bell labs

Scientists Managed to Make Broadband Speeds 4.5 Million Times Faster

UK researchers created a lightning-fast way to transmit data in previously untouched wavelengths, breaking a world record.

Stanford President to Step Down Over Allegations He Manipulated Mountains of Science

A college newspaper and freshman journalist uncovered allegations Prez Marc Tessier-Lavigne manipulated data in journals like Science and Nature.

50 Years Ago, the First Cell Phone Call Was Made on This DynaTAC Dinosaur

Dr. Martin Cooper of Motorola decided to make history by trolling his rival, Joel Engel of AT&T, with a phone call.

What We Will Never Know

Science and technology have evolved, but some things may always be beyond human knowledge.

Rare AT&T Videophones From the 1970s Go Up for Auction This Month

Two videophones from the early 1970s that were produced by AT&T/Bell Labs and the now-defunct Western Electric will go up for auction this month. And while they might not seem very special to kids of the 21st century, these videophones were the most futuristic things around for people who grew up watching movies like 2001:…

The History of Wireless Everything

Halfway between Brooklyn and Montauk, a steel cupola propped up on wooden legs once looked out over the Long Island Sound and beyond the horizon. Built in the first years of the 20th century, Wardenclyffe Tower served as the centerpiece of a real-life mad scientist’s laboratory. Lever pulling, lightning bolts, maniacal laughter—this is where that…

2 Computer Science Profs + 1 Room + 30 Minutes of Conversation = Geek Gold

Professor Brian Kernighan is computing heavyweight: he worked at Bell Labs, helped develop Unix and was one of two authors of the C programming language. Here, he talks with one of the UK’s foremost computer science professors, Professor David Brailsford. Time to geek out. Yes, it’s 30 minutes long. Yes, Brailsford isn’t quite a chat…

Beautiful Video Explains How Light’s Been Harnessed For Communication

Whether you have fiber supplying Internet access to your home or not, you use optical systems to send and receive information every single day. This stunning video takes a look at the scientists and engineers that have enabled light to be used for human communication. Ricocheting between Oxford, Stuutgart, Paris and New Jersey, with interviews…

How It Felt to Work at Bell Labs in the 60s

Just 45 miles outside New York City in Murray Hill, New Jersey sits Bell Labs: the birth place of lasers, transistors, cellphones and many other modern technologies. In this video, Professor Brian Kernighan remembers what it was like to work there. Kernighan joined the labs in the late 60s, at a time when computer science…

The Price For A Videophone in 1955 Was $44,000 Adjusted for Inflation

We’ve been imagining a future of ubiquitous videophones for over a century. And today it’s considered no big deal that we’re able to make video calls with devices that we carry around in our pockets. But it took a while to get to that point. One reason? It was incredibly expensive. Above we have a…

What It Was Like to Work at the Birthplace of Cellphones and Lasers

A semi-rural New Jersey community about 45 miles outside of New York City seems like an unlikely home for the most important breakthroughs in telecommunications of the 20th century. But that’s exactly what happened at Bell Labs’ Holmdel facility in the 1960s. https://gizmodo.com/inside-bell-labs-where-the-future-is-being-built-1561723432 Holmdel was built by the legendary Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen in 1962—inside,…

Bell Labs Could Send Sign Language Over The Phone – In 1979

Back in the good ‘ole days before the internet and Yo and Meerkat and Snapchat, we had one way to talk to people in faraway lands: the telephone. But a microphone and speaker aren’t much use if you’re hearing impaired. In 1979, a Bell Labs research project devised a way of communicating with sign language,…

How Bell Labs Is Reinventing the Future All Over Again

In 1964, a pair of Bell Labs researchers in New Jersey pointed the world’s largest radio telescope to the skies and unwittingly stumbled upon one of the greatest discoveries of the 20th Century: cosmic background radiation. We talked with the legendary physicist behind that breakthrough to find out more—and with the president of Bell Labs…

Inside Bell Labs, Where the Future is Being Built

Inside Bell Labs almost 70 years ago, the invention that defined the 20th century was born: The transistor. On a recent sunny April day here in the present, Gizmodo had the rare opportunity to tour the historic and cutting edge facilities at Bell Labs—and get a preview of the inventions that could change this century.…

Martin Luther King’s 1956 tips for riding integrated buses, examining how design has helped an Alabama county, building instant cities in Accra and instant skyscrapers in Mumbai, and how two New York architects are tearing down the work of their former friends. It’s all this week in our favorite Urban Reads. “Do not deliberately sit…

The Birthplace of the Cellphone Is Being Turned Into a Mall

Think Apple’s forthcoming Cupertino headquarters is the first corporate space ship to touch down in America? Not so: In 1962 the legendary R&D hub, Bell Labs, opened a glittering, 500-acre headquarters in semi-rural New Jersey. Today, it’s the focus of an ambitious reuse scheme that could turn it into a commercial hub, complete with a…

A Brief History of the Videophone That Almost Was

The videophone is one of those technologies that more or less snuck up on us. Promises that one day you’d not only be able to hear but see a person through your telephone are nearly as old as the telephone itself. The videophone spent nearly a century as every bit as much a “technology of…

Cameras in the Future Might Not Need Lenses

Every camera you’ve ever used in your life has a lens that focuses incoming photons on to a light-sensitive surface. But in the future, cameras might not need lenses at all, and this Bell Labs prototype illustrates how this could be done for cheap. Technology Review reports the Bell Labs concept, which relies on a…

The Cellphone Turns 40 Today

Forty years ago today, senior Motorola engineer Marty Cooper made one very important phone call. From midtown Manhattan, Marty called Joel Engel, then the head of rival research department Bell Labs. When Joel picked up, Marty uttered something rather unexpected: “Joel, this is Marty. I’m calling you from a cellphone, a real handheld portable cellphone.”…

Windows 8’s Great Great Grandfather Was a Real Jerq

Why Xerox never chose to capitalize on the groundbreaking GUI developments made at its Palo Alto Research Center may never fully be understood. But other companies certainly saw the value, and in addition to Microsoft and Apple creating their own graphical computer interfaces, Bell Labs created the Blit in 1982 which was originally called the…