Bell Labs Creations
Bell Labs Creations
Television and television broadcasting technologies were first created in Bell Labs during the 1920's, domestic TV's didn't come about until the 50's from the UK.
In 1927 Bell Labs transmitted a 128 line TV signal of Herbert Hoover from Washington to New York.
In 1937 Bell Labs created the Vocoder and Voder (shown above). They were the first human speech synthesis devices.
In the 1930's Bell Labs created the foundations of Radio Astronomy by discovering that radio waves were being transmitted from the center of the galaxy.
In 1941 Bell Labs created the first Photovoltaic Cell AKA, solar panel. At the same time they were creating speech scrambling devices for the Navy during WW2.
In 1947, Bell Labs created the most influential creation of the 20th century, the transistor. What makes something 'digital' is it containing transistors. A modern computer has over
4 billion transistors in them and there is currently a competition between corporations to create the physically smallest transistor.
The invention of the Transistor marked the beginning of the computer revolution that has so drastically changed our society today.
Proir to Transistors, computers used large, hot, and inneffecient vacuum tubes for their binary logic.
In 1952, in a cooperative effort between, Bell Labs and British and Canadian Telephone companies, the first Trans-Atlantic Telephone cable was laid to allow the continents to communicate.
In December of 1960, Bell Labs operated the first continuous-light laser, and that year also discovered cosmic background radiation leftover from the big-bang.
Between these two discoveries, Bell Labs had 4 researchers win the Nobel Prize in physics in the next 8 years.
In 1969, Ken Thompsonn and Dennis Ritchie created the UNIX operating sytem and in 1972, Ritchie created the C programming language.
The C programming language in conjunction withe the UNIX operating system (and its derivatives) have been priceless in the development of computer science.
Today, there are countless derivatives of UNIX, with the original being long depricated. The most well known UNIX-like operating system today would be MacOS.
The server that this website's running on is using a UNIX-like operating system called Ubuntu.
After the fractioning of Bell Labs, innovation was severely hindered. The last main-stream and prolific development from Bell Labs was in 1991 with the 56k modem.
The 56k modem single-handedly propelled the world into being able to provide the internet to everyone.