Often referred to as “The Idea Factory” or “The Crown Jewel,” Nokia Bell Labs has an unparalleled history of innovation output.
Researchers at Nokia Bell Labs have been behind or involved in nearly every critical technological milestone for the last century. We built the first lasers and transistors, discovered the origins of the universe and connected the world using communications satellites. We also invented implementable technologies like the solar battery and the first hearing aids, and made great theoretical leaps forward with the likes of Information Theory.
Every decade of existence has brought new ideas, new breakthroughs and new contributions to humanity. Here, we'll break down the essential ideas, people and concepts that shaped Bell Labs over time.
Bell Labs’ greatest innovations
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1920s–1930s: From telephones to telecommunications
It all started with the telephone. Nokia Bell Labs had its roots in the consolidation of several engineering departments within the American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) company and the Western Electric company, the manufacturing organization for the Bell System. As pieces of the national communications network were deployed, these departments were tasked with overcoming AT&T's day-to-day engineering challenges. Simply put, the system had to work, and the earliest Bell Labs innovations started from the need to provide clear, reliable telephone connections. In the early decades of the Labs, there were incredible achievements in understanding loudness, the intricate science of human speech and hearing, capacity and early standardization testing. As these ancillary discoveries began to bubble to the surface in the 1920s, attention increasingly turned to exploring fundamental areas of science likely to shape the future of the industry.
As a result, in 1925 about 4,000 scientists and engineers were assigned to a newly created Bell Telephone Laboratories, and were to be fully dedicated to such research. In 1934, AT&T’s Development and Research Department, which had been devoted to bridging the gap between laboratory research and the operations of communication systems, was integrated into Bell Laboratories. Growth continued as engineers from development departments were also folded into Bell Laboratories.
Research into the fundamentals of acoustics was a critical avenue of exploration during the 1920s. Its impacts would be far reaching, ranging from telephone call clarity to synthesized speech.
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1940s–1950s: Wartime projects and the birth of Information Theory
The United States’ entry into World War II forced a reorganization of research efforts at Bell Labs. Resources were devoted to projects around military electronics—radar, magnetics, acoustics and cryptography. During the post-war boom, Bell Labs continued to help the Bell System meet its promise of “universal telephone service” for everyone in the US. Research focused on broadband microwave transmission for voice, data and television, transoceanic telephone cables, and automated switching systems.
1960s–1970s: Satellites, CCDs and the Big Bang
The 1960s brought a rise of computing technologies. Bell Labs scientists extended their research in software and solid-state electronics, signaling a gradual move towards digital communication systems and the realm of satellite technology. The 1970s brought in a new era of microelectronics with Bell Labs designing new microchips that handle digital signal processing and computer memory functions. Research trials began on lightwave transmission systems that use photons instead of electrons.
1980s–1990s: Digital divestiture
Significant changes occurred in 1984 when AT&T Corporation divested itself of its local exchange companies and the Bell System, as it was then known, ceased to exist. As part of its divestiture agreement with the US government, AT&T Technologies assumed the business of Western Electric and Bell Laboratories. Concurrently, several thousand Bell Laboratories employees were split off to form Bellcore, the organization established to provide research and technical functions for the newly independent local exchange carriers.
But research didn't just stop.
In the 1980s, digital networks began to replace outdated analog systems. Bell Labs – which was then part of AT&T – was critical to this shift and looked to increase the capacity of lightwave systems through improved lasers and better techniques for routing and amplifying photonic signals. And then in the 1990s, there was, well, the internet. Research became focused on providing instant access to voice, data and video both through wired and wireless networks. High-speed digital networking became a must-have almost overnight.
In 1996, AT&T spun off most of Bell Laboratories and its equipment manufacturing business into Lucent Technologies (AT&T retained a smaller number of researchers to form AT&T Laboratories). As part of this transition, most development departments were integrated into the business divisions of Lucent Technologies, but the research functions remained within Bell Laboratories. In 2007, a year after the merger of Lucent Technologies and Alcatel (forming Alcatel-Lucent), Bell Laboratories and the former Research and Innovations division of Alcatel were combined into a single organization.
2000s-2010s: A new information age
As the new Millennium dawned, the world witnessed radical changes in the communications and information technology. The internet became the driving force of the era, upending the way we lived, learned, worked and interacted while radically transforming industries from retail to entertainment. Mobility untethering us, allowing this new internet age to blossom wherever a cellular signal was present.
As always, Bell Labs was on forefront of the new technologies that drove these seismic shifts. In 2001, Bell Labs laid the foundation for wireless broadband systems for decades to come with the invention of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology, which greatly boosted network capacity without increasing power or bandwidth requirements. In 2014, Bell Labs built on the foundation by conceptualizing massive MIMO, which became a key component of 5G networking.
In wireline, Bell Labs breathed new life into copper phones lines with the innovations of G.Fast and XG-Fast in 2013 and 2014 respectively. And in optical communications, it pushed the boundaries of optical capacity with the invention of probabilistic constellation shaping (PCS) in 2016. Bell Labs research extended beyond networking, leading to key inventions in medical imaging (optical coherence tomography), in IoT systems (World Wide Streams) and in data routing (the softrouter).
The first two decades of the 3rd millennium also ushered in another period of consolidation for Bell Labs. In 2007, a year after the merger of Lucent Technologies and Alcatel, Bell Laboratories and the former Research and Innovations division of Alcatel were combined into a single organization. And in 2016, Nokia acquired Alcatel -Lucent, merging Bell Labs and Nokia’s research arm FutureWorks in the process.
Nokia Bell Labs today
As the 2020s unfold, Nokia Bell Labs finds itself in the familiar position of advancing the state of the art of communications technologies while also broadening its reach into exciting fields of research. This ultimately led to Bell Labs streamlining its structure, forming two sister organizations under a single umbrella: Bell Labs Core Research and Bell Labs Solutions Research.
In Bell Labs Core Research, wireless experts are investigating the key technologies that will constitute 6G in the next decade. Meanwhile optical researchers are pursuing the next phase in the evolution of optical systems as we rapidly approach the fundamental limits in single-fiber communications.
Bell Labs Solutions Research is exploring the technologies and applications that will fuse the digital and physical worlds through new advancements in AI, industrial automation, software systems, sensing and quantum computing.
And just as Bell Labs revolutionized communications on Earth for the last 100 years, it now has its sights set beyond our planet. NASA has selected Nokia to build the first cellular network on the Moon, opening up even greater possibilities for the future.