The skunk and the beaver

At its peak, Skunk Works was a few dozen engineers building three of the most advanced aircraft ever flown, on technology that now looks impossible. Bell Labs was similar. Between them they account for a startling share of the world we live in.

That does not make sense, and the puzzle is worth taking seriously rather than romanticising. How many such places were there? Why did we lose them? What actually gets them back?

This piece is being researched. It will cover the nameable mechanisms behind both labs, the funding half that does not transfer, Olivetti as the European case, and the one fragment of that bet that survived and is now a semiconductor company of real scale.