Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as Bell Labs, is an American industrial research and development company owned by the Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the company operates several laboratories in the United States and around the world.
As a former subsidiary of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), Bell Labs and its researchers have been credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages B, C, C++, S, SNOBOL, AWK, AMPL, and others, throughout the 20th century. Eleven Nobel Prizes and five Turing Awards have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.[1]
Bell Labs had its origin in the complex corporate organization of the Bell System telephone conglomerate. The laboratory began operating in the late 19th century as the Western Electric Engineering Department, located at 463 West Street in New York City. After years of advancing telecommunication innovations, the department was reformed into Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1925 and placed under the shared ownership of Western Electric and the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. In the 1960s, laboratory and company headquarters were moved to Murray Hill, New Jersey. Its alumni during this time include a plethora of world-renowned scientists and engineers.
With the breakup of the Bell System, Bell Labs became a subsidiary of AT&T Technologies in 1984, which resulted in a drastic decline in its funding.[2][3] In 1996, AT&T spun off AT&T Technologies, which was renamed to Lucent Technologies, using the Murray Hill site for headquarters. Bell Laboratories was split with AT&T retaining parts as AT&T Laboratories. In 2006, Lucent merged with French telecommunication company Alcatel to form Alcatel-Lucent, which was acquired by Nokia in 2016.
Origin and historical locations
Bell's personal research after the telephone
In 1880, when the French government awarded Alexander Graham Bell the Volta Prize of 50,000 francs for the invention of the telephone (equivalent to about US$10,000 at the time, or about $0 now), he used the award to fund the Volta Laboratory (also known as the "Alexander Graham Bell Laboratory") in Washington, D.C. in collaboration with Sumner Tainter and Bell's cousin Chichester Bell.[4] The laboratory was variously known as the Volta Bureau, the Bell Carriage House, the Bell Laboratory and the Volta Laboratory.
It focused on the analysis, recording, and transmission of sound. Bell used his considerable profits from the laboratory for further research and education advancing the diffusion of knowledge relating to the deaf.[4] This resulted in the founding of the Volta Bureau (c. 1887) at the Washington, D.C. home of his father, linguist Alexander Melville Bell. The carriage house there, at 1527 35th Street N.W., became their headquarters in 1889.[4]
Discoveries and developments
Bell Laboratories was, and is, regarded by many as the premier research facility of its type, developing a wide range of revolutionary technologies, including radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, information theory, the operating system Unix, the programming languages C and C++, solar cells, the charge-coupled device (CCD), and many other optical, wireless, and wired communications technologies and systems.
1920s
In 1924, Bell Labs physicist Walter A. Shewhart proposed the control chart as a method to determine when a process was in a state of statistical control. Shewhart's methods were the basis for statistical process control (SPC): the use of statistically based tools and techniques to manage and improve processes. This was the origin of the modern quality control movement, including Six Sigma.
In 1926, the laboratories invented an early synchronous-sound motion picture system, in competition with Fox Movietone and DeForest Phonofilm.[43]
Accolades
Nobel Prize
Eleven Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.[130]
- 1937: Clinton J. Davisson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating the wave nature of matter.
- 1956: John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain, and William Shockley received the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the first transistors.
- 1977: Philip W. Anderson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for developing an improved understanding of the electronic structure of glass and magnetic materials.
- 1978: Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. Penzias and Wilson were cited for their discovering cosmic microwave background radiation, a nearly uniform glow that fills the Universe in the microwave band of the radio spectrum.
Emmy Awards, Grammy Award, and Academy Award
The Emmy Award has been won five times by Bell Labs: one under Lucent Technologies, one under Alcatel-Lucent, and three under Nokia.
The inventions of fiber-optics and research done in digital television and media File Format were under former AT&T Bell Labs ownership.
The Grammy Award has been won once by Bell Labs under Alcatel-Lucent.
The Academy Award has been won once by E. C. Wente and Bell Labs.
- 1997: Primetime Engineering Emmy Award for "work on digital television as part of the HDTV Grand Alliance."[139]
- 2013: Technology and Engineering Emmy for its "Pioneering Work in Implementation and Deployment of Network DVR" [140]
- 2016: Technology & Engineering Emmy Award for the pioneering invention and deployment of fiber-optic cable.
- 2020: Technology & Engineering Emmy Award for the CCD (charge-coupled device
Publications
The American Telephone and Telegraph Company, Western Electric, and other Bell System companies issued numerous publications, such as local house organs, for corporate distribution, for the scientific and industry communities, and for the general public, including telephone subscribers.
The Bell Laboratories Record was a principal house organ, featuring general interest content such as corporate news, support staff profiles and events, reports of facilities upgrades, but also articles of research and development results written for technical or non-technical audiences. The publication commenced in 1925 with the founding of the laboratories.
A prominent journal for the focussed dissemination of original or reprinted scientific research by Bell Labs engineers and scientists was the Bell System Technical Journal, started in 1922 by the AT&T Information Department. Bell researchers also published widely in industry journals.
Some of these articles were reprinted by the Bell System as Monographs, consecutively issued starting in 1920.[142] These reprints, numbering over 5000, comprise a catalog of Bell research over the decades. Research in the Monographs is aided by access to associated indexes,[143] for monographs 1–1199, 1200–2850 (1958), 2851–4050 (1962), and 4051–4650 (1964).
Essentially all of the landmark work done by Bell Labs is memorialized in one or more corresponding monographs. Examples include:
Presidents
See also
- Bell Labs Technical Journal—Published scientific journal of Bell Laboratories (1996–present)
- Bell Labs Record
- Industrial laboratory
- George Stibitz—Bell Laboratories engineer—"father of the modern digital computer"
- History of mobile phones—Bell Laboratories conception and development of cellular phones
- High speed photography & Wollensak—Fastax high speed (rotating prism) cameras developed by Bell Labs
- Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory
- Simplified Message Desk Interface
- Sound film—Westrex sound system for cinema films developed by Bell Labs
- TWX Magazine—A short-lived trade periodical published by Bell Laboratories (1944–1952)
- Experiments in Art and Technology—A collaboration between artists and Bell Labs engineers & scientists to create new forms of art
Further reading
- Martin, Douglas. Ian M. Ross, a President at Bell Labs, Dies at 85, The New York Times, March 16, 2013, p. A23
- Gleick, James. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. Vintage Books, 2012, 544 pages. ISBN 978-1400096237.
External links
- old Bell Labs website
- old Bell Labs people's home
- Bell Works, the re-imagining of the historic former Bell Labs building in Holmdel, New Jersey
- Timeline of discoveries as of 2006 <Nokia Bell-Labs Timeline>
- Bell Labs' Murray Hill anechoic chamber
- Bell Laboratories and the Development of Electrical Recording
- History of Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. (from Bell System Memorial)
References
- 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics laureate Arthur Ashkin delivers his Nobel Lecture at Nokia Bell Labs Nokia, retrieved April 9, 2020^
- Iulia Georgescu. Bringing back the golden days of Bell Labs Nature Reviews Physics, February 2022^
- Geoff Brumfiel. Bell Labs bottoms out Nature, 2008-08-01^