Bell Labs
From GHN
Bell Labs
- Page created by Nbrewer, 13 August 2008: New page: == Bell Labs == Since the early 1900s Bell Telephone Laboratories, or Bell Labs, has been a major source of technological experimentation and change. Bell Labs has sponsored research far ...
- Contributors: Nbrewer x14, Csommero x2, EMW x3, SHH x1, WikiSysop x1, Administrator1 x2, Rnarayan x1, Lthurner x2
- Last modified by Administrator1, 6 January 2012:
By the early 1920s the research effort had grown so large—over 3600 employees by 1924—management decided to split it off into its own organization. This new company, owned entirely by AT&T, was called the Bell Telephone Laboratories. The existing research building in New York City was greatly enlarged that same year, and Bell Labs was on its way to becoming the world’s largest industrial research laboratory.
In the 1930s and through the end of World War II, Bell Labs continued to expand. The company established new research facilities in New Jersey, where open land was still plentiful and cheap. The huge resources of AT&T, which had a monopoly on telephone service, enabled Bell Labs to undertake fundamental research that had only loose ties to ordinary telephone service. In 1933, for example, Karl Jansky, working at the Holmdel, New Jersey facility, discovered radio astronomy. Another trend was closer cooperation with the military, which had begun during World War I, and which continued in the 1930s as Bell Labs began working on radar and military communication systems. When World War II came, Bell Labs invented or improved numerous military systems, such as the two-way radio, proximity fuses, semiconductor devices, radar, sonar, computers, the “bazooka,” and the first encrypted communications systems.
At the end of the war Bell Labs was at the peak of its power. From the late 1940s through the late 1970s, it reigned unchallenged as the largest and perhaps most inventive industrial laboratory in the world. Its engineers and scientists invented or brought to fruition numerous technologies, including the first transistor and many of its important variations. Although the integrated circuit was invented elsewhere, construction techniques invented at Bell Labs established many of the necessary precursors to it. The same could be said for fiber optic transmission, electronic switching systems, cellular telephony, satellite communication, solar power, and other technologies we use today. Although not all of their elements were invented at Bell Labs, it was there that the long and incredibly expensive development process brought them to maturity. And while there were notable failures, such as the notorious “Picturephone” system, there were numerous inventions, some little-known at the time, which later became very important. The Charge-Coupled Device or CCD, now universally used in digital cameras, video cameras, the Hubble telescope, and elsewhere, was one such development. Bell Labs engineers Willard Boyle and George Smith invented it in the 1970s.
The dominance of Bell Labs faded after 1984, when the courts found that AT&T was a monopoly and mandated that the large company be broken up into multiple, independent companies often called Baby Bells. This weakened all the new companies and made it necessary for Bell Labs to cut back on the long-term exploratory research that had resulted in so many new inventions. Today’s Bell Labs, a part of Lucent Corporation, is a smaller but still very important organization that focuses its research on next-generation products for voice and data communication.
