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Bell Labs

Bell Telephone Laboratories or Bell Labs was originally the research and development arm of the Bell System, developing everything from telephone switches to specialized coverings for telephone cables, to the transistor.

In 1925, Walter Gifford (president of AT&T) established the separate entity called Bell Telephone Laboratories Inc., which took over work previously conducted by the research division of Western Electric's engineering department. Bell Labs was 50 percent owned by Western Electric, and 50 percent owned by AT&T.

The work done by Bell Labs was broadly divided into three categories: research, systems engineering and development.

Research created the theoretical underpinnings for telecommunications. It covered subjects such as mathematics, physics, material sciences, behavioral sciences, and computer programming theory.

Systems engineering concerned itself with conceiving the highly complex systems that make up the telecommunication networks.

Development, by far the largest of Bell Labs' activities designed the specific systems -- both hardware and software -- needed to build the Bell System's telecommunications networks.

After the 1984 divestiture agreement with the government that broke up AT&T, Bellcore was split off from Bell Labs to provide the same R&D functions for the newly created local exchange carriers.

In 1996 AT&T spun off Bell Labs, along with most of its equipment-manufacturing business, into a new company named Lucent Technologies. AT&T retained a smaller number of researchers to form AT&T Laboratories.

In 2002 Jan Hendrik Schön, a German physicist, was fired from Bell Labs after his work was found to contain fraudulent data; it was the first case of fraud in the lab's history. Over a dozen of Schön's papers were found to contain made up or altered data, including a paper on molecular-scale transistors that was hailed as a breakthrough.

At its height, Bell Labs had research and/or development facilities all over the country, but mostly concentrated in New Jersey. Among the locations were:

Bell Labs is currently located in Murray Hill, New Jersey.

See also: Lucent

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