A Forgotten Company?

In all the talk about innovators of the 21st century - including Apple, Google,Facebook - there has been little mention of the company whose innovations dwarf those of just about any company in any time period. That super innovator was Bell Labs. It is absolutely amazing the things created at the Labs in the 20th century. Our world would be totally different without Bell Labs. Jon Gertner has a two-page diagram of those created from the 1920s to the 1980s. He has divided these innovations into seven categories: telephone, space, internet, music, cellphones, radio, television.

I'm biased in that I tend to think their work in the internet arena was their largest contribution to mankind. Claude Shannon and company developed information science. UNIX and the C programming language was created by Bell Lab people. But Shannon and the UNIX people would have been mere footnotes in the computer world without the invention of the transistor by Bardeen, Shockley and Brattain, Bell engineers and recipients of the Nobel Prize.

Here are some other innovations that owe a lot to Bell Labs: hi-fi records, facsimile, long-distance television transmission (this in 1927), stereo sound, cellphones, laser technology, fiber-optics, etc., etc.

While the demise of AT&T, parent of Bell, was a force for the good, it has had a bad effect on Bell. The Labs were spun off and are now part of Alcatel. In 2008 Alcatel pulled out of the basic science and research that made Bell Labs what it was. The company is now focused on things that can be sold today, not 20 years from now.