Excellent video. It would have been even better to at least mention the Monopoly aspect, and how they were able to consistently be cutting edge with innovation, when that is counter to the typical attributes of a monopoly. ...and whether the AT&T breakup was the downfall of the once greatness of Bell Labs. Whether the govt anti-trust action might have done more harm than good, at least as it pertains to Bell Labs.
"Even though the UK is no longer part of the EU any more I still get blocked by some websites" MASSIVE non-sequitur.. I'm surprised and disappointed that you agreed to read this bullshit ad script that is firmly targeted at the ignorant xenophobe crowd :/ Apologies for my first comment being negative (as is sadly often the case) I really do appreciate what you do, I highly rate your content and will continue to do so
My step father was a physicist at Bell Labs in Holmdel for over 40 years. He held 27 patents through them and was the person who designed the original articulating arm that held the laser for the first laser eye surgery. Art Ashkin was his good friend and use to come by the house often. At the time I thought what he did was neat, but being a boy never fully understood the scope of what went on there. It wasn’t till much later in life, and really learning the history, did I know. To my step father, it was just work, it was just what he did…
When I graduated from engineering college in 1975 I started doing field testing for Bell Labs. The system they designed had two parts: a control system based on a dec pdp11 minicomputer running a custom designed real-time operating system and hundreds of remote testing systems based on an Intel 8008 processor (the second one designed by Intel). From the engineers at Bell Labs I learned how to design computers from the chips up and operating systems. The on-the-job experience of working with the folks at Bell Labs led me to eventually working as an applications engineer for HP Labs taking theories and creating products. HPL and IBM Labs are also now gone. All were victims of short-term focused bean-counters and hence the decline of USA innovation.
@Jim Pad, it was a product of its times, large monopolies, that made enough money to go around. But monopolies ended hence singular entities to support research in them. It's not lost, but not as concentrated either, the side effect is somewhat slower innovation and somewhat faster and cheaper adoption.
@@b5627 His career took him all over some of the finest engineering firms in the country... Harris, Lockheed, General Atronics, Texas Instruments. Shortly after his work at Bell Labs, he interviewed for, but ultimately turned down, a position at Xerox PARC. He specialized in shortwave and cellular signal creation, transmittal and acquisition.
Yes, my father worked for Bell Labs in the 50s until 1982 when he retired. He was a PhD in Electrical Engineering. In fact, Bell was the only company he ever worked for.
I loved Bell labs, but in my role I was a technical associate. I worked with all PHDs pretty much as their programmer and experimenter, but to be at the top in the labs, a PHD was pretty much required. I was sort of a "little fish in a big pond." I worked around people who I considered "giants" , so I moved on to other companies where I could be a regular fish in a regular pond. I worked with the UNIX team, as we used UNIX and the PWB (Programmers work bench) to do our development on Dataphone II modems that my team developed. We did use PDP11 computers. I is pretty amazing that Linux looks pretty much like the UNIX I worked on at BTL. BTL was a national treasure, but it was a cutting edge research and development environment, filled with the most brilliant people I have been blessed to know, but I am not so sure BTL was equipped to move into the cut-throat commercial world. They were brilliant nerds, but not cut out for the commercial world.
I grew up not too far away from Bell Labs. It was the kind of place I dreamed of working at some day. And they weren't the only one, lots of big companies used to have laboratories and did lots of in-house research decades ago.
Whilst there are others, RCAs comes to mind. Elsewhere, PMG (became Telecom Australia and then Telstra here in Australia), The UKs British Telecom & BBC, Japan's NTT also had their own labs and researchers that contributed to their own company's success, the technology ecosystem within their respective countries and the technical world as a whole.
I’m not sure if there’s anything quite like Bell Labs today but coming from a younger generation, Elon Musk’s ventures remind me of that dream of the future
Another example: a century ago the Pennsylvania Railroad had its own research division and did a lot of work optimizing and designing steam engines and other rail equipment. Many of their locomotives were designed and built in their own shops or the designs farmed out to contractors, they did their own signal technology and had lots of smart people on the payroll. The company ceased to exist around 1970.
@@Bruh-wb3qw I've heard Elon micromanages his companies - not good for innovation. The key to innovation is to give demonstrated creative people with practical experience their freedom while holding them to a high standard. This was always the formula for success from Edison until Wall Street bean counters took over and Asians were allowed to steal all new innovations.
@@chrisfuller1268 I dont know how true that is. Try micromanaging over 100,000 employees; you give him too much credit. His companies are leaders in the new space race and dominate global electric car manufacturing amongst many other things like research in neuroscience, AI, communications, infrastructure, etc. His companies are clearly sucessful and rapidly evolving so im not sure where you see innovation lacking here. What i have heard is that there is not a ton of hierarchy in his companies which i'd argue is probably good for innovation because you dont need a supervisors, superior to approve little things.
I don't know how a 'next Bell Labs' could emerge in the 21st century. The business paradigm has changed substantially. Bell Labs grew organically at the pace of business in the 20th century.
Sadly, that's the truth. Gross margin and ROI focus have ruined these kinds of investments in the future. Few companies are willing to take the risk of investing in grass roots research if there isn't a business plan attached to it. For big companies it seems like less risk to just buy up-and-coming ideas, at the cost of progress for all of us.
Bell Labs wanted to learn, discover and create things that enhanced "our" way of life. Sadly there will never be another like it. Greed, $$$$, ROI, and productivity is all anyone can think about now....that window of brilliance that brought us all the cornerstones of modern technology that we take for granted today has long since slammed shut.
Myths and legitimate concerns about capitalism is actually what will prevent it. Bell Labs is a reminder of a lot of the good capitalism has brought the world and a lot of people don't like that. If something was to become as big as Bell, it would be broken up by modern antitrust legislation anyway. That's what happens when you have a society that is ashamed of existing.
I run a mid sized PBX (~3000 endpoints). Telephony is my day in day out business. The entire world of telephony has Bell Labs fingerprints all over it. It’s incredible the amount of innovation and influence they had on the world of telephony.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Oh yeah, 100%. Even though they helped immensely with technologies and data sciences that became the backbone of the internet and modern data networks. Even in VoIP systems the routing logic and even just what things are named has a lot of Bell tells.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 That was more of a "don't bite the hand that feeds you" thing. The same happened in a lot of telcos back in the day. Big telcos had a solid business based on existing copper. That existing copper gave them an edge over possible competitors, and gave their business a solid backbone that old business people could understand. It was like real estate. So, communications tech that threatened that was *frowned upon*. They continued to do things the old school way, even when it was more expensive for them to do so than to switch to VoIP systems themselves for their own networks. "Let's not compete with ourselves" has been the doom of more than one large corporation, where management opposition to new tech they saw as disruptive to their own business meant the leaders of an industry ended up being the only ones not developing said tech. Like Blockbuster losing out on streaming or Microsoft losing out on the server business.
Great to see another CD video, when there's a gap it always worries me these days. A classic Droid video, as well - something I never knew I didn't know anything about! With most YT channels, you know pretty much what you're going to get, but with CD it's always an interesting surprise. Thanks, Paul.
My dad worked for Western Electric and Bell Labs from 1927 to 1969. He started at that building in NYC, and later in Whippany and Holmdel. It must have been so exciting to be a part of that period of tremendous technological and engineering advancement. I worked for Lucent in the late 1990s and it was a shadow of the company's past.
@@shailmurtaza9082 they messed with employee pensions and retirement accounts and locked them so employees couldn’t withdraw funds after having fraudulently reporting revenue in a similar way to Enron. Employees lost millions and I even see a lawsuit for $1.2billion. Had an uncle who worked for ATT then Lucent when it was spun off and he lost millions in retirement due to all of it and is still working now into his 70s just to someday retire.
@donmoore7785 - I came to work for Lucent through an acquisition in 1999, as the telecom/internet bubble was still inflating. All these years later, I'm still disgusted by those who were "leading" Lucent at the time and how they destroyed such a magnificent company, hurt so many amazing employees, and lined their own pockets along the way. Seeing "Nokia Bell Labs" now makes me queasy.
It was at its best when it was run by the innovators. My father worked in Homdel and I remember when he knew it was over. They had a parts department where people could take what they wanted for any reason be it personal or work related. The idea was that when you have smart people working for you to trust them that even if they are doing a personal project they are still improving their skills which is worth the price of parts. Then one day he said they started locking up the parts and keeping track when the MBA types got in control. That was the beginning of the end.
By the time I retired from Bell Labs in 2001, the bean counters had changed the company and degraded the work environment. The changes could be traced back to 1984 when the company was split.
Sad how greed and $$$$ (and MBA types) pretty much suck the oxygen out of every room they enter. Aside from that.......Cheers to your dad for his contributions to our technological luxuries we enjoy today.
I worked for HP. When they started mixing smart people with 'politically correct' people, they may have got diversity and new ideas, but the 'self driven smart people' then had to make up for the 'shortcomings' of the diverse group. This affected productivity and the managers started focusing on your dress and how they perceived you, rather than your results. Didn't matter you worked long hours or your weekends were 'lost' during travel for the company, you were judged and your pay scale rated on how they judged you. After 9 years I 'bit the bullet' and after another 5 years, bit through that bullet and got out of the company. The bean counters replaced managers with team leaders and it went down hill after that. If someone tells me to work smarter and not harder, I would question their sanity.
@@Liberty2357 When those 'bean counters' lose sight of what's in the books (real people), crazy things happen. The Test and Measurement that got re-invented to Agilent Technologies and was going to be set up in Australia, (around the same time as ACO) suddenly had their 'in progress' construction of their purposed building stopped. The bean counters decided it was cheaper to hire buildings and not own them. The builder did a deal with Agilent and went to the bank and got a loan to finish it, backed with a guarantee of some years rent. Bill and Dave would be rolling in their graves to see how their HP people are now treated.
Thanks to all the engineers and geniuses at Bell Labs for inventing most of our modern information, technology and communications driven society, and thank you Curious Droid for sharing this video.
My first post university job was at bell telephone laboratories in Holmdel New Jersey. Two Nobel prizes were awarded to bell labs researchers while I worked there. Reporters just to call around to all the bell labs telephone exchanges as the reporters were searching for someone who could contact the prize winners. I received several phone calls from reporters looking Phineas
I think there is something to be said about the bell labs model of doing things vs the rush it out and patch it up later methods we have now. While it is sad to no longer see Bell Labs for what it was, there is a lot we can learn from them and their ways of recruiting and managing projects.
Also, some developments were made without management being fully aware of what researchers were doing. Like Unix and C, nowadays management structures try to to kill such kind of thing.
@@calexico66 Absolutely. Has *anything* come out of Silicon Valley over the last 20 years that's anywhere close to the significance of what Bell Labs produced in an "average" decade?
And the lack of research centers like Bell Labs, is what I believe to be one of the main reasons, technological innovation and breakthroughs have almost ground to halt. The breakthroughs form 2012-2022 amount to maybe 1 year in the 50's. And that sucks.
@@Renee_R343 is MIT college considered one or nasa? Im curious about what school would be best for ideas not being crushed and wants to really put the innovation before the money.
I would say especially up here in Canada because even though Bell Canada/Bell was split up decades ago, you can still find traces of its technology and software in all of the telecoms up here. I worked with Rogers and telus and a lot of the older hardware (switches and what not, the old electromechanical ones) were usually Bell labs stuff, and I even found Bell Labs "watermarks" in some of the really legacy software for both companies.
This channel is incredible. It supersedes most science-focused tv shows out there today. I would actually love if you made a video talking a bit about yourself, your backround and what you're doing outside of youtube etc. I reckon alot of people would like that! Truly I thank you for your amazing content and unparalelled quality you bring to the world. You take care!
"The Idea Factory" by Jon Gertner is a great read for anyone interested in Bell Labs history. As mentioned by others here the innovative work done by people at Bell Labs was mind blowing.
You are correct. Reading the book now. Took me back to my high school days as a lab assistant in physics. Time meant nothing as I played with home made solar cells and parabolic mirrors.
I was employed by AT&T briefly earlier this year, and stumbled across all this while I was trying to learn more about where I worked. Nobody in the company today is aware of any of this, aside from the one guy who maintains the 'AT&T Archives' playlist here on youtube. It's utterly baffling to me that the USA once had an engine of technology, money, and even culture, and just... Decided it wasn't worth it. I understand Bell Labs was ultimately a corporate entity, but it boggles the mind to think that government can't agree to keep discovering all the new tech that put us at the top, once upon a time. We proved that putting a bunch of smart people in a place where they can self-actualize works, so what even is the problem?
Well I'd argue the US is still the leading country in the world for tech innovation. But really, innovation isn't what it used to be because most innovations have been thought up by now. It's now mostly down to a case of 'who can actually do it?'. And the challenges involved often require massive resources thrown at things with huge confluences of science+tech fields all working towards a larger goal. So yea, it's about execution rather than ideas nowadays. And there's only so many companies that have the capabilities and resources to really compete anymore to solve so many of these really complex problems.
_"It's utterly baffling to me that the USA once had an engine of technology, money, and even culture, and just... Decided it wasn't worth it."_ Just like the British rocket programme. Ahead in many aspects dropping the programme overnight. Look up _Black Knight_ and _Megaroc_ on Mark Felton's channel.
@@maynardburger "....because most innovations have been thought up by now." Really? If the 20th Century has taught us one thing, it's that discovery and invention are increasing, not decreasing. What's holding innovation and invention back isn't a lack of people willing and capable, but the bean-counters at the top of these sorts of organizations... Everything now needs to be 'profitable' in the short-term. We have lost the ability to think long-term, and realise that those sorts of small investments now may not show 'results' for years, but will yield orders of magnitude more than the current philosophy of pushing every cent out of everything in the short-term and it's going to bite us! Hard! (If it isn't already doing so)
@@tolep The private monopoly was broken up. You will find that funding for most inventions comes from public money. The outfit maybe private but pubic grants are given. The Internet was a joint development between DARPA in the USA and the National Physics Labs in the UK. The NPL invented the key components, the router and packet switching. Both public bodies and publicly funded.
Being 80 years old, I was around for many of the hay days of AT&T and Bell Labs. It was an amazing time. The downfall came when the big wigs at AT&T got greedy. They allowed the breakup of the buisiness so they could get on the money train. President Reagan was ready to stop the antitrust action, but management agreed to the breakup. So the nation lost an amazing company, with all of its attributes and advancements, and AT&T became just another ho hum company. Such a shame. Great video, as usual. Thanks.
so i think that you may the one who saw alien technology from wich...you all smart persons give us so much...copied technology or invented but after model...you saw in artefacts send there by...BIG BOYS....so GUES what now ther are smarter BOYS then there but in other companys...so is there the....HIGH TECH goes....to be copied...
I had a professor of economics in the 80's who had been at Bell Labs in the late 60's or early 70's. He said one time that one of the great things about working at Bell Labs is that they supported researchers so well. "If you're a physicist they build you a lab to work in. If you're an economist they hand you a yellow legal pad." I wish I had been sharp enough to realize just what a bit of dry self depreciating humor that really was, but of course, I was just a dumb kid and was only moderately amused.
Asianometry has several great videos about chip making. It involves insanely expensive lasers that require a truck-sized piece of equipment to work, but are so accurate they can cut a germ in two.
Growing up, one of the dads on the street was an engineer at Bell Labs in Murray Hill. Dad was also an engineer (chemical not electrical) and Mr Johnson got permission to give dad a tour (obviously the most sensitive areas were off limits). He came home very impressed and raved about the place, so much so that I have always considered the Labs to have been a national treasure. And what I found out later just increased that conviction. When I saw what happened to the Labbs, I was incredibly saddened. I am just glad Mr Johnson had passed away before things went really downhill.
I worked for two years as an MTS at Bell Labs Holmdel. A wonderful experience. If you were curious about something, you could pick up the phone and a leading expert on the subject would happily explain things to you. You could walk down a corridor and the name on each door would be an internationally known researcher. To be employed there having a PhD was a prerequisite. But within Bell Labs, everybody (every man that is) was addressed as "mister".
Breaking up Bell Labs was one of the great unrecognized acts of corporate vandalism of the last quarter century. In general our "job creating" owner class isn't interested in producing anything new. They just want to set themselves up as rentiers, and squeeze the juice from the work of others.
You won't see anything like it coming out of the "job creators" who make the decisions now. They're a lot more interested in asset stripping than creating anything new and useful.
@@samuelglover7685 did YOU? It literally did... I know what you mean, but the way you wrote it is a bit misleading, since what you actually wrote is very untrue (it's undeniable: Bell Labs only existed because of one man, Alexander Graham Bell).
i worked at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ in a student type IT/computer position for several years in the mid to late 90's. It was an incredible place to work. It was exciting to work at an R&D facility as you never knew what or where you might be working from day to day. One day, my boss introduced me to Dennis Ritchie as he was still working there at the time! Some of my most cherished memories of working in my career field are from working at the Labs for the few years I did. It never ceases to amaze me how many discoveries came out of Bell Labs. I feel priviledged to have worked there.
I generally applaud and appreciate the distinction Paul makes when it comes to possible “alternative” outcomes to what we have had. By saying “as we know them…” he keeps that interpretation grounded in plausible reality!
Cool to hear the name of Harry Nyqvist. Since he came from the same village in Sweden as me (tot. pop. around 12 000 people) there is a small museum dedicated to his memory not far from where I live. :)
When ATT spun off Bell Labs, I saw that as the end of ATT. Now ATT is just South Eastern Bell under a name purchased for name recognition. And the US is doing so well in private research. Because the bean counters destroyed Bell Labs.
Think of what even a local phone call cost in the 1980's and compare that to the cost most any phone call to anywhere today. Bell labs ( and the virtually bullet / nuke proof system ) existed because of the $$$ flowing into the company. Something else to think of. Bell Labs was inventing basic building block technology that was later integrated into other products or improved on by others, this is why there were so dominant. Things like the transistor , lasers and so on What new ground breaking basic technology has been invented in say the past 30 years?
I noticed a wall of plaques in the video that said "Nokia Bell Laboratories". The buying up of legacy companies by upstarts with investor backing invariably cheapens the original brand as the new management cannibalizes the company assets and spins off subsidiaries for cash, all to please the investors with high stock prices and short-term returns. Innovation ceases when extraction begins.
Only a small clarification. C++ is not a replacement for C. C and C++ are two different standards that are independent and both are used today for different applications. C is usually used for hardware close applications like drivers and operating systems. C++ have extensions like object oriented programming and exceptions and is used more in desktop applications. C and C++ are both general purpose software languages so you can use C++ for hardware and C for desktop applications.
These guys in this video, all of them and then some. are the guys that laid the ground work for my modern life (1993) it's insane to think these were all just normal dudes going to work making history. I love it
At the university of Oklahoma, they had the Bell Systems Technical Journal archived. These were a great influence on my love of science (along with a complete collection that f Scientific American). These were great organizations that went beyond the technical but also inspired us ‘80s generation of scientists and engineers.
I worked directly with at least 5 of the authors of that version of the BTL technical journal. The person who stands the out I my mind is Helen Rovegno not because of her technical skill, which was indeed great, but because she was so socially unadjusted. This was an environment filled with brilliant PhD scientists, and she would openly insult their intelligence in large meetings. I doubt Helen was smarter than the other scientists at BTL.
Got to meet Nobel Prize Winner Arno Penzias at a local electronics store in Highland Park, New Jersey where he lived. He was very nice and actually spoke to me for about 1.5 hours. We talked about everything and anything. At the time he was in charge of Bell Labs.
Great video. As a kid, I admired Bell Labs. When they became Lucent, it was just sad and I knew the glory had passed. What Nokia is doing with it is anybody's guess.
Bell labs was an amazing place, so much science came out of that place it's amazing. I wish this video was longer, I watched all old documentaries on YT about AT&T and Bell labs.
They key was that Bell had a telephone monopoly in the USA. They used the profits to fund the labs - to make more money. Large monopolies can do this, as the British GPO Telephones did. Bell was a private monopoly and GPO a public one. GPO built the world's first electronic computer (Tommy Flowers), and optic fibre system in 1977, cell phones, amongst others. Bell's private monopoly was split up. The GPO was privatized.
I had a cousin who worked for Bell/Western Electric and we lived near their test bed telephone exchange. We got the first touch tone phones and features like call waiting. Never knew there were so many non phone innovations from Bell. I guess there were benefits to the monopoly but they abused it with huge bills & fees.
I was just at the old bell labs a few months ago. Really cool feeling walking around knowing it was where our modern society stemmed from. Now its a glorified shopping center.
@@DiviAugusti I think he's saying that the demise of Bell Labs was a loss, a disgrace -- which it was. What he's saying is pretty much the opposite of the Unabomber's fever dreams.
You visited a repurposed building that was once a major Bell Labs location. Bell Labs left that location years before the building's current revival. Anyway, there's still a functioning Bell Labs location in Murray Hill. Still a lot of research being done there, though very little basic physics these days.
These guys were unbelievably smart. The things they were able to achieve in such a short amount of time is nothing short of incredible. Cranking out life changing innovations was just another day at the office. Wish I could've been apart of that
I began my professional career in 1968 in the Network Planning Division of Bell Labs in Holmdel NJ. I stayed with Bell Labs for 19 years, departing in 1987 as the Network Planning Division was sundered in the wake of the break-up of the Bell System.
Long haired freaky person from Texas here, and I am very happy that someone took the time to properly do a video on Bell Labs. It is more interesting than most people know.
I had the honor of working at Bell Labs in Holmdel in 1982 83. It was the experience of a lifetime. It spoiled me for the rest of my career in IT. We were free to develop systems without interference from management that did not understand software development. I encountered management like this later in my career. We were trusted to get the job done, and we did. The loss of Bell Labs was and is a tragedy for the USA and the world.
Bell labs never truly went away . It just melded into other segments of business and specializiation . As technology improves more and specializing occurs and the need for a single monopoly is no longer needed ..
So this is why Abe Weismann wanted to work at bell labs so much I'm MMM. I admit I didn't know much about bell labs until watching that series. Now I can't wait to learn more.
In the late 80s, I remember going to Bell Labs seminar where they talked about their work with data transmission over copper. It was, it turned out to be DSL. It was very interesting as they talked how they were chasing fibre in the race for data transmission. The other great lab of the times was Xerox PARC.
@@bobroberts2371 I've never turned down an opportunity to watch anything about Voyager and I'm not going to start now. I find myself watching The Farthest documentary from 2017 again and again.
Another great video. If I may mention "the history guy" here he has an excellent video on just the transistor. The end of the video has a lot of passion in it. He also has one on the trans Atlantic cable.
Thumbs up for The History Guy channel! Actually, a couple years ago he said that at that point in time anyway the most watched episode he ever did was a history of screws and screwdrivers.!
I graduated from Electrical Engineering in '83, then some Telecom work, then switched to the Software Engineering in 1986 and retired last year (2021). This video summarizes my whole life (Almost). Sigh...
Bell labs is pretty wild. Does make me ponder the changes recently that have led to the dearth of novel technology discoveries over the past 5 decades or so.
I've read about these guys before from a researcher, The Economic Laws of Research, which is a dry title for a great book. Though Bell Labs isn't the focus they did stick out to me (along with the Japanese government creating a scientific institution that had a 100% record of failure, and even tried to convince Japanese industry to stay away from cars and computer chips!)
What are those parenthesis doing? I need more to the story. Like you are going to explain your secondary thought. I feel like the birthday cake ran out and I was the last in line.
Bell Labs was a groundbreaking place ... as long as it was funded by a Government-controlled monopoly. After that monopoly was broken up (during the Reagan era), it lost most of its brilliance.
@@ipissed well I was going to write more, but the video was playing away and he mentioned stuff like "more Nobel Prizes" and a few other things so I assumed it'd be covered in the video. Another thing I thought was cool, though not unique to Bell Labs, was there's been a number of great scientists just given cart blanche to do whatever they liked, with the best science labs, and as free to share whatever they discovered, funded by the private sector! Their contracts actually said that! But it works out funding the best scientists with the best equipment cause of first mover advantage (one of the laws), and if you want to try and coast of second mover advantage (ie replication) you still need scientists at the top of their game where the breakthroughs are cause otherwise they won't understand it if it's too far ahead of their experience (you're not learning it from a book after all, and can't just set up a lab in a week and nail whatever breakthrough happened without experience, science ain't that easy). So yeah I found that surprising, how often scientists have an open contract to research whatever they want with the money behind them, and business just trusting sooner or later something profitable will come from it. It's not what you'd expect.
This is an amazing documentary about an amazing topic. Well played and well executed. By far one of my favourite topics you've covered. I'd LOVE to see documentaries about some of the fathers of the semiconductor industry like William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brittain who invented the BJT, or the less famous (I wonder why) Mohammed Atalla who invented the first working MOSFET. Which I would argue might be more groundbreaking than the BJT. But that's a tough contest. I could go on and on with names. Whether from Bell Labs, Fairchild, RCA or any of their competitors. Actually, it's a bit obscure, but I'd LOVELOVELOVE to see a video on the history of the 5400/7400 series, 4000 series and LM series of chips. Although that's a bit specialist for this channel maybe. It would make a fine trilogy of videos to compliment this one.
My Dad worked at Western Electric as an installer and then Ohio Bell as an Engineer. I followed in my Dad's footsteps and worked at AT&T Network Systems "Western Electric " and was proud to do so. Even though I didn't work at Bell Labs I installed the equipment and tested the equipment they created for AT&T. I left there to work in other areas but always thought it was a HUGE mistake to let as I recall the big French Telecom company buy Bell Labs. All they wanted were the patients and it made the US vulnerable to being hacked by foreign nations. I also worked on the Treasury DTS project which installed a 5ESS in the Treasury Dept. so they could actually be their own telecom and provide their own dial tone. I worked on and installed the first digital ready Cell Site Network in the MD and VA area the AT&T Autoplex series II. All of which Bell Labs helped create!!
The first computer animated film clip was in fact made in Sweden in 1961. It was a 3D view of a planned highway, and was generated by the Swedish built computer BESK.
Realy bloody interesting. I remember playing with some very early Philips transistors, potted in clear resin and painted black, they could be used as a light sensitive switch.
Where I work, several older people with my current company worked for the affiliated companies that worked with Bell Lab. Multiple generations of one family worked in one of the factories that produced electrical, then electronic and finally microprocessor equipment. It was a sad story because with the turn of the century and the sending of industrial jobs to Mexico then Asia, several of those people were out of very good paying jobs that would have allowed them to retire within a decade, the closure required them to work for almost 20 years more. Such jobs provided a pathway to high paying jobs with merely a high school diploma and a willingness to work, they provided the training needed. Hearing the history of this company really brought me down, hopefully such a institution and related industry can exist in this country once again.
I remember the days when DSL was too expensive for us and you couldn't talk on the phone and check emails at the same time. Now, we do it on the same device.
If I recall correctly, you had Bell Canada and Northern Electric which became Bell Northern Research. I was told once that the term NERD came from Northern Electric Research Division!
I often wonder what the world would look like if we would dedicate all the resources we now use for wars, fighting each other and preventing the other company from having success to research for all mankind.
I dreamed of working at Bell Labs since elementary school and I ended up getting two job offers in '81 and '82 to go to work for them but declined both of them. By then, "This is not your father's Bell Labs" was commonly heard. It was the break up that did them in. Sad.
I know a physics PhD that worked on electron microscopes at Bell Labs. He is in his 90s.His office was next to Shockley's. He went to a military symposium where Carl Sagan said that if a Hydrogen bomb was tested, it would make a nuke winter. The old guy challenged Carl on that.
Thank you for this excellent history lesson! It’s amazing to me how a few people and their discoveries can make such a difference! Have you done a video about John Goodenough??!! Now there’s an amazing person!
Not trying to shill, but I genuinely did not realize you had continued posting stuff because you are not on Odysee or Rumble. You're now one of the three channels I return to UA-cam for (the three I highly value that have not diversified).
Sooner or later every organization became plagued by bureaucracy. Despite most of bureaucratic proposals sound reasonable, like order of shifting paper from one stack to another faster, in the end it killing everything.
I’ve got quite a few tools stamped with “Bell System” they came from family members who worked for Cincinnati Bell. I had no idea that Bell System was related to Bell Labs.
In the late 80s, I worked for a consortium of which Bell Labs was the main member. The people I met there would be working at all hours of the day and, as an undergraduate, I had no idea what they were talking about most of the time.
Ever heard about the Max-Planck Gesellschaft and its predecessor the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft? 15 Nobel Prize winners as KWG (until 1945) and 22 Nobel Prize winners as MPG (from 1945 until now). Seems to be another league.
I spent several years at Bell Labs in Naperville, Illinois (Indian Hill). I worked on such projects as the first touch screen (which was about about 10cm x 20 cm and had a DEC VAX 11/780 behind it). I also worked on some very earliest voice recognition systems. I am English, and I threw a number of accents at it. The RP accent gave it some problems, but nothing too bad. Yorkshire was more difficult, as was Cockney. Glaswegian was impossible and I didn't even try Geordie. Actually, I spent most of my time working on telephone switches.
This pertains to everyone! I am responsible for every single act and invention that’s not caused negative consequences to humanity!As far as you know this is true!
I live in Allentown PA near where one of the old bell labs building is, the place where the first transistors were produced....where the first cell phone computer chips were made.....I worked at a sign shop in the early 2000s during the transition to Lucent Technologies, and again to Agere Systems. Over a few years we rebranded all the interior and exterior signs, all the company trucks etc for the Allentown, Reading and Breingsville locations....the sheer ammount of wasted money and number of people who were "managers" was staggering, we redid some projects 3 or 4 times usually because a different "manager" had a bigger and better idea than the last guy... we even custom printed rolls of ribbon with the lucent logo for the Christmas trees in the lobby..... no wonder it all eventually closed, it had the feeling of an Enron level scam towards the end, I dont think a majority of the administration people we had contact with actually did any work there, everyday was always pizza parties, coffee breaks, lunches being catered, anytime you needed to talk to someone in charge they had left early, worked a half day, a vacation day........the main building is now an unemployment office / charter school and the production areas are now gone and became a minor league baseball stadium, Really sad ending to alot of good jobs just because of poor management.
A lot of people think, that Bell was the inventor of the telphone, but this isn't true. Bell was inspired by Johann Philipp Reis, who invented the telephone in 1861. Reis also "created" the word telephone.
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did you say Mohamed atalla instead of martin atalla?
Excellent video.
It would have been even better to at least mention the Monopoly aspect, and how they were able to consistently be cutting edge with innovation, when that is counter to the typical attributes of a monopoly.
...and whether the AT&T breakup was the downfall of the once greatness of Bell Labs. Whether the govt anti-trust action might have done more harm than good, at least as it pertains to Bell Labs.
Nord. The insecure VPN. Thumbs down.
What I really want to know is, where do you get these wonderful shirts?
"Even though the UK is no longer part of the EU any more I still get blocked by some websites"
MASSIVE non-sequitur.. I'm surprised and disappointed that you agreed to read this bullshit ad script that is firmly targeted at the ignorant xenophobe crowd :/
Apologies for my first comment being negative (as is sadly often the case) I really do appreciate what you do, I highly rate your content and will continue to do so
My step father was a physicist at Bell Labs in Holmdel for over 40 years. He held 27 patents through them and was the person who designed the original articulating arm that held the laser for the first laser eye surgery. Art Ashkin was his good friend and use to come by the house often. At the time I thought what he did was neat, but being a boy never fully understood the scope of what went on there. It wasn’t till much later in life, and really learning the history, did I know. To my step father, it was just work, it was just what he did…
I also worked at the Holmdel labs 1977 to 1980
@@chrisschene8301 what did you work on while you were there?
@@tonenuff modems. Data phone ii.
Amazing thanks for sharing 👍
Sure bud
When I graduated from engineering college in 1975 I started doing field testing for Bell Labs. The system they designed had two parts: a control system based on a dec pdp11 minicomputer running a custom designed real-time operating system and hundreds of remote testing systems based on an Intel 8008 processor (the second one designed by Intel). From the engineers at Bell Labs I learned how to design computers from the chips up and operating systems. The on-the-job experience of working with the folks at Bell Labs led me to eventually working as an applications engineer for HP Labs taking theories and creating products. HPL and IBM Labs are also now gone. All were victims of short-term focused bean-counters and hence the decline of USA innovation.
It's weird how the US is self-destructive in that way.
@@ericvosselmans5657 I dont think it's just the USA.
@@Outland9000 I am from western Europe. We are self-destructing even faster.
IBM labs is alive and well in Switzerland
@Jim Pad, it was a product of its times, large monopolies, that made enough money to go around. But monopolies ended hence singular entities to support research in them. It's not lost, but not as concentrated either, the side effect is somewhat slower innovation and somewhat faster and cheaper adoption.
My father's engineering career started at Bell Labs in New Jersey… he always spoke very fondly of his time there.
I hope you don't mind my saying, your father is a high caliber, bona fide badass
@@b5627 His career took him all over some of the finest engineering firms in the country... Harris, Lockheed, General Atronics, Texas Instruments. Shortly after his work at Bell Labs, he interviewed for, but ultimately turned down, a position at Xerox PARC. He specialized in shortwave and cellular signal creation, transmittal and acquisition.
My father was an engineer with Bell as well from the late fifties to early eighties and also enjoyed his time there.
Yes, my father worked for Bell Labs in the 50s until 1982 when he retired. He was a PhD in Electrical Engineering. In fact, Bell was the only company he ever worked for.
I loved Bell labs, but in my role I was a technical associate. I worked with all PHDs pretty much as their programmer and experimenter, but to be at the top in the labs, a PHD was pretty much required. I was sort of a "little fish in a big pond." I worked around people who I considered "giants" , so I moved on to other companies where I could be a regular fish in a regular pond. I worked with the UNIX team, as we used UNIX and the PWB (Programmers work bench) to do our development on Dataphone II modems that my team developed. We did use PDP11 computers. I is pretty amazing that Linux looks pretty much like the UNIX I worked on at BTL. BTL was a national treasure, but it was a cutting edge research and development environment, filled with the most brilliant people I have been blessed to know, but I am not so sure BTL was equipped to move into the cut-throat commercial world. They were brilliant nerds, but not cut out for the commercial world.
Bell labs was the 'gold standard' for research labs as I was growing up.
I grew up not too far away from Bell Labs. It was the kind of place I dreamed of working at some day. And they weren't the only one, lots of big companies used to have laboratories and did lots of in-house research decades ago.
Whilst there are others, RCAs comes to mind.
Elsewhere, PMG (became Telecom Australia and then Telstra here in Australia), The UKs British Telecom & BBC, Japan's NTT also had their own labs and researchers that contributed to their own company's success, the technology ecosystem within their respective countries and the technical world as a whole.
I’m not sure if there’s anything quite like Bell Labs today but coming from a younger generation, Elon Musk’s ventures remind me of that dream of the future
Another example: a century ago the Pennsylvania Railroad had its own research division and did a lot of work optimizing and designing steam engines and other rail equipment. Many of their locomotives were designed and built in their own shops or the designs farmed out to contractors, they did their own signal technology and had lots of smart people on the payroll. The company ceased to exist around 1970.
@@Bruh-wb3qw I've heard Elon micromanages his companies - not good for innovation. The key to innovation is to give demonstrated creative people with practical experience their freedom while holding them to a high standard. This was always the formula for success from Edison until Wall Street bean counters took over and Asians were allowed to steal all new innovations.
@@chrisfuller1268 I dont know how true that is. Try micromanaging over 100,000 employees; you give him too much credit. His companies are leaders in the new space race and dominate global electric car manufacturing amongst many other things like research in neuroscience, AI, communications, infrastructure, etc. His companies are clearly sucessful and rapidly evolving so im not sure where you see innovation lacking here. What i have heard is that there is not a ton of hierarchy in his companies which i'd argue is probably good for innovation because you dont need a supervisors, superior to approve little things.
I don't know how a 'next Bell Labs' could emerge in the 21st century. The business paradigm has changed substantially. Bell Labs grew organically at the pace of business in the 20th century.
Sadly, that's the truth. Gross margin and ROI focus have ruined these kinds of investments in the future. Few companies are willing to take the risk of investing in grass roots research if there isn't a business plan attached to it. For big companies it seems like less risk to just buy up-and-coming ideas, at the cost of progress for all of us.
Bell Labs wanted to learn, discover and create things that enhanced "our" way of life. Sadly there will never be another like it. Greed, $$$$, ROI, and productivity is all anyone can think about now....that window of brilliance that brought us all the cornerstones of modern technology that we take for granted today has long since slammed shut.
Myths and legitimate concerns about capitalism is actually what will prevent it. Bell Labs is a reminder of a lot of the good capitalism has brought the world and a lot of people don't like that. If something was to become as big as Bell, it would be broken up by modern antitrust legislation anyway. That's what happens when you have a society that is ashamed of existing.
I run a mid sized PBX (~3000 endpoints). Telephony is my day in day out business.
The entire world of telephony has Bell Labs fingerprints all over it. It’s incredible the amount of innovation and influence they had on the world of telephony.
They never understood the Internet, though. VoIP was a complete mystery to them.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Oh yeah, 100%. Even though they helped immensely with technologies and data sciences that became the backbone of the internet and modern data networks. Even in VoIP systems the routing logic and even just what things are named has a lot of Bell tells.
MA Bell, Got the Ill Communications.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 That was more of a "don't bite the hand that feeds you" thing. The same happened in a lot of telcos back in the day. Big telcos had a solid business based on existing copper. That existing copper gave them an edge over possible competitors, and gave their business a solid backbone that old business people could understand. It was like real estate. So, communications tech that threatened that was *frowned upon*. They continued to do things the old school way, even when it was more expensive for them to do so than to switch to VoIP systems themselves for their own networks.
"Let's not compete with ourselves" has been the doom of more than one large corporation, where management opposition to new tech they saw as disruptive to their own business meant the leaders of an industry ended up being the only ones not developing said tech.
Like Blockbuster losing out on streaming or Microsoft losing out on the server business.
Any jobs going? Uk based.
Great to see another CD video, when there's a gap it always worries me these days. A classic Droid video, as well - something I never knew I didn't know anything about! With most YT channels, you know pretty much what you're going to get, but with CD it's always an interesting surprise. Thanks, Paul.
My dad worked for Western Electric and Bell Labs from 1927 to 1969. He started at that building in NYC, and later in Whippany and Holmdel. It must have been so exciting to be a part of that period of tremendous technological and engineering advancement. I worked for Lucent in the late 1990s and it was a shadow of the company's past.
Shame what Lucent did to their workers
@@jcret510 what do you mean?
@@shailmurtaza9082 they messed with employee pensions and retirement accounts and locked them so employees couldn’t withdraw funds after having fraudulently reporting revenue in a similar way to Enron. Employees lost millions and I even see a lawsuit for $1.2billion. Had an uncle who worked for ATT then Lucent when it was spun off and he lost millions in retirement due to all of it and is still working now into his 70s just to someday retire.
@@jcret510 I see!
That is horrible
@donmoore7785 - I came to work for Lucent through an acquisition in 1999, as the telecom/internet bubble was still inflating. All these years later, I'm still disgusted by those who were "leading" Lucent at the time and how they destroyed such a magnificent company, hurt so many amazing employees, and lined their own pockets along the way. Seeing "Nokia Bell Labs" now makes me queasy.
It was at its best when it was run by the innovators. My father worked in Homdel and I remember when he knew it was over. They had a parts department where people could take what they wanted for any reason be it personal or work related. The idea was that when you have smart people working for you to trust them that even if they are doing a personal project they are still improving their skills which is worth the price of parts.
Then one day he said they started locking up the parts and keeping track when the MBA types got in control. That was the beginning of the end.
By the time I retired from Bell Labs in 2001, the bean counters had changed the company and degraded the work environment. The changes could be traced back to 1984 when the company was split.
Sad how greed and $$$$ (and MBA types) pretty much suck the oxygen out of every room they enter. Aside from that.......Cheers to your dad for his contributions to our technological luxuries we enjoy today.
I worked for HP. When they started mixing smart people with 'politically correct' people, they may have got diversity and new ideas, but the 'self driven smart people' then had to make up for the 'shortcomings' of the diverse group. This affected productivity and the managers started focusing on your dress and how they perceived you, rather than your results. Didn't matter you worked long hours or your weekends were 'lost' during travel for the company, you were judged and your pay scale rated on how they judged you. After 9 years I 'bit the bullet' and after another 5 years, bit through that bullet and got out of the company. The bean counters replaced managers with team leaders and it went down hill after that. If someone tells me to work smarter and not harder, I would question their sanity.
@@David-yo5ws what HP did to their calculator group is a crime against humanity.
@@Liberty2357 When those 'bean counters' lose sight of what's in the books (real people), crazy things happen.
The Test and Measurement that got re-invented to Agilent Technologies and was going to be set up in Australia, (around the same time as ACO) suddenly had their 'in progress' construction of their purposed building stopped. The bean counters decided it was cheaper to hire buildings and not own them. The builder did a deal with Agilent and went to the bank and got a loan to finish it, backed with a guarantee of some years rent. Bill and Dave would be rolling in their graves to see how their HP people are now treated.
Thanks to all the engineers and geniuses at Bell Labs for inventing most of our modern information, technology and communications driven society, and thank you Curious Droid for sharing this video.
My first post university job was at bell telephone laboratories in Holmdel New Jersey. Two Nobel prizes were awarded to bell labs researchers while I worked there. Reporters just to call around to all the bell labs telephone exchanges as the reporters were searching for someone who could contact the prize winners. I received several phone calls from reporters looking Phineas
I think there is something to be said about the bell labs model of doing things vs the rush it out and patch it up later methods we have now. While it is sad to no longer see Bell Labs for what it was, there is a lot we can learn from them and their ways of recruiting and managing projects.
Also, some developments were made without management being fully aware of what researchers were doing. Like Unix and C, nowadays management structures try to to kill such kind of thing.
@@calexico66 Absolutely.
Has *anything* come out of Silicon Valley over the last 20 years that's anywhere close to the significance of what Bell Labs produced in an "average" decade?
And the lack of research centers like Bell Labs, is what I believe to be one of the main reasons, technological innovation and breakthroughs have almost ground to halt.
The breakthroughs form 2012-2022 amount to maybe 1 year in the 50's. And that sucks.
@@Renee_R343 is MIT college considered one or nasa? Im curious about what school would be best for ideas not being crushed and wants to really put the innovation before the money.
@@Renee_R343 I don't think that's true at all. I just think people don't understand the complexity & future applications of those breakthroughs yet.
I would say especially up here in Canada because even though Bell Canada/Bell was split up decades ago, you can still find traces of its technology and software in all of the telecoms up here.
I worked with Rogers and telus and a lot of the older hardware (switches and what not, the old electromechanical ones) were usually Bell labs stuff, and I even found Bell Labs "watermarks" in some of the really legacy software for both companies.
This channel is incredible. It supersedes most science-focused tv shows out there today.
I would actually love if you made a video talking a bit about yourself, your backround and what you're doing outside of youtube etc. I reckon alot of people would like that!
Truly I thank you for your amazing content and unparalelled quality you bring to the world.
You take care!
"The Idea Factory" by Jon Gertner is a great read for anyone interested in Bell Labs history. As mentioned by others here the innovative work done by people at Bell Labs was mind blowing.
You are correct. Reading the book now. Took me back to my high school days as a lab assistant in physics. Time meant nothing as I played with home made solar cells and parabolic mirrors.
I was employed by AT&T briefly earlier this year, and stumbled across all this while I was trying to learn more about where I worked. Nobody in the company today is aware of any of this, aside from the one guy who maintains the 'AT&T Archives' playlist here on youtube. It's utterly baffling to me that the USA once had an engine of technology, money, and even culture, and just... Decided it wasn't worth it. I understand Bell Labs was ultimately a corporate entity, but it boggles the mind to think that government can't agree to keep discovering all the new tech that put us at the top, once upon a time. We proved that putting a bunch of smart people in a place where they can self-actualize works, so what even is the problem?
Well I'd argue the US is still the leading country in the world for tech innovation. But really, innovation isn't what it used to be because most innovations have been thought up by now. It's now mostly down to a case of 'who can actually do it?'. And the challenges involved often require massive resources thrown at things with huge confluences of science+tech fields all working towards a larger goal. So yea, it's about execution rather than ideas nowadays. And there's only so many companies that have the capabilities and resources to really compete anymore to solve so many of these really complex problems.
_"It's utterly baffling to me that the USA once had an engine of technology, money, and even culture, and just... Decided it wasn't worth it."_
Just like the British rocket programme. Ahead in many aspects dropping the programme overnight. Look up _Black Knight_ and _Megaroc_ on Mark Felton's channel.
@@maynardburger "....because most innovations have been thought up by now."
Really? If the 20th Century has taught us one thing, it's that discovery and invention are increasing, not decreasing. What's holding innovation and invention back isn't a lack of people willing and capable, but the bean-counters at the top of these sorts of organizations... Everything now needs to be 'profitable' in the short-term. We have lost the ability to think long-term, and realise that those sorts of small investments now may not show 'results' for years, but will yield orders of magnitude more than the current philosophy of pushing every cent out of everything in the short-term and it's going to bite us! Hard! (If it isn't already doing so)
AT&T was essentialy a monopoly so it had all the resources to run Bell Labs.
@@tolep
The private monopoly was broken up. You will find that funding for most inventions comes from public money. The outfit maybe private but pubic grants are given.
The Internet was a joint development between DARPA in the USA and the National Physics Labs in the UK. The NPL invented the key components, the router and packet switching. Both public bodies and publicly funded.
Being 80 years old, I was around for many of the hay days of AT&T and Bell Labs. It was an amazing time. The downfall came when the big wigs at AT&T got greedy. They allowed the breakup of the buisiness so they could get on the money train. President Reagan was ready to stop the antitrust action, but management agreed to the breakup.
So the nation lost an amazing company, with all of its attributes and advancements, and AT&T became just another ho hum company. Such a shame. Great video, as usual. Thanks.
so i think that you may the one who saw alien technology from wich...you all smart persons give us so much...copied technology or invented but after model...you saw in artefacts send there by...BIG BOYS....so GUES what now ther are smarter BOYS then there but in other companys...so is there the....HIGH TECH goes....to be copied...
I had a professor of economics in the 80's who had been at Bell Labs in the late 60's or early 70's. He said one time that one of the great things about working at Bell Labs is that they supported researchers so well. "If you're a physicist they build you a lab to work in. If you're an economist they hand you a yellow legal pad." I wish I had been sharp enough to realize just what a bit of dry self depreciating humor that really was, but of course, I was just a dumb kid and was only moderately amused.
Asianometry has several great videos about chip making. It involves insanely expensive lasers that require a truck-sized piece of equipment to work, but are so accurate they can cut a germ in two.
Growing up, one of the dads on the street was an engineer at Bell Labs in Murray Hill. Dad was also an engineer (chemical not electrical) and Mr Johnson got permission to give dad a tour (obviously the most sensitive areas were off limits). He came home very impressed and raved about the place, so much so that I have always considered the Labs to have been a national treasure. And what I found out later just increased that conviction. When I saw what happened to the Labbs, I was incredibly saddened. I am just glad Mr Johnson had passed away before things went really downhill.
I worked for two years as an MTS at Bell Labs Holmdel. A wonderful experience. If you were curious about something, you could pick up the phone and a leading expert on the subject would happily explain things to you. You could walk down a corridor and the name on each door would be an internationally known researcher.
To be employed there having a PhD was a prerequisite. But within Bell Labs, everybody (every man that is) was addressed as "mister".
I really didn´t know they were behind SO MANY innovations! Great video!
Breaking up Bell Labs was one of the great unrecognized acts of corporate vandalism of the last quarter century. In general our "job creating" owner class isn't interested in producing anything new. They just want to set themselves up as rentiers, and squeeze the juice from the work of others.
Bell labs is a thing of legend. I hope another one spawns up so I can be apart of it.
You could be the one to create it. Just saying.
You won't see anything like it coming out of the "job creators" who make the decisions now. They're a lot more interested in asset stripping than creating anything new and useful.
@@malcolmmutambanengwe3453 If you're saying Bell Labs emerged from the work of *one* person -- did you watch the video?
In an age where it's trendy for capitalists to think they hate capitalism, that will never happen. Modern antitrust laws would get in the way too.
@@samuelglover7685 did YOU? It literally did... I know what you mean, but the way you wrote it is a bit misleading, since what you actually wrote is very untrue (it's undeniable: Bell Labs only existed because of one man, Alexander Graham Bell).
i worked at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ in a student type IT/computer position for several years in the mid to late 90's. It was an incredible place to work. It was exciting to work at an R&D facility as you never knew what or where you might be working from day to day. One day, my boss introduced me to Dennis Ritchie as he was still working there at the time! Some of my most cherished memories of working in my career field are from working at the Labs for the few years I did. It never ceases to amaze me how many discoveries came out of Bell Labs. I feel priviledged to have worked there.
I generally applaud and appreciate the distinction Paul makes when it comes to possible “alternative” outcomes to what we have had. By saying “as we know them…” he keeps that interpretation grounded in plausible reality!
Cool to hear the name of Harry Nyqvist. Since he came from the same village in Sweden as me (tot. pop. around 12 000 people) there is a small museum dedicated to his memory not far from where I live. :)
I used to work at Lucent, they had a great museum at the HQ with the Bell Labs inventions
*Honeywell* developed an operating system naming it Multix. Unix is a pun on that being derived from Multix.
I always had such a big curiosity for bell labs, always present in most wikipedia pages of major technological events.
Thanks from Santiago, Chile !
When ATT spun off Bell Labs, I saw that as the end of ATT. Now ATT is just South Eastern Bell under a name purchased for name recognition.
And the US is doing so well in private research. Because the bean counters destroyed Bell Labs.
Yep, seen this happen everywhere. Even my work is at the mercy of bean counters. Lucky I retire soon.
Think of what even a local phone call cost in the 1980's and compare that to the cost most any phone call to anywhere today. Bell labs ( and the virtually bullet / nuke proof system ) existed because of the $$$ flowing into the company.
Something else to think of. Bell Labs was inventing basic building block technology that was later integrated into other products or improved on by others, this is why there were so dominant. Things like the transistor , lasers and so on
What new ground breaking basic technology has been invented in say the past 30 years?
I noticed a wall of plaques in the video that said "Nokia Bell Laboratories". The buying up of legacy companies by upstarts with investor backing invariably cheapens the original brand as the new management cannibalizes the company assets and spins off subsidiaries for cash, all to please the investors with high stock prices and short-term returns. Innovation ceases when extraction begins.
Only a small clarification. C++ is not a replacement for C. C and C++ are two different standards that are independent and both are used today for different applications. C is usually used for hardware close applications like drivers and operating systems. C++ have extensions like object oriented programming and exceptions and is used more in desktop applications. C and C++ are both general purpose software languages so you can use C++ for hardware and C for desktop applications.
Thanks. I was going to say it if nobody else did! Still a good video even with some small errors though. Keep it up, Curious Droid! Rocking channel.
These guys in this video, all of them and then some. are the guys that laid the ground work for my modern life (1993) it's insane to think these were all just normal dudes going to work making history. I love it
Quality of this channel is unriveled. I love the shift from aerospace to electrical engineering.
At the university of Oklahoma, they had the Bell Systems Technical Journal archived. These were a great influence on my love of science (along with a complete collection that f Scientific American). These were great organizations that went beyond the technical but also inspired us ‘80s generation of scientists and engineers.
I worked directly with at least 5 of the authors of that version of the BTL technical journal. The person who stands the out I my mind is Helen Rovegno not because of her technical skill, which was indeed great, but because she was so socially unadjusted. This was an environment filled with brilliant PhD scientists, and she would openly insult their intelligence in large meetings. I doubt Helen was smarter than the other scientists at BTL.
Got to meet Nobel Prize Winner Arno Penzias at a local electronics store in Highland Park, New Jersey where he lived. He was very nice and actually spoke to me for about 1.5 hours. We talked about everything and anything. At the time he was in charge of Bell Labs.
Great video. As a kid, I admired Bell Labs. When they became Lucent, it was just sad and I knew the glory had passed. What Nokia is doing with it is anybody's guess.
Bell labs was an amazing place, so much science came out of that place it's amazing. I wish this video was longer, I watched all old documentaries on YT about AT&T and Bell labs.
I'm guessing you also watched all of the Bell Labs own videos in which they were hilariously prescient about the future
I feel that Bell was a huge benefactor for the human kind, not just a company, not just a brand.
By the way, how many Nobels Apple has?
Hope you're doing well lately, good to see another video from you.
This video comes with perfect timing as I've been watching old Bell Labs videos for weeks now. Amazing!
They key was that Bell had a telephone monopoly in the USA. They used the profits to fund the labs - to make more money. Large monopolies can do this, as the British GPO Telephones did. Bell was a private monopoly and GPO a public one. GPO built the world's first electronic computer (Tommy Flowers), and optic fibre system in 1977, cell phones, amongst others. Bell's private monopoly was split up. The GPO was privatized.
Sandia labs and Lawrence Livermore were sister organizations to bell labs. Our researchers worked with Sandia on many defense projects
I had a cousin who worked for Bell/Western Electric and we lived near their test bed telephone exchange. We got the first touch tone phones and features like call waiting. Never knew there were so many non phone innovations from Bell. I guess there were benefits to the monopoly but they abused it with huge bills & fees.
I was just at the old bell labs a few months ago. Really cool feeling walking around knowing it was where our modern society stemmed from. Now its a glorified shopping center.
The start of our doom
@@djpunisha29 The Unabomber? Is that you?
@@DiviAugusti I think he's saying that the demise of Bell Labs was a loss, a disgrace -- which it was. What he's saying is pretty much the opposite of the Unabomber's fever dreams.
You visited a repurposed building that was once a major Bell Labs location. Bell Labs left that location years before the building's current revival. Anyway, there's still a functioning Bell Labs location in Murray Hill. Still a lot of research being done there, though very little basic physics these days.
These guys were unbelievably smart. The things they were able to achieve in such a short amount of time is nothing short of incredible. Cranking out life changing innovations was just another day at the office. Wish I could've been apart of that
I began my professional career in 1968 in the Network Planning Division of Bell Labs in Holmdel NJ.
I stayed with Bell Labs for 19 years, departing in 1987 as the Network Planning Division was sundered in the wake of the break-up of the Bell System.
It is the factory of Ideas and innovation! Imagine current technology without inventions of bell labs
Long haired freaky person from Texas here, and I am very happy that someone took the time to properly do a video on Bell Labs. It is more interesting than most people know.
Some of the most high-quality videos on the Internet great job again
5:37 wow I never knew this ... incredible!
Happy to see another one of your videos. Your channel is seriously one of the very best on UA-cam!
I had the honor of working at Bell Labs in Holmdel in 1982 83. It was the experience of a lifetime. It spoiled me for the rest of my career in IT. We were free to develop systems without interference from management that did not understand software development. I encountered management like this later in my career. We were trusted to get the job done, and we did. The loss of Bell Labs was and is a tragedy for the USA and the world.
Feedback theory was developed at Bell labs, it made amplifiers and linear control systems possible
This is the best UA-cam channel I've ever subscribed to. You rock!
Bell labs never truly went away . It just melded into other segments of business and specializiation . As technology improves more and specializing occurs and the need for a single monopoly is no longer needed ..
So this is why Abe Weismann wanted to work at bell labs so much I'm MMM. I admit I didn't know much about bell labs until watching that series. Now I can't wait to learn more.
wonderful Paul.
"click the *BELL* notification" nice pun!
Yay! It's Friday after work and there's a new Curious Droid!
In the late 80s, I remember going to Bell Labs seminar where they talked about their work with data transmission over copper. It was, it turned out to be DSL. It was very interesting as they talked how they were chasing fibre in the race for data transmission. The other great lab of the times was Xerox PARC.
Another quality video. May I make a request? I would love to see a video about the Voyager spacecraft. I think you would knock it out of the park!
Here you go, see these 2 vids, both on the " Guy Collins Animation " channel
" Voyager "
" Secret Video #3 - Voyager "
@@bobroberts2371 I've never turned down an opportunity to watch anything about Voyager and I'm not going to start now. I find myself watching The Farthest documentary from 2017 again and again.
Another great video. If I may mention "the history guy" here he has an excellent video on just the transistor. The end of the video has a lot of passion in it. He also has one on the trans Atlantic cable.
Thumbs up for The History Guy channel! Actually, a couple years ago he said that at that point in time anyway the most watched episode he ever did was a history of screws and screwdrivers.!
I graduated from Electrical Engineering in '83, then some Telecom work, then switched to the Software Engineering in 1986 and retired last year (2021). This video summarizes my whole life (Almost). Sigh...
Bell labs is pretty wild. Does make me ponder the changes recently that have led to the dearth of novel technology discoveries over the past 5 decades or so.
I've read about these guys before from a researcher, The Economic Laws of Research, which is a dry title for a great book. Though Bell Labs isn't the focus they did stick out to me (along with the Japanese government creating a scientific institution that had a 100% record of failure, and even tried to convince Japanese industry to stay away from cars and computer chips!)
What are those parenthesis doing? I need more to the story. Like you are going to explain your secondary thought. I feel like the birthday cake ran out and I was the last in line.
@@ipissed I suppose that, like me, you'll have to find the book. I bet it's at the library.😄😄😄😄 Edit: Mine doesn't, but it's available from Amazon.
Bell Labs was a groundbreaking place ... as long as it was funded by a Government-controlled monopoly. After that monopoly was broken up (during the Reagan era), it lost most of its brilliance.
@@rcknbob1 Or you can just Google it, how are you even on the internet without knowing how a search works? What are you 90? Time for a diaper change.
@@ipissed well I was going to write more, but the video was playing away and he mentioned stuff like "more Nobel Prizes" and a few other things so I assumed it'd be covered in the video. Another thing I thought was cool, though not unique to Bell Labs, was there's been a number of great scientists just given cart blanche to do whatever they liked, with the best science labs, and as free to share whatever they discovered, funded by the private sector! Their contracts actually said that! But it works out funding the best scientists with the best equipment cause of first mover advantage (one of the laws), and if you want to try and coast of second mover advantage (ie replication) you still need scientists at the top of their game where the breakthroughs are cause otherwise they won't understand it if it's too far ahead of their experience (you're not learning it from a book after all, and can't just set up a lab in a week and nail whatever breakthrough happened without experience, science ain't that easy).
So yeah I found that surprising, how often scientists have an open contract to research whatever they want with the money behind them, and business just trusting sooner or later something profitable will come from it. It's not what you'd expect.
This is an amazing documentary about an amazing topic. Well played and well executed. By far one of my favourite topics you've covered. I'd LOVE to see documentaries about some of the fathers of the semiconductor industry like William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brittain who invented the BJT, or the less famous (I wonder why) Mohammed Atalla who invented the first working MOSFET. Which I would argue might be more groundbreaking than the BJT. But that's a tough contest. I could go on and on with names. Whether from Bell Labs, Fairchild, RCA or any of their competitors. Actually, it's a bit obscure, but I'd LOVELOVELOVE to see a video on the history of the 5400/7400 series, 4000 series and LM series of chips. Although that's a bit specialist for this channel maybe. It would make a fine trilogy of videos to compliment this one.
My Dad worked at Western Electric as an installer and then Ohio Bell as an Engineer. I followed in my Dad's footsteps and worked at AT&T Network Systems "Western Electric " and was proud to do so. Even though I didn't work at Bell Labs I installed the equipment and tested the equipment they created for AT&T. I left there to work in other areas but always thought it was a HUGE mistake to let as I recall the big French Telecom company buy Bell Labs. All they wanted were the patients and it made the US vulnerable to being hacked by foreign nations. I also worked on the Treasury DTS project which installed a 5ESS in the Treasury Dept. so they could actually be their own telecom and provide their own dial tone. I worked on and installed the first digital ready Cell Site Network in the MD and VA area the AT&T Autoplex series II. All of which Bell Labs helped create!!
My great great grandpa bought stock in AT&T when it started up. In 1899 helped with the acquisition of Bell.
I worked for Lucent starting in 97. I do miss those days. Didn't last long after that though.
Did you hear about the guy who invented the knock knock joke?
He won the "no-bell" prize!
The first computer animated film clip was in fact made in Sweden in 1961. It was a 3D view of a planned highway, and was generated by the Swedish built computer BESK.
Realy bloody interesting. I remember playing with some very early Philips transistors, potted in clear resin and painted black, they could be used as a light sensitive switch.
Where I work, several older people with my current company worked for the affiliated companies that worked with Bell Lab. Multiple generations of one family worked in one of the factories that produced electrical, then electronic and finally microprocessor equipment. It was a sad story because with the turn of the century and the sending of industrial jobs to Mexico then Asia, several of those people were out of very good paying jobs that would have allowed them to retire within a decade, the closure required them to work for almost 20 years more.
Such jobs provided a pathway to high paying jobs with merely a high school diploma and a willingness to work, they provided the training needed. Hearing the history of this company really brought me down, hopefully such a institution and related industry can exist in this country once again.
it can happen again, but only with monopolies such as bell corporation.
I remember the days when DSL was too expensive for us and you couldn't talk on the phone and check emails at the same time. Now, we do it on the same device.
I take it you are talking about dial up internet? I was still using it until 2003 - that's just 19 years ago. Even my kids remember using dial-up.
As always, Paul produces among the finest content on all of UA-cam.
They perfected the time machine and all these ideas were seen in the future using the machine.
Thank you for the nice overview history of Bell Labs. Engineering at it's best.
Hi Paul. Thanks for the video. Hope you're doing well these days.
Paul, what a wonderful explanation of Bell Labs and a nice tour of their discoveries.
If I recall correctly, you had Bell Canada and Northern Electric which became Bell Northern Research. I was told once that the term NERD came from Northern Electric Research Division!
I often wonder what the world would look like if we would dedicate all the resources we now use for wars, fighting each other and preventing the other company from having success to research for all mankind.
I dreamed of working at Bell Labs since elementary school and I ended up getting two job offers in '81 and '82 to go to work for them but declined both of them. By then, "This is not your father's Bell Labs" was commonly heard. It was the break up that did them in. Sad.
I know a physics PhD that worked on electron microscopes at Bell Labs. He is in his 90s.His office was next to Shockley's. He went to a military symposium where Carl Sagan said that if a Hydrogen bomb was tested, it would make a nuke winter. The old guy challenged Carl on that.
Absolutely wonderful. Thank you SO much for what you do. --Fink
Thank you for this excellent history lesson! It’s amazing to me how a few people and their discoveries can make such a difference! Have you done a video about John Goodenough??!! Now there’s an amazing person!
ua-cam.com/video/kR8CESrigEg/v-deo.html
Not trying to shill, but I genuinely did not realize you had continued posting stuff because you are not on Odysee or Rumble. You're now one of the three channels I return to UA-cam for (the three I highly value that have not diversified).
Jansky's name lives on in a unit name of spectral flux density. It's used early in the movie Contact.
Sooner or later every organization became plagued by bureaucracy. Despite most of bureaucratic proposals sound reasonable, like order of shifting paper from one stack to another faster, in the end it killing everything.
I’ve got quite a few tools stamped with “Bell System” they came from family members who worked for Cincinnati Bell. I had no idea that Bell System was related to Bell Labs.
In the late 80s, I worked for a consortium of which Bell Labs was the main member. The people I met there would be working at all hours of the day and, as an undergraduate, I had no idea what they were talking about most of the time.
Fascinating video, with great use of contemporary photos and film. Terrific!
Ever heard about the Max-Planck Gesellschaft and its predecessor the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft? 15 Nobel Prize winners as KWG (until 1945) and 22 Nobel Prize winners as MPG (from 1945 until now). Seems to be another league.
I spent several years at Bell Labs in Naperville, Illinois (Indian Hill). I worked on such projects as the first touch screen (which was about about 10cm x 20 cm and had a DEC VAX 11/780 behind it).
I also worked on some very earliest voice recognition systems. I am English, and I threw a number of accents at it. The RP accent gave it some problems, but nothing too bad. Yorkshire was more difficult, as was Cockney. Glaswegian was impossible and I didn't even try Geordie.
Actually, I spent most of my time working on telephone switches.
This pertains to everyone! I am responsible for every single act and invention that’s not caused negative consequences to humanity!As far as you know this is true!
I live in Allentown PA near where one of the old bell labs building is, the place where the first transistors were produced....where the first cell phone computer chips were made.....I worked at a sign shop in the early 2000s during the transition to Lucent Technologies, and again to Agere Systems. Over a few years we rebranded all the interior and exterior signs, all the company trucks etc for the Allentown, Reading and Breingsville locations....the sheer ammount of wasted money and number of people who were "managers" was staggering, we redid some projects 3 or 4 times usually because a different "manager" had a bigger and better idea than the last guy... we even custom printed rolls of ribbon with the lucent logo for the Christmas trees in the lobby..... no wonder it all eventually closed, it had the feeling of an Enron level scam towards the end, I dont think a majority of the administration people we had contact with actually did any work there, everyday was always pizza parties, coffee breaks, lunches being catered, anytime you needed to talk to someone in charge they had left early, worked a half day, a vacation day........the main building is now an unemployment office / charter school and the production areas are now gone and became a minor league baseball stadium, Really sad ending to alot of good jobs just because of poor management.
A lot of people think, that Bell was the inventor of the telphone, but this isn't true. Bell was inspired by Johann Philipp Reis, who invented the telephone in 1861. Reis also "created" the word telephone.
One of the best, but then they’re all excellent. Thank you.
Incredible how these inventions and discoveries affected everyone in the world thereafter in some form or another