Bell Labs

Nokia Bell Labs
Company typeSubsidiary
IndustryTelecommunication, information technology, material science
FoundedJanuary 1925 (1925-01) (as Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc.)
HeadquartersMurray Hill, New Jersey, U.S.
Parent
SubsidiariesNokia Shanghai Bell
Websitebell-labs.com

Bell Labs[b] is an American industrial research and development (R&D) company, currently operating as a subsidiary of Finnish technology company Nokia. With a long history, Bell Labs is 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. Ten Nobel Prizes and five Turing Awards have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.[1]

The laboratory began in the late 19th century as the Western Electric Engineering Department, located at 463 West Street in New York City. After years of conducting research and development under Western Electric, a Bell subsidiary, the Engineering 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 (AT&T). In the 1960s, laboratory and company headquarters were moved to Murray Hill, New Jersey. Its alumni during this time include people like William Shockley, Dennis Ritchie, Claude Shannon and Willard Boyle.

Bell Labs became a subsidiary of AT&T Technologies in 1984 after the Bell System was broken up. After the breakup, its funding greatly declined.[2][3] In 1996, AT&T Technologies was spun off and renamed to Lucent Technologies, who used the Murray Hill site as their headquarters. Bell Laboratories was split as well, with part of it going to AT&T as AT&T Laboratories. In 2006, Lucent merged with French telecommunications company Alcatel to form Alcatel-Lucent, which was in turn acquired by Nokia in 2016.


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  1. ^ "2018 Nobel Prize in Physics laureate Arthur Ashkin delivers his Nobel Lecture at Nokia Bell Labs". Nokia. Archived from the original on April 7, 2022. Retrieved April 9, 2020.
  2. ^ Georgescu, Iulia (February 2022). "Bringing back the golden days of Bell Labs". Nature Reviews Physics. 4 (2): 76–78. doi:10.1038/s42254-022-00426-6. ISSN 2522-5820. PMC 8792522.
  3. ^ Brumfiel, Geoff (2008-08-01). "Bell Labs bottoms out". Nature. 454 (7207): 927–927. doi:10.1038/454927a. ISSN 1476-4687.

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