fit with corporate goals. American Optical tried to commercialize the neodymium-glass laser invented by Elias Snitzer of its research lab, but after management changes shut down its whole research laboratory and spun off its laser business.

Overall, American industry “became more concerned about output and far less concerned about basic fundamental science,” says Graham. Most labs that survived did so by tailoring their operations to corporate needs. James McGroddy saved IBM’s research labs by getting development groups to fund projects, so they became vital to company business operations. When Louis Gerstner overhauled the troubled company in 1993, he saw the labs were useful and preserved them.

Barney DeLoach with Bell Labs’ million-hour laser.

Courtesy of Bell Labs

Bell Labs was another story. It survived largely intact into the 1980s on the strength of AT&T’s virtual telephone monopoly. It used carbon dioxide lasers in manufacturing, but only diode lasers became commercial products, and those were mainly for internal use. A series of corporate divestitures split the labs, and they shrank as key researchers left and budgets dropped. Today, Bell Labs is part of Alcatel-Lucent, a maker of telecommunications systems with a limited research portfolio.

It’s no longer possible for companies to try everything in their research labs, Graham says. Big public companies find themselves handcuffed by Wall Street’s obsession with short-term returns, so research has shifted elsewhere, particularly to universities and entrepreneurs. Today we live in a different and more complex world. 

Jeff Hecht ( jeff@jeffhecht.com) is a science and technology writer based in Auburndale, Mass., U.S.A. Member

[ References and Resources ]

>> A.L. Schawlow and C.H. Townes. “Infrared and Optical Masers,” Phys. Rev. 112, 1940-9 (1958).

>> A. Javan. “Possibility of producing negative temperature in gas discharge,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 3, 87-89 (1959).

>> H. Kroemer. “A proposed class of heterojunction injection lasers,” Proc. IEEE 51, 1782-3 (1963).

>> H. Kressel and H. Nelson. “Close confinement gallium arsenide pn junction lasers with reduced optical loss at room temperature,” RCA Review 30, 106-113 (1969).

>> Z Alferov et al. “Effect of the heterostructure parameters on the laser threshold current and the realization of continuous generation at room temperature,” (English translation in) Soviet Physics— Semiconductors 4, 1573 (1971).