The technology industry is obsessed with the future.
Many of our modern marvels are rooted in the legacy of Bell Labs, an innovation powerhouse in suburban New Jersey.
Bell Labs, the once-famed research arm of AT&T, celebrated the centennial of its founding last year.
In its heyday, starting in the 1940s, the lab created a cascade of inventions, including the transistor, information theory and an enduring computer software language. The labs’ digital DNA is in our smartphones, social media and chatbot conversations.
“Every hour of your day has a bit of Bell Labs in it,” observed Jon Gertner, author of “The Idea Factory,” a history of the storied research center.
Bell Labs’ most far-reaching idea — information theory — forms the bedrock of computing. The mathematical framework, known as the “Magna Carta of the information age,” provided a blueprint for sending and receiving information with precision and reliability. It was the brainchild of Claude Shannon, a brilliant eccentric whom the A.I. start-up Anthropic named its chatbot after.
Last month, Nvidia announced a new A.I. chip packed with more than 300 billion transistors — the tiny on-off electrical switches invented in the lab.
Bell Labs became so powerful and renowned that it is entrenched in pop culture. The 1968 sci-fi movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” drew inspiration from Bell Labs, and the father of the titular character in the period dramedy “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” worked there. Most recently, characters in the show “Severance” report to a former Bell Labs building.
Here are some of the labs’ most prominent inventions.
Bell Labs described itself as a wide-ranging “institute of creative technology.” And it was a well-funded one, thanks to the monopoly held by AT&T — with incentive to expand Ma Bell’s phone business.
One invention was Telstar, the first powerful communications satellite, which could receive radio signals, then amplify them (10 billion times) and retransmit them. This allowed for real-time phone conversations across oceans, high-speed data communications and global television broadcasts.
1960
In 1960, Bell Labs launched an earlier orbital communications satellite in collaboration with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration — a passive balloon satellite called Echo that could reflect signals one way.
1962
The lab again teamed up with NASA to launch the smaller Telstar, which was about three feet in diameter and weighed 170 pounds.
1962
Bell Labs also developed some of the rocket technology that launched the satellite, a byproduct of an antiballistic missile project.
1962
Lyndon B. Johnson, vice president at the time, spoke on the first phone conversation bounced off a satellite. “You’re coming through nicely,” he assured Frederick Kappel, the phone company’s chairman.
PRESENT
In the decades since, those groundbreaking inventions from Bell Labs have become ubiquitous and affordable. International phone calls and television broadcasts are part of daily life. Today, more than 11,000 satellites provide internet, surveillance and navigation services, and are crucial for driverless cars and drone warfare.
While developing mobile-phone service, Bell Labs scientists drove around in a van to check transmission quality.
The labs submitted its plan for a working cellular network to the government in 1971, and AT&T opened the first commercial cellular service in Chicago more than a decade later.
1968
An early, simple version of mobile service was essentially a conventional phone on wheels — the car phone. Through radio technology, it connected to the landline network for calls.
1972
Smaller, more powerful chips, radios and batteries made a truly mobile phone possible. It still weighed nearly two pounds.
PRESENT
The technology continued to improve, as cellphones grew smaller and more sophisticated. Smartphones, which gained popularity with the iPhone’s launch in 2007, helped cement the devices as everywhere, ever-present and the dominant device for communication, information and entertainment — for better or worse.
The Picturephone allowed you to see the person you were talking to on a small screen.
1968
And it was heavily promoted. An ad for the Picturephone said it amounted to “crossing a telephone with a TV set.” Its tagline: “Someday you’ll be a star!”
1964
The Picturephone was introduced to great fanfare at the 1964 New York World’s Fair.
1964
Even the White House was enlisted for a publicized demo. Lady Bird Johnson spoke via Picturephone to a Bell Labs scientist, Elizabeth Wood.
1968
But at the cost of $16 for a three-minute call (more than $165 today), the novelty soon wore off. Though a market failure, the Picturephone had a star turn in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
PRESENT
Decades later, tech giants ran with the vision of talking with people on video. Similar technology is now incorporated in every smartphone, allowing families to chat in real time. Video calls have also transformed the way we work — connecting people around the world for meetings.
The light-sensitive electronic sensor, called a charge-coupled device, opened the door to digital imaging. It captured images by converting photons of light into electrons, breaking images into pixels.
1978
Efforts to use the imaging sensors in cameras and camcorders began in the 1970s, and the products steadily improved. The cameras got smaller and the images sharper. Willard Boyle and George E. Smith earned a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics for their invention.
1978
The science is complicated, but the sensor converts light to electrical charges, stores them and then shifts them across the chip to be measured.
PRESENT
By the early 2000s, a smaller, cheaper technology, CMOS, had won out in mass markets like camera phones. But charge-coupled sensors remained the choice for tasks requiring very high resolution, like mapping the Milky Way.
The silicon solar cell was a Bell Labs triumph of material physics.
The solar cell performs a special kind of photon-to-electron conversion — sunlight to energy.
1956
But while a scientific success, the early solar cell technology was a market flop — prohibitively expensive for mainstream adoption. By one estimate at the time, it would have cost $1.5 million for the solar cells needed to meet the electricity needs of the average American house in 1956.
PRESENT
The solar industry would take off decades later, riding the revolution in semiconductor technology, with prices falling and performance soaring. Government subsidies in many countries, eager to nurture clean energy development, helped as well. Today, light-catching panels stretch across fields and deserts.
All computer technology stems from the transistor, the seemingly infinitely scalable nugget of hardware that is essentially an on-off electrical switch that powers digital technology. It was invented at Bell Labs, which licensed the technology to others, paving the way for today’s tech industry.
The versatile transistor can also boost signals by gating electrons and then releasing them.
1956
These transistors — seen on the face of a dime — were the tiniest in their day. The smaller the transistors, the more that can be packed on a chip, using less electricity and enabling faster, more powerful computers.
1950s
Improvements in transistor design led to mass production in the 1950s, helping inspire new products like the portable transistor radio.
1956
The transistor’s inventors — John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley — shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for their creation.
1979
The technology continued to improve as a “computer on a chip” in the late 1970s. It was smaller than a fingernail and a few hundredths of an inch thick.
PRESENT
Today’s microscopic transistors animate the chips that go into our phones, computers and cars. The artificial intelligence boom is powered by chips of almost unimaginable scale. Jensen Huang, president of Nvidia, recently showed off the company’s new Rubin A.I. chip, with 336 billion transistors.
