The 100-year history of the rise and fall of Bell Labs

Hello everyone, I am Xiaozaojun.

A few days ago, I went to a university in Nanjing to meet a friend, intending to talk to him about life and ideals. When I got there, I found out that his unit was a national key laboratory .

I immediately felt admiration for him.

I asked him, " What is it like to work in such an awesome place? "

As a result, instead of feeling proud at all, he complained to me a lot - talking about how tired he was here, how aggrieved he was there, and he looked indignant and disappointed with me.

To be honest, I was totally confused at the time.

As I was listening, my mind suddenly wandered and I remembered a place, um, it was Bell Labs .

Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, USA

The greatest laboratory on the planet (no one else)

Everyone must be familiar with laboratories. Anyone who has been to school has been to a laboratory.

" Do experiments in the lab to see if there are any unchanging promises~ "

Unlike laboratories in primary and secondary schools which are used solely for learning purposes, laboratories in universities and companies are more used for academic research and product development.

From basic theory to the final product design and verification, the laboratory has played a huge role.

Many times, to see whether a school or company is good or not, we just need to look at whether its laboratory is good or not.

As the most powerful laboratory in history, Bell Labs is a household name. After all, there are not many laboratories that dare to say that they have changed the fate of mankind (more than once).

However, such a great laboratory quickly disappeared after entering the 21st century. Now it is almost difficult to hear the name, which makes people wonder whether it no longer exists?

What happened to Bell Labs? How did it rise to glory? And how did it decline?

Let’s follow Xiaozaojun and review its legendary story.

Bell Labs, named after Bell.

This Bell is Alexander Graham Bell , the winner of the telephone patent.

Alexander Graham Bell

Many people say that Bell is the inventor of the telephone. In fact, this statement is not accurate. There is controversy about the inventor of the telephone. The specific story can be found on Baidu.

In 1876, Bell submitted a patent application for the telephone and was approved. The following year, Bell, who had a business sense, founded the Bell Telephone Company .

In 1895, Bell split off its developing long-distance business in the United States and established an independent company called American Telephone and Telegraph Company , also known as AT&T (American Telephone & Telegraph) .

AT&T's early logo

No one expected that in the following years, AT&T's scale and strength would surpass that of its parent company.

In 1899, AT&T integrated the operations and assets of American Bell and became the parent company of the Bell System.

Twenty-six years later, on January 1, 1925, AT&T President Walter Gifford acquired the research division of Western Electric and formed an independent entity called Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. (AT&T and Western Electric each owned 50% of the company).

Later, the company was renamed Bell Labs .

So, in other words, Bell Labs was founded by AT&T and had no direct relationship with Bell himself (he died in 1922).

At the beginning of its establishment, Bell Labs was committed to research in mathematics, physics, materials science, computer programming, telecommunications technology, etc. In other words, in addition to the research and development of telecommunications technology, its focus is on basic theoretical research .

It was the research on basic theory that opened the glorious era of Bell Labs.

In 1927, Davidson and Lester Gemmell of Bell Labs demonstrated the wave nature of electrons by firing slow-moving electrons at a nickel crystal target . This experiment provided strong evidence for the hypothesis that all matter and energy have both wave and particle properties. Ten years later, Davisson won the Nobel Prize for his work on electron interference.

Davidson's proof of the wave nature of electrons

In 1933, Karl Jansky of Bell Labs discovered that the center of the Milky Way continuously emits radio waves by studying static noise in long-distance communications. Through this research, radio astronomy was founded . (It’s a pity to create a discipline directly...)

Karl Jansky

In 1947, Bell Labs invented the transistor .

Needless to say, right? As one of the greatest inventions in modern history, the transistor marks the beginning of the electronic industrial revolution, and mankind has officially entered the electronic information society. (Without transistors, there would be no computers, televisions, mobile phones...)

John Bardeen , William Shockley , Walter Brattain, who invented the transistor

The three won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956

By the way, it was this William Shockley who later founded the first technology company in Silicon Valley and started the legendary history of Silicon Valley.

In 1948, Claude Shannon published his paper "A Mathematical Principles of Communication", which laid the foundation for modern communication theory. His work was based in part on the work of Nyquist and Hartley at Bell Labs.

Claude Shannon, our grandfather

He worked at Bell Labs for 31 years, from 1941 to 1972.

In 1954, Bell Labs produced the first solar cell with practical application value .

In 1962, the world's first communications satellite, Telstar 1, was successfully launched and the first live transatlantic television broadcast was made by Bell Labs.

Telstar 1 satellite

In 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation, for which they were awarded the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Penzias and Wilson with their microwave antenna

In 1969, UNIX system and C language were successfully developed by Dennis Leach and Ken Thompson of Bell Labs ; in the 1980s, C language was developed into C++ language by Bigani Struxure .

Dennis Leach and Ken Thompson

Therefore, Bell Labs can be regarded as a holy place for programmers.

Also in 1969, George Elwood Smith and Willard Boyle of Bell Labs jointly invented the charge-coupled device ( CCD ), which is now an essential photosensitive component for barcode scanners, cameras, and scanners. The two won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics.

George Elwood Smith and Willard Boyle

A few years later, the basic theories of mobile phone communication systems also appeared in the laboratory.

。。。

Bell Labs' achievements go far beyond this. Since its founding, Bell Labs has obtained more than 30,000 patents, an average of one patent per day.

In 1964, Bell Labs made the "videophone"

Not to mention the various awards, Bell Labs has almost won them all:

• 11 scientists won Nobel Prizes;

• 16 people won the United States' highest science and technology awards - the National Medal of Science and the National Medal of Technology, both of which were awarded by the president himself;

• 4 have won the Turing Award (known as the "Nobel Prize in Computer Science");

• Many more scientists have won high medals from other countries, and even the laboratory became the first institutional winner in history (the U.S. National Medal of Technology).

• ......

In short, Bell Labs of that era represented the forefront of global science and technology and was the source of advanced technology and innovative thinking.

After 70 years of prosperity, at the end of the 20th century, the fate of Bell Labs was completely changed. More precisely, the fate of AT&T was completely changed, and Bell Labs had no choice but to change with it.

The saying " everything that goes up must come down " has been proven true in the case of AT&T and Bell Labs.

In 1984, the U.S. Department of Justice split AT&T in accordance with the Antitrust Act, splitting it into a new AT&T company (specializing in long-distance telephone services) that inherited the name of the parent company and seven local telephone companies (the "Bell Brothers"). From then on, the U.S. telecommunications industry entered an era of competition.

In 1995, Lucent Technologies and NCR, which were engaged in equipment development and manufacturing, were separated from AT&T , retaining only the communication service business. At the same time, Bell Labs was also " stripped off " and became a part of Lucent Technologies .

To add, in 2005, Southwestern Bell, one of the original "Baby Bells", merged with AT&T, and the merged company inherited the name of AT&T, which is now AT&T.

Previously, Bell Labs' main source of funding was the additional charges on AT&T's phone bills. After the split, this funding was gone, and it could only rely on Lucent for financial support.

However, Lucent's situation is not optimistic.

Under the fierce market competition, Lucent was exhausted and its operating conditions continued to deteriorate. It had to cut costs and lay off employees. The Bell Labs with 10,000 people was a huge burden for Lucent, and Lucent could not afford it with its profits.

In the past ten years, Lucent's stock price dropped from $84 at its peak to $0.55 per share, and the number of employees dropped sharply from more than 30,000 to 16,000, almost reaching the brink of collapse. Bell Labs was also forced to sell patents to balance expenses.

At the end of 2006, Alcatel, a French telecommunications company 1.5 times larger than Lucent, extended an olive branch across the ocean and " merged " Lucent. Bell Labs also became part of the merged "Alcatel-Lucent".

In fact, before this, Bell Labs had already carried out large-scale layoffs, and its overall strength had declined significantly. In addition, the media also exposed that Jan Hendrik, a researcher at Bell Labs, had falsified his papers, which dealt a heavy blow to the reputation of the lab.

Even so, the bad luck was not over.

Alcatel-Lucent still faces many difficulties in market operations. Under the constant pressure from competitors such as Huawei and ZTE, Alcatel-Lucent has never made a profit after the merger, and its market value has evaporated by more than half.

Huawei & ZTE, nightmares of European and American giants

Alcatel-Lucent had no choice but to sell the 46-year-old Bell Labs building, which was purchased by Somerset Real Estate Development Company in New Jersey, USA, and planned to convert it into a shopping mall and residential building.

Interior view of dilapidated building

After the financial crisis in 2008, Bell Labs simply gave up its proud basic physics research and invested its limited resources in areas such as networks, high-speed electronics, radio, nanotechnology, and software, hoping to bring returns to the parent company.

However, this ultimately failed to save " Alang ".

In 2016, Nokia completed its acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent. Bell Labs is now owned by Nokia.

Today, Bell Labs is basically just a small research institute. Although it is also engaged in the research and development of new technologies such as 5G, it has long lost its former glory.

Nokia Bell Labs drone experiments

In less than a hundred years, Bell Labs climbed to the altar and then fell to the bottom. The past glory has become a thing of the past, which is a pity.

Why did it achieve such brilliant success, and why did it decline so quickly? This is a question worth our serious consideration.

Maybe you will say, it’s all because of “money”. In the past, we had money and we achieved results, but now we have no money and we are done for.

Indeed, money is a very important factor for a research and development organization.

Bell Labs was basically well-funded during the AT&T period. When the lab was first established, AT&T had a 90% market share in the U.S. telephone industry, and the first research funding for the lab was $12 million, an astronomical figure at the time.

In the early days of Bell Labs, there were many valuable equipment.

With the strong financial support from the monopoly, Bell Labs created a very relaxed and comfortable environment. Such a free environment is a paradise for scientific researchers to pursue their dreams.

For researchers, the greatest pleasure is to choose research topics according to their own interests and expertise and to be able to communicate and discuss freely. All of these can be fully met at Bell Labs.

Tolerating failure and encouraging experimentation are the guarantee of Bell Labs' innovation ability.

Those researchers have no KPIs, no performance appraisals, no progress checks, no task reports, and no constraints or surveillance. Their "leaders" at every level are recognized technical authorities in this field. The relationship between superiors and subordinates is a very equal colleague relationship, not a subordinate relationship. The superiors will not interfere with the research projects of their subordinates at will.

Of course, maintaining the atmosphere requires controlling the influx of people.

The talent selection of Bell Labs is extremely strict. All the presidents of Bell Labs have doctoral degrees, and several of them have won the Nobel Prize in Physics. They have a high reputation in the industry and academia. Bell Labs recruits only a very small number of outstanding talents each year. The important qualities of junior staff include the concept of scientific pursuit and self-driven passion. The recruitment of senior experts is determined by their leadership in the field of science and technology.

Due to the influence of many factors, Bell Labs eventually became a paradise for research talents and a fertile ground for research results.

Well, let’s look at the situation of many laboratories in our country.

I don't need to say it, everyone understands it.

In fact, for many talents, luxury and wealth are not their life goals. What they need is recognition and respect, as well as a relaxed environment where they can display their talents. Their goals are more spiritual, to realize their own personal values.

I hope the story of Bell Labs can bring some inspiration.