Bell Labs

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Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc.
Type Holding of Lucent Technologies
Founded 1925
Location Murray Hill, New Jersey, USA
Key people
Industry Telecom Research
Products
Revenue
Operating Income {{{operating_income}}}
Net Income {{{net_income}}}
Employees
Parent {{{parent}}}
Subsidiaries {{{subsid}}}
Website www.bell-labs.com
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Bell Telephone Laboratories Inc., also known as Bell Labs and AT&T Bell Laboratories, was the research and development arm of the US Bell System.

At its peak, Bell Labs was the premier facility of its type, developing a range of revolutionary technologies including the transistor, Laser, and the UNIX operating system. Bell Labs had research and development facilities throughout the USA, with the greatest concentration of facilities located in New Jersey. Among the locations in New Jersey were Crawford Hill, Freehold, Holmdel, Lincroft, Long Branch, Middletown, Murray Hill, Piscataway, Red Bank and Whippany. The largest facility in the country was at Naperville-Lisle, which had the single largest concentration of employees (about 11,000) prior to the telecomm bust of 2000. There were also facilities in Columbus, Ohio, Allentown and Breinigsville in Pennsylvania, and Westminster, Colorado. Since 2000, many of the former Bell Labs locations have been scaled back or shut down entirely.

There have been 6 Nobel Prizes awarded for work done at Bell Labs [1].

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Timeline

The timeline of achievement at Bell Labs continued at a breathtaking pace since its inception since their inception in 1925.

Bell Labs logo, 1969-1983
Bell Labs logo, 1969-1983

In the mid-1980's external forces began to conspire against the Bell Labs system; meanwhile, the pace of innovation continued as before:

  • 1984: A Divestiture agreement with the Federal government results in the break-up AT&T: Bellcore is split off from Bell Labs to provide the same R&D functions for the newly created local exchange carriers. AT&T is also limited to using the Bell trademark in association with Bell Labs.
  • 1985: Laser cooling used to slow and manipulate atoms by Steven Chu and team.
  • 1980s: Plan 9 operating system is devloped as a replacement for Unix.
  • 1980s: Development of the Radiodrum, a three dimensional electronic instrument.
  • 1988: TAT-8 is the first fiber optic transatlantic cable.
  • 1990: WaveLAN is the first wireless local area network (LAN).
  • 1991: 56K modem technology patented by Nuri Dagdeviren and team.
  • 1994: Quantum cascade laser invented by Federico Capasso, Claire Gmachl and team.
  • 1995: Wireless internet access first demonstrated.
  • 1996: SCALPEL electron lithography, which prints features atoms wide on microchips, invented by Lloyd Harriott and team.
  • 1996: The Inferno operating system, an update of Plan 9, is created by Dennis Ritchie and team using the new concurrent Limbo programming language.
  • 1996: AT&T spins off Bell Labs, along with most of its equipment-manufacturing business, into a new company named Lucent Technologies. AT&T retains a smaller number of researchers to form AT&T Laboratories.
  • 1997: Smallest practical transistor created, 60 nanometers or 182 atoms wide.
  • 1998: First optical router.
  • 1998: First combination of voice and data traffic on an Internet Protocol (IP) network.
  • 2000: DNA machine prototypes developed.
  • 2000: Progressive geometry compression algorithm makes widespread 3-D communication practical.
  • 2000: First electrically powered organic laser.
  • 2000: Large-scale map of cosmic dark matter provided.
  • 2000: F-15, an organic material that makes plastic transistors possible, invented.
  • 2002: Jan Hendrik Schön, a German physicist, is fired after his work is found to contain fraudulent data; it is the first case of fraud in the lab's history. Over a dozen of Schön's papers are found to contain fictional or altered data, including a paper on molecular-scale transistors that was portrayed as a breakthrough.
  • 2002: World's first semiconductor laser that emits light continuously and reliably over a broad spectrum of infrared wavelengths.
  • 2003: New Jersey Nanotechnology Laboratory (successor to Bell Laboratories) at Murray Hill, New Jersey.
Bell Labs logo, 1984-1995
Bell Labs logo, 1984-1995
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Calculators built by Bell Labs

  • Model I - Complex Number Calculator, completed January 1940, for doing calculations of complex numbers
  • Model II - Relay Calculator or Relay Interpolator, September 1943, for aiming anti-aircraft guns by interpolating from positions
  • Model III - Ballistic Computer, June 1944, for calculations of ballistic trajectories
  • Model IV - Bell Laboratories Relay Calculator, March 1945, a second Ballistic Computer
  • Model V - Bell Laboratories General Purpose Relay Calculator, two were built: July 1946 and February 1947. These were general-purpose programmable computers using electromechanical relays.
  • Model VI - November 1950, an enhanced Model V.
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See also

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External links