The End of an Era

I was very sad to read this, after all my years in IT:

After six Nobel Prizes, the invention of the transistor, laser and countless contributions to computer science and technology, it is the end of the road for Bell Labs' fundamental physics research lab.

Alcatel-Lucent, the parent company of Bell Labs, is pulling out of basic science, material physics and semiconductor research and will instead be focusing on more immediately marketable areas such as networking, high-speed electronics, wireless, nanotechnology and software.

The idea is to align the research work in the Lab closer to areas that the parent company is focusing on, says Peter Benedict, spokesperson for Bell Labs and Alcatel-Lucent Ventures.

"In the new innovation model, research needs to keep addressing the need of the mother company," he says.

That view is shortsighted and may drastically curtail the Labs' ability to come up with truly innovative discoveries, respond critics.

"Fundamental physics is absolutely crucial to computing," says Mike Lubell, director of public affairs for the American Physical Society. "Say in the case of integrated circuits, there were many, many small steps that occurred along the way resulting from decades worth of work in matters of physics."

I agree with the critics. The provision of labs and funding to do truly left-field research was one of the areas where I felt large corporates really could give something back to society in a way that smaller organisations and individuals couldn't.

Click here for a fairly complete list of achievements, but for me, these stand out:

* 1937 Clinton J. Davisson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating the wave nature of matter
* 1956 John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain and William Shockley received the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the first silicon based transistor

During its first year of operation, facsimile (fax) transmission, invented elsewhere, was first demonstrated publicly by the Bell Laboratories.
In 1926, the laboratories invented the first synchronous-sound motion picture system.
In 1927, a long-distance television transmission of images of Herbert Hoover from Washington to New York was successful.
During the 1920s, the one-time pad cipher was invented by Gilbert Vernam and Joseph Mauborgne at the laboratories; Bell's Claude Shannon later proved that it was unbreakable.
In 1931, a foundation for radio astronomy was laid by Karl Jansky during his work investigating the origins of static on long-distance shortwave communications. He discovered that radio waves were being emitted from the center of the galaxy.
In 1933, stereo signals were transmitted live from Philadelphia to Washington, DC.
In 1937, the vocoder, the first electronic speech synthesizer was invented and demonstrated by Homer Dudley.
In 1947, the transistor, probably the most important invention developed by Bell Laboratories, was invented by John Bardeen, Walter Houser Brattain, and William Bradford Shockley (all of whom subsequently won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956). As for the spectacular side of the business, in 1956 TAT-1, the first transatlantic telephone cable was laid between Scotland and Newfoundland, in a joint effort by AT&T, Bell Laboratories, and British and Canadian telephone companies.
A year later, in 1957, MUSIC, one of the first computer programs to play electronic music, was created by Max Mathews.
In 1958, the laser was first described, in a technical paper by Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes.
In 1960, Dawon Kahng and Martin Atalla invented the metal oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET); the MOSFET has achieved electronic hegemony and sustains the large-scale integrated circuits (LSIs) underlying today's information society.
In 1962, the electret microphone was invented by Gerhard M. Sessler and James Edward Maceo West.
In 1969, the UNIX operating system was created by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson.
In 1970 Dennis Ritchie developed the C programming language as a replacement for the interpretive B for use in writing the UNIX operating system (also developed at Bell Laboratories).
In 1976, Fiber optics systems were first tested in Georgia and in 1980, the first single-chip 32-bit microprocessor, the BELLMAC-32A was demonstrated;
In 1983, the C++ programming language was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension to the original C programming language also developed at Bell Laboratories.
In 1988, TAT-8 became the first fiber optic transatlantic cable.
In 1990, WaveLAN, the first wireless local area network (LAN) was developed at Bell Laboratories. Wireless network technology would not become popular until the late 1990s and was first demonstrated in 1995.
In 1991, the 56K modem technology was patented by Nuri Dağdeviren and his team.
In 1997, 50 years after inventing the original transistor, the smallest practical transistor (60 nanometers or a mere 182 atoms wide) was built.
In 1998, the first optical router was invented and the first combination of voice and data traffic on an Internet Protocol (IP) network was developed at the Laboratories.

That's a lorra, lorra fucking clever stuff right there: transistors, UNIX, C, C++, 56K modems, WiFi, transatlantic cables, VOIP ...

Think how much worse off we would all be if it hadn't been for all the geniuses at Bell Labs, and let's raise a glass in their memory ... and in the memory of a fantastic research organisation.