Bell Telephone Laboratories

Bell Telephone Laboratories, commonly called Bell Labs, is an American industrial research and development company, today owned by the Finnish technology company Nokia and headquartered in Murray Hill, New Jersey. It grew out of the Western Electric Engineering Department in the late nineteenth century and was reformed as Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1925 under the shared ownership of Western Electric and AT&T. Its researchers are credited with radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the charge-coupled device, information theory and the Unix operating system, and early work at its sites included radio transmissions in 1915 and tests of the first transoceanic radio telephone. It became a subsidiary of AT&T Technologies in 1984, passed to Lucent in 1996, to Alcatel-Lucent in 2006 and to Nokia in 2016.