

First transistor (Bell Labs)

Bell Telephone Laboratories

If the Volta Laboratory laid the groundwork for networks and Bletchley Park pioneered the concepts of computer hardware and software, then Bell Labs is the lynchpin that combined the two to create modern computing. In 1925, AT&T and Western Electric joined its research teams to form Bell Labs, housed in the Bell Laboratories Building in Manhattan, with the main focus of developing better telephone exchange switches for North America’s rapidly-burgeoning telephony network.

The researchers would discover so much more than telephone switches, though. Bell Lab invented the unbreakable one-time pad cipher, radio astronomy, stereophonic recordings, speech synthesis, photovoltaic cells — and most importantly, in 1947, the transistor. The most famous inventor at Bell Labs was probably Claude Shannon, one of the founding fathers of information theory (along with Alan Turing), and the inventor of modern, mathematical cryptography.

The history of Bell Labs doesn’t end there, however! In the 1960s, the MOSFET (transistor) was created; the underlying carrier of almost all wireless protocols and DSL, orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), was invented; and even the first charge-coupled device (CCD) was created at Bell Labs.

Finally, in 1969, Bell Labs constructed the Unix operating system (the forefather of Linux) — and in 1970, Labs gave birth to the compiled C programming language, which replaced the interpreted B language.

You’d think with inventions like the transistor and Unix under its belt that Bell Labs would walk away with the prize for “best laboratory,” but to discover the true father of modern computers we need to visit a couple more laboratories.

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