Bell Labs: Imagination Inc.

With 22,500 people on its payroll (3,000 of them Ph.D.s), 19,000 patents and an annual budget of $1.6 billion, Bell Laboratories is a mighty engine of research and development. It is possibly the finest, and certainly the largest, private operation of its kind anywhere.

The think tank of the Bell System, Bell Labs is also a gigantic down-to-earth workshop, where imagination is turned into practical products and services. To one degree or another, Bell Labs has been responsible for most of the innovations in voice communications in this century. That is why AT&T was so anxious to keep this corporate crown jewel, when the Government forced the telephone company to spin off some of its operations.

Bell officials say that the wonders coming out of its labs should increase now that Washington is freeing it to go into other fields. They claim that massive regulation of the utility has slowed development of a number of Bell Labs products and kept others off the market. Typical is the example of an advanced mobile telephone. The company came up with the technology for the product in the 1960s, but the Federal Communications Commission gave it final clearance to sell the service only last month. Says Bell Labs Executive Vice President Solomon J. Buchsbaum: "The agreement should unleash us."

Even without being unleashed, Bell Labs has built up an impressive record of technological innovation in the nearly 60 years since it was formed from the engineering department of Western Electric, with a research budget of $12.6 million There are now 18 labs in the Bell Labs organization, most of them clustered around its headquarters in Murray Hill, N.J.,with others in Colorado, Georgia, Ohio, Illinois and Massachusetts.

In 1947, Bell Labs gave the world the transistor, for which three of its scientists won the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics. It also developed the laser, high-fidelity phonograph records, stereo and sound movies. In 1927, Bell Labs demonstrated the first long-distance, live, television transmission over wires. One of its early computers helped direct antiaircraft fire during World War II and knocked down 76% of Nazi buzz bombs in areas it defended in England. Bell scientists pioneered work in semiconductors, integrated circuits and microchips, all necessary parts of the computer explosion. They have now won a total of seven Nobel Prizes in physics.

For telephone service, Bell Labs invented a plethora of devices and systems. Among themf Direct Distance Dialing (1951), Wide Area Telephone Service (WATS lines, 1961) Touch-Tone (1964) and the 911 emergency communications system (1968).

Many developments out of the labs are not so obvious to telephone users. In 1959, engineers came up with Time Assignment Speech Interpolation (TASI), a high-speed switching and transmission technique that seeks out natural pauses and listening time during telephone calls and fits other conversations into those moments of silence, greatly increasing the carrying capacity of communications channels.

In the works now, or completed and on Bell's shelves are scores of products and services. In Coral Gables, Fla, and Ridgewood, N.J., Bell has been experimenting with so-called electronic yellow pages. Using ordinary telephone lines, this service feeds news and classified ads into subscribers' television sets. Says Morris Tanenbaum, AT&T's executive vice president for planning: "We're very bullish on this."

Peering toward the end of the decade, Bell Labs scientists expect computers and telephone lines to come together in ways that could yield billions of dollars in revenue to AT&T. The SOcalled Advanced Communications Service will enable any computer to communicate with any other one, regardless of ake. A pharmacist, for example, could order drugs by computer, first collecting price figures from a number of widely scattered suppliers.

A major goal at the Labs is making computers easier for the average person to use. Says Buchsbaum: "We want to make it possible for people to talk to computers on people terms not just computer terms." Bell researchers have already developed a computer that can understand 1,000 spoken words, and they are working at increasing it to 2,000, the vocabulary of the average person.

The outpouring of technology from Bell Labs seemingly knows no end. Now in the testing phase of development are tiny superconducting switches, smaller than a speck that can operate 100 times quicker than today's fastest transistors Scientists are also working on a new computer memory chip that can store 100 million bits of information (enough to hold the complete text of War and Peace) on a wafer an inch square

The success of Bell Labs is due, in large part, to its very special atmosphere. Says Arno Penzias, co-winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize for his work in radio astronomy: "Unless it can be demonstrated that you're really wasting your time and our money, people leave you alone. The place demands that you work. But it also demands that you think " The research aims at practical products that AT&T can some day put on the market. But beyond that broad guideline scientists can let their imaginations roam. Take Penzias,' whose Nobel was awarded for an achievement that is not likely to have much effect on the average telephone user. In the mid-1960s, he and fellow Bell Scientist Robert Wilson detected faint echoes of the creation, the Big Bang that is believed to have formed the universe.

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