Follow
Bell Labs 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. Eleven Nobel Prizes and five Turing Awards have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.
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. 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.