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 centre.
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 AI startup Anthropic named its chatbot after.
In January, Nvidia announced a new AI chip packed with more than 300 billion transistors – the tiny on-off electrical switches invented in the lab.
Bell Labs, with headquarters in Murray Hill, New Jersey, 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.
COMMUNICATIONS SATELLITE
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.
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.
The lab again teamed up with NASA in 1962 to launch the smaller Telstar, which was about 3 feet in diameter and weighed 170 pounds.
Bell Labs also developed some of the rocket technology that launched the satellite, a byproduct of an anti-ballistic missile project.
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 chair.
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.
CELLULAR PHONE TECHNOLOGY
While developing mobile-phone service, Bell Labs scientists drove around in a van to check transmission quality.
The labs submitted their 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.
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.
Smaller, more powerful chips, radios and batteries made a truly mobile phone possible. It still weighed nearly 2 pounds.
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.
VIDEO CALLING
The Picturephone allowed you to see the person you were talking to on a small screen.
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!”
The Picturephone was introduced to great fanfare at the 1964 New York World’s Fair.
Even the White House was enlisted for a publicised demo. Lady Bird Johnson spoke via Picturephone to a Bell Labs scientist, Elizabeth Wood.
But at the cost of US$16 (RM62) for a three-minute call (more than US$165/RM647 today), the novelty soon wore off. Though a market failure, the Picturephone had a star turn in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Decades later, tech giants ran with the vision of talking with people on video. Similar technology is now incorporated in every smartphone, allowing people to chat in real time. Video calls have also transformed the way we work – connecting people around the world for meetings.
DIGITAL IMAGING
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.
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.
The science is complicated, but the sensor converts light to electrical charges, stores them and then shifts them across the chip to be measured.
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.
SOLAR BATTERY
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.
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 US$1.5mil (RM5.8mil) for the solar cells needed to meet the electricity needs of the average American house in 1956.
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.
TRANSISTOR
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 holding back electrons and then releasing them, much like a valve on a water pipe.
These transistors 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.
Improvements in transistor design led to mass production in the 1950s, helping inspire new products like the portable transistor radio.
The transistor’s inventors – John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley – shared the Nobel Prize in physics for their creation.
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.
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, founder and CEO of Nvidia, recently showed off the company’s new Rubin AI chip, with 336 billion transistors. – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
