Bell Labs
More info
- Founded
- Owner
- Nokia (since 2016)
- Headquarters
- Murray Hill, New Jersey
- Type
- Industrial research laboratory
The most productive institution in the history of industrial research — the transistor, information theory, Unix and C all came from here.
AT&T's telephone monopoly funded basic research with no demand for quick returns, and the results were improbable. The transistor in 1947, Shannon's information theory in 1948, the solar cell, the laser, the CCD sensor, UNIX in 1969, C in the early 1970s, C++ in the 1980s. Nine Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work done there.
The breakup of AT&T in 1984 removed the monopoly money, and the lab shrank steadily through Lucent and Alcatel-Lucent before Nokia took over in 2016. What remained was mostly applied telecom research. The model — let capable people work at hard problems for a long time with no product requirement — has proved difficult to reproduce.