The speaker says Bell Labs had substantial commercial impact, including from the vacuum tube, while some of its advances were not commercialized and some research, such as cosmic-background research, was not commercializable.

“Before and after we love to show that solid-state physics material science research can make a big impact commercially and then that will attract more attention young people will want to study physics which will be a dream and you know Bell Labs did make a huge commercial impact right so they failed to commercialize some of their incredible advances they of course did some research that just couldn't be commercialized like the cosmic background but but they did benefit a lot from like the vacuum tube”