Bell Labs gave the world the transistor, the laser, Unix and C
Eleven Nobel Prizes and five Turing Awards trace back to one telephone company research lab. Its staff are credited with radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, solar cells, the image sensors inside digital cameras, information theory, the Unix operating system and a string of programming languages, including C and C++.
Its roots reach Alexander Graham Bell himself. France awarded him the Volta Prize of 50,000 francs in 1880 for inventing the telephone, and he used it to fund a Washington laboratory studying how sound could be recorded and transmitted, later steering profits toward research on deafness. The corporate lab grew separately, from Western Electric's engineering department at 463 West Street in New York, a property bought in 1896 to gather the firm's telephone and switching engineers.
On January 1, 1925, Bell Telephone Laboratories was formally created, owned equally by Western Electric and AT&T and staffed by 3,600 people. Frank B. Jewett served as its first president until 1940. Field stations spread across New Jersey and beyond: early radio transmissions from a shack in Montauk, ship-to-shore telephony at Deal, and test plots at Gulfport, Mississippi, where telephone poles were studied for wood preservation.
Congestion in New York pushed researchers outward, and headquarters officially moved to Murray Hill, New Jersey, in 1967. At Holmdel, a mirrored-glass building by Eero Saarinen housed up to about 9,000 workers in 1982, its driveway marked by a water tower shaped like a transistor, its three legs standing for collector, base and emitter. Nearby Crawford Hill's horn antenna supported the Big Bang theory.
Breaking up the Bell System in 1984 slashed funding. The lab passed to Lucent in 1996, then to Alcatel-Lucent in 2006, and in 2016 to Finland's Nokia, which owns it today. Holmdel closed in 2007 and has since been redeveloped as Bell Works, a mix of offices and homes.
Source: Bell Labs
