AT&T, Bell

Bell Laboratories (also known as Bell Labs and formerly known as AT&T Bell Laboratories and Bell Telephone Laboratories) is part of the research and development organization of Alcatel-Lucent and previously the United States Bell System. more...

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Bell Labs is headquartered at Murray Hill, New Jersey, in the USA, and has research and development facilities throughout the world. Its greatest concentration of facilities are in northern New Jersey.

Origin and Historical Locations

Bell Telephone Laboratories Inc. was established 1925 by Walter Gifford (then president of AT&T) as a separate entity which would take over the work being conducted by Western Electric's engineering department's research division. Ownership of Bell Labs was evenly split between AT&T and Western Electric. Its principal work was to design and support the equipment Western Electric built for Bell System operating companies, including switches. It also carried out consulting work for them, and US government work including Project Nike. A few workers were assigned to basic research, which attracted much attention. Until the 1940s, the principal locations were in New York.

Among the historical Bell Labs locations in New Jersey were Crawford Hill, Freehold, Holmdel, Lincroft, Long Branch, Middletown, Murray Hill, Piscataway, Red Bank and Whippany. Of these Crawford Hill, Holmdel, Murray Hill, and Whippany remain. The largest facility in the country was in Illinois, at Naperville-Lisle, which had the single largest concentration of employees (about 11,000) prior to the telecomm downturn of 2001. There were also facilities in Columbus, Ohio, Allentown and Breinigsville in Pennsylvania, and Westminster, Colorado. Since 2001, many of the former Bell Labs locations have been scaled back or shut down entirely.

Discoveries

At its peak, Bell Labs was the premier facility of its type, developing a wide range of revolutionary technologies, including radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, information theory, the UNIX operating system, and the C programming language. There have been 6 Nobel Prizes awarded for work done at Bell Labs.

1998 Horst Stormer, Robert Laughlin, and Daniel Tsui, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery and explanation of the fractional quantum Hall effect.; 1997 Steven Chu, shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for developing methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.; 1978 Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. Penzias and Wilson were cited for their discovery cosmic microwave background radiation, a nearly uniform glow that fills space in the microwave part of the spectrum.; 1977 Philip W. Anderson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for developing an improved understanding of the electronic structure of glass and magnetic materials.; 1956 John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain and William Shockley received the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the transistor.; 1937 Clinton J. Davisson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating the wave nature of matter.;

Read more at Wikipedia.org