Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Three problems beat one
Three problems at once
In a letter to Vannevar Bush in the early 1940s, Shannon described working on three different ideas simultaneously, and strangely enough it seemed a more productive method than sticking to one problem. His days at Bell Labs followed the same pattern. He might think about cryptography or about improving the telephone network for a while, then put his pad down.
Work as play
Then he would listen to jazz, play his clarinet, juggle, or ride his unicycle, and go back to the pad. Most days were spent shut indoors, alternating between the notepad and the clarinet. For him there was no separation between work and play.
Freedom at Bell Labs
Bell Labs made that life possible. He had the freedom to do anything he wanted from almost the day he started, and nobody told him what to work on. His only duties were to tinker, think, and publish papers. That suited a man who was allergic to administrative work and bureaucracy.
Why does switching problems help?
In 2009 the psychologists Ut Na Sio and Thomas Ormerod reviewed dozens of experiments on incubation, the effect of taking a break from a problem. Their paper in Psychological Bulletin found that breaks improved later performance on creative problems. The gain was largest when the break involved an undemanding activity that left the mind free to wander.
How did Bell Labs fund free exploration?
AT&T held a regulated monopoly on American telephone service, and its steady revenue paid for Bell Labs. The lab could take on long-range questions with no promise of a product. Researchers there invented the transistor in 1947 and later won multiple Nobel Prizes.
How did its buildings encourage chance meetings?
Mervin Kelly, who later became president of Bell Labs, designed the Murray Hill site in New Jersey with long corridors so that people from different fields would pass one another. Jon Gertner describes the design in his 2012 book The Idea Factory. Offices for theorists and experimenters were placed close together on purpose.
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