But in the past few years, the thinking has changed, and tech companies have begun looking to the past for answers. In 2010, Google opened Google X, where it is building driverless cars, Internet-connected glasses, balloons that deliver the Internet and other things straight out of science fiction. Microsoft Research just announced the opening of a skunk-works group called Special Projects. Even Bell Labs announced this month that it is trying to return to its original mission by finding far-out ways to solve real-world problems.

All of their parent companies, however, are determined to learn from the mistakes that Xerox and AT&T made, namely failing to capitalize on their own research. It’s Valley lore, after all, that companies like Apple and Fairchild Semiconductor built their fame and fortune on research done at Xerox and Bell. Instead of focusing on basic science research, “we’re tackling projects that advance science and solve significant problems,” says Regina Dugan, the former director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), who now runs a small group inside Google called Advanced Technology and Projects. “What this means is you’re not compromising this idea of doing really important and interesting science and this sense of it really mattering.” To put a finer point on it, Astro Teller, who oversees Google X, told me: “We are not a research center. We think of ourselves as a moonshot factory, and the reasons for using that phrase is the word ‘moonshot’ reminds us to be audacious, and the word ‘factory’ reminds us we have to industrialize it in the end.”

There is a decidedly 21st-century quality to Google X. Teller dismisses the old “academics on steroids model.” (He would know. One of his grandfathers, Gerard Debreu, won the Nobel Prize in economics, and the other, Edward Teller, was an early physicist on the Manhattan Project.) Instead, Google X does the inverse: It picks products to make, then hires people specifically to build them: artists and philosophers and designers, many of whom don’t even know what they’ll be working on until they join. (Sample job interview question: “Do you like yellow?”) The idea, in other words, is to recreate the institutionalized and research-predicated model of Bell Labs while also trying to get rich off it.

There is worry, however, that if no major company is doing the basic science to invent new things, there will be nothing left to invent in a decade. “A big part of research is just chipping away at a problem,” says Peter Lee, the head of Microsoft Research, which is a more academic-minded R. and D. group. “At some point, maybe it’s a decade, you suddenly pass a tipping point and completely change the world.” Teller agrees but says it’s not his concern: “It’s absolutely the case that many of the projects we’re working on rely on the academic work of the last 30 or 40 years,” he said. “But I don’t think places like Google X should necessarily be responsible for basic research. The word ‘basic’ implies ‘unguided,’ and ‘unguided’ is probably best put in government-funded universities rather than industry.” It may take decades to see who is right.