Bell Labs

Nokia Bell Labs (formerly AT&T Bell Laboratories, Bell Telephone Laboratories and Bell Labs) is an American scientific research and development company, currently owned by the Finnish company Nokia. Its headquarters are in Murray Hill, New Jersey, as well as having laboratories elsewhere in the United States and in other countries, including Spain. Its origins date back to the Bell Telephone Laboratories, founded in 1925 by the AT&T company and later owned by Lucent Technologies..

For many years, the labs commanded one of the largest budgets in the world for technology research in the wake of AT&T's monopoly on the US telephone industry. Among his most important patents and discoveries are the single-use notebook, the transistor, lasers, fiber optics, DSL technology, mobile telephony, communications satellites, the Unix operating system, the B programming language, the C programming language and C++ programming language. Its researchers have won nine Nobel Prizes, four Turing Awards, two Grammys, and one Emmy.

In 1984, following the restructuring of AT&T, a part of the laboratories became the company Bellcore. The rest became part of Lucent Technologies in 1996 and their employees were later divided between the research and development departments of the companies AT&T Research and Lucent Technologies. Bell Labs remained in the latter, and has continued as a world benchmark for technological innovation after the merger with Alcatel to form Alcatel-Lucent, and its subsequent acquisition by Nokia.

Timeline

Bell Laboratories Logo (1969 - 1983)

Some important facts about these labs.

• 1869: Elisha Gray and Enos N. Barton create a small manufacturing firm called Gray and Barton in Cleveland. Three years later, the firm, then located in Chicago, changed its name to Western Electric Manufacturing Company.

• 1881: American Bell is made with Western Electric interests and makes it the only equipment developer for Bell phone companies.

• 1925: Bell Telephone Laboratories is created from the consolidation of the Western Electric Research Laboratories, a part of the engineering department of AT fakeT created in 1907.

• 1927: First long-distance television broadcast, from Washington to New York.

• 1937: Clinton J. Davisson of Bell Labs wins the Nobel Prize for his experimental confirmation of the undulating nature of electrons.

• 1946: After having a critical role in supplying communications equipment to the American navy in World War II, the Western Electric devotes its efforts to meet the demand for phones, producing the record number of 4 million units.

• 1947: In the mid 1940s, Bell Labs created the concept of “cellular”, developing the first mobile phone service. Bell Labs invents the transistor. Three more Bell Labs scientists receive Nobel Prize winner Walter Houser Brattain, William Shockley, and John Bardeen.

• 1948: Claude Shannon quantifies the information (Information Theory) and gives engineers a theoretical maximum based on the mathematics of information transport capacity for any communication system.

• 1954: Bell Labs develops the photovoltaic cell. Turn solar energy directly into electricity.

• 1956: The first transatlantic telephone cable is put into service. It is capable of offering up to 36 simultaneous calls.

• 1957: The laser was invented in the Bell laboratories.

• 1962: Bell Labs successfully builds and launches Telstar 1, the first communications satellite in orbit.

• 1969: Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie develop the UNIX operating system. This and programming language C are developed between 1969 and 1978.

• 1979: Bjarne Stroustrup develops the programming language C++.

• 1980: Bell Labs introduces the digital signal processing chip.

• 1998: Horst Stormer and two other Bell Labs researchers receive the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of fractional charges in the Quantum Hall effect.

Presidents