X-Nico

9 unusual facts about Bell Labs


Bell Laboratory

Bell Labs, also known as the Bell Laboratories, the large research organization created by American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T) in 1925, or

Crawford Hill

Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Labs used the Holmdel Horn Antenna located on Crawford Hill to take measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation.

Eugene I. Gordon

He was Director of the Lightwave Devices Laboratory of Bell Labs

He became director of the Lightwave Devices Laboratory of Bell Labs.

Leanna Brown

After graduating from Smith College in 1956, she married William Stanley Brown, who had attended the Mount Hermon School and Yale University and would go on to be a scientist at Bell Labs.

Mark G. Kuzyk

in 1985, then was a member of technical staff at Bell Labs in Princeton, New Jersey from 1985 to 1990.

Nicholas F. Maxemchuk

He served as a member of the technical staff at the David Sarnoff Research Center from 1968–1976, and Bell Labs from 1976–1984, where he subsequently served as head of distributed systems research Department (1984–1996) and technology leader (1996–2001).

Pulsed EPR

Much of the pioneering early pulsed EPR was conducted in the group of W. B. Mims at Bell Labs during the 1960s.

Vita Nuova Holdings

Inferno is a derivative of Plan 9, which was originally developed at Bell Labs by the creators of Unix and C, among others.


Acoustic phonetics

(Incidentally, Alexander Graham Bell's father, Alexander Melville Bell, was a phonetician.) During World War II, work at the Bell Telephone Laboratories (which invented the spectrograph) greatly facilitated the systematic study of the spectral properties of periodic and aperiodic speech sounds, vocal tract resonances and vowel formants, voice quality, prosody, etc.

Adaptive differential pulse-code modulation

ADPCM was developed in the early 1970s at Bell Labs for voice coding, by P. Cummiskey, N. S. Jayant, and James L. Flanagan.

BEFLIX

BEFLIX is the name of the first specialised computer animation language, invented by Ken Knowlton at Bell Labs in 1963.

Bellmac 32

After the breakup of AT&T, Bell Labs passed to Western Electric, and with this, the Bellmac 32 was renamed the WE 32000.

David E. Meyer

After earning his Ph.D., Dr. Meyer worked with Saul Sternberg at Bell Labs before returning to the faculty of the Psychology Department of the University of Michigan in 1977.

DIMACS

The Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS) is a collaboration between Rutgers University, Princeton University, and the research firms AT&T, Bell Labs, Applied Communication Sciences, and NEC.

Discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation

Working at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, in 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were experimenting with a supersensitive, 6 meter (20 ft) horn antenna originally built to detect radio waves bounced off Echo balloon satellites.

Douglas Osheroff

He then worked at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey for 15 years, continuing to research low-temperature phenomena in 3He.

Edgar Villchur

Fred Waldhauer of Bell Labs heard Villchur lecture on this new hearing aid system, and started a Bell Labs project to develop a hearing aid.

Edward Lawry Norton

Edward Lawry Norton (28 July 1898, Rockland, Maine–28 January 1983, Chatham, New Jersey) was an accomplished Bell Labs engineer and scientist famous for developing the concept of the Norton equivalent circuit.

Empire Classic

Peter Langston's 1971 version was developed while he was on staff at Harvard University using Bell Labs UNIX and the C programming language on a PDP 11/45.

Fault tree analysis

Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) was originally developed in 1962 at Bell Laboratories by H.A. Watson, under a U.S. Air Force Ballistics Systems Division contract to evaluate the Minuteman I Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) Launch Control System.

Float-zone silicon

The process was developed at Bell Labs by Henry Theuerer in 1955 as a modification of a method developed by William Gardner Pfann for germanium.

Fumitada Itakura

From 1973 to 1975 he worked at the Acoustics Research Department of Bell Labs, having been invited to work there on fundamental problems by James Flanagan, who had been impressed by one of Itakura's papers on low bit-rate encoding.

Gary S. May

May was a National Science Foundation and an AT&T Bell Laboratories graduate fellow, and has worked as a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey.

Hans Ferdinand Mayer

Edward Lawry Norton likewise described this in 1926 in an internal report for Bell Labs.

Jacqueline Barton

After earning her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1979, Barton held post-doctoral appointments at Bell Labs and Yale University, where she worked with R.G. Shulman.

John S. Mayo

Following this, Mayo joined Bell Labs, now Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, (1955) where he first worked on early computers as the Triadic and Leprechaun, the Telstar satellite, ocean sonar systems and various switching systems.

Kai Li

Prior to joining Data Domain, he served as an industry consultant of AT&T, Bell Labs, Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel, and NEC.

MPEG-1

--at ???--> Optimum Coding in the Frequency domain (OCF) the doctoral thesis by Karlheinz Brandenburg at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Perceptual Transform Coding (PXFM) by J. D. Johnston at AT&T Bell Labs, and Transform coding of audio signals by Y. Mahieux and J. Petit at Institut für Rundfunktechnik (IRT/CNET).

N connector

It was one of the first connectors capable of carrying microwave-frequency signals, and was invented in the 1940s by Paul Neill of Bell Labs, after whom the connector is named.

Naperville, Illinois

Employers contributing to the population explosion of the 1980s and 1990s included: Bell Labs and Western Electric (now Alcatel-Lucent), Amoco (now BP and Ineos), Nalco, Nicor, and Edward Hospital.

Ninety-ninety rule

The rule is attributed to Tom Cargill of Bell Labs and was made popular by Jon Bentley's September 1985 "Programming Pearls" column in Communications of the ACM, in which it was titled the "Rule of Credibility".

Principles of Compiler Design

The acknowledgments mention that the book was entirely typeset at Bell Labs using troff on the Unix operating system, which at that time had been little seen outside the Labs.

Ronald J. Brachman

Before that, he worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories (Murray Hill, New Jersey) as the Head of the Artificial Intelligence Principles Research Department (2004) and Director of the Software and Systems Research Laboratory.

Source Code Control System

It was originally developed in SNOBOL at Bell Labs in 1972 by Marc Rochkind for an IBM System/370 computer running OS/360 MVT.

Stan Vanderbeek

His desire for the utopian led him to work with Ken Knowlton in a co-operation at Bell Labs, where dozens of computer animated films and holographic experiments were created by the end of the 1960s.

TNC connector

Invented in the late 1950s and named after Paul Neill of Bell Labs and Carl Concelman of Amphenol, the TNC connector has been employed in a wide range of radio and wired applications.

Trevor Hastie

He returned to United States in 1986 and joined the AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey and remained there for nine years.

Ultrix

Absolutely key to bringing Unix to inside the company, DEC's Unix Engineering Group (UEG) was started by Bill Munson with Jerry Brenner and Fred Canter, both from DEC's premier Customer Service Engineering group, Bill Shannon (from Case Western Reserve University), and Armando Stettner (from Bell Labs).

Videotelephony

The development of the crucial video technology first started in the latter half of the 1920s in the United Kingdom and the United States, spurred notably by John Logie Baird and AT&T's Bell Labs.

Weekly Innovation Challenge

Hill and Rogers stress the importance of innovation in both tech companies and universities: “To encourage more play on the job, colleges and universities could emulate nonacademic institutions like Google, Bell Labs, and IDEO by establishing playrooms and allocating time specifically for the purpose of fostering creativity”.


see also

Alfred Aho

At Bell Labs Aho worked closely with Steve Johnson and Jeffrey Ullman to develop efficient algorithms for analyzing and translating programming languages.

Bell Labs Digital Synthesizer

Several tracks on the album Games by Larry Fast (Synergy) were taken from sessions recorded at Bell Labs on the digital synthesizer.

Bellmac 32

The teams that developed the Bellmac 32 were in three different locations: AT&T Bell Labs in Indian Hill (Naperville, Illinois), AT&T Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey and AT&T Bell Labs Murray Hill, New Jersey.

Csound

Csound was originally written at MIT by Barry Vercoe, based on his earlier system called Music 11, which in its turn followed the MUSIC-N model initiated by Max Mathews at the Bell Labs.

Diffusion transistor

At Bell Labs Calvin Souther Fuller produced basic physical understanding of a means of directly forming the emitter, base and collector by double diffusion.

DS1

Digital Signal 1, a T-carrier signaling scheme devised by Bell Labs

Ian Ross

Ian Munro Ross (1927–2013), pioneer in transistors and President of Bell Labs

IEEE Eric E. Sumner award

2005 - Krishan Sabnani, Senior Vice President, Networking Research, Bell Labs Lucent Technologies, For seminal contributions to networking protocols.

Lincoln in Dalivision

Harmon was a Bell Labs researcher who had been developing this concept, and the first image in this article was the well recognized portrait of Abraham Lincoln from the U.S. five dollar bill made from a collection of solid gray mosaics.

Marvin R. Sambur

Sambur worked at Bell Labs until 1977, when he joined ITT Defense Communications in Nutley, New Jersey, as senior vice president.

Maser

When the laser was developed, Townes and Schawlow and their colleagues at Bell Labs pushed the use of the term optical maser, but this was largely abandoned in favor of laser, coined by their rival Gordon Gould.

Muhammed Zafar Iqbal

He then joined Bell Communications Research (Bellcore), a separate corporation from the Bell Labs (now Telcordia Technologies), as a research scientist.

Peking University Application Server

PKUAS ("Peking University Application Server") is a J2EE application server developed by the research group of PKU-Bell Labs Software Technologies Joint Lab.

Ray Young

W. Rae Young, Bell Labs engineer, co-inventor of the cell phone

Renée French

French is married to Rob Pike, one of the creators of Plan 9 from Bell Labs, and of the Go programming language at Google.

Vita Nuova Holdings

The name of the company continues the association with Dante Alighieri, begun with the choice of Inferno, at Bell Labs, as a name for the operating system: La Vita Nuova, meaning "The New Life" in Italian, is the title of an early work by Dante.