This year, Bell Labs celebrates its one-hundredth birthday. In a centennial celebration held last week at the Murray Hill, N.J., campus, the lab’s impressive technological history was celebrated with talks, panels, demos, and over a half dozen gracefully aging Nobel laureates.
During its impressive 100-year tenure, Bell Labs scientists invented the transistor; laid down the theoretical grounding for the digital age; discovered radio astronomy, which led to the first evidence for the big bang theory; contributed to the invention of the laser; developed the Unix operating system; invented the charge-coupled device (CCD) camera; and many more scientific and technological contributions that have earned Bell Labs 10 Nobel prizes and five Turing awards.
“I normally tell people this is the ‘Bell Labs invented everything’ tour,” said Nokia Bell Labs archivist Ed Eckert as he led a tour through the lab’s history exhibit.
The lab is smaller than it once was. The main campus in Murray Hill, N.J., seems like a bit of a ghost town, with empty cubicles and offices lining the halls. Now it’s planning a move to a smaller facility in New Brunswick, N.J., sometime in 2027. In its heyday, Bell Labs boasted around 6,000 workers at the Murray Hill location. Although that number has now dwindled to about 1,000, more work at other locations around the world
The Many Accomplishments of Bell Labs
Despite its somewhat diminished size, Bell Labs, now owned by Nokia, is alive and kicking.
“As Nokia Bell Labs, we have a dual mission,” says Bell Labs president Peter Vetter. “On the one hand, we need to support the longevity of the core business. That is networks, mobile networks, optical networks, the networking at large, security, device research, ASICs, optical components that support that network system. And then we also have the second part of the mission, which is to help the company grow into new areas.”
Some of the new areas for growth were represented in live demonstrations at the centennial.
A team at Bell Labs is working on establishing the first cellular network on the moon. In February, Intuitive Machines sent up its second lunar mission, Athena, with Bell Labs’ technology on board. The team fit two full cellular networks into a briefcase-size box, the most compact networking system ever made. This cell network was self-deploying: Nobody on Earth needs to tell it what to do. The lunar lander tipped on its side upon landing and quickly went offline due to lack of solar power, but Bell Labs’ networking module had enough time to power up and transmit data back to Earth.
Another Bell Labs group is focused on monitoring the world’s vast network of undersea fiber-optic cables. Undersea cables are subject to interruptions, whether it be from adversarial sabotage, undersea weather events like earthquakes or tsunamis, or fishing nets and ship anchors. The team wants to turn these cables into a sensor network, capable of monitoring the environment around a cable for possible damage. The team has developed a real-time technique for monitoring mild changes in cable length that’s so sensitive the lab-based demo was able to pick up tiny vibrations from the presenter’s speaking voice. This technique can pin changes down to a 10-kilometer interval of cable, greatly simplifying the search for affected regions.
Nokia is taking the path less traveled when it comes to quantum computing, pursuing so-called topological quantum bits. These qubits, if made, would be much more robust to noise than other approaches, and are more readily amenable to scaling. However, building even a single qubit of this kind has been elusive. Nokia Bell Labs’ Robert Willett has been at it since his graduate work in 1988, and the team expects to demonstrate the first NOT gate with this architecture later this year.
Beam-steering antennas for point-to-point fixed wireless are normally made on printed circuit boards. But as the world moves to higher frequencies, toward 6G, conventional printed circuit-board materials are no longer cutting it—the signal loss makes them economically unviable. That’s why a team at Nokia Bell Labs has developed a way to print circuit boards on glass instead. The result is a small glass chip that has 64 integrated circuits on one side and the antenna array on the other. A 100-gigahertz link using the tech was deployed at the Paris Olympics in 2024, and a commercial product is on the road map for 2027.
Mining, particularly autonomous mining—which avoids putting humans in harm’s way—relies heavily on networking. That’s why Nokia has entered the mining business, developing smart digital-twin technology that models the mine and the autonomous trucks that work on it. The company’s robo-truck system features two cellular modems, three Wi-Fi cards, and 12 Ethernet ports. The system collects different types of sensor data and correlates them on a virtual map of the mine (the digital twin). Then it uses AI to suggest necessary maintenance and to optimize scheduling.
The lab is also dipping into AI. One team is working on integrating large language models with robots for industrial applications. These robots have access to a digital-twin model of the space they are in and have a semantic representation of certain objects in their surroundings. In a demo, a robot was verbally asked to identify missing boxes in a rack. The robot successfully pointed out which box wasn’t found in its intended place, and when prompted, it traveled to the storage area and identified the replacement. The key is to build robots that can “reason about the physical world,” says Matthew Andrews, a researcher in the AI lab. A test system will be deployed in a warehouse in the United Arab Emirates in the next six months.
Despite impressive scientific demonstrations, there was an air of apprehension about the event. In a panel discussion about the future of innovation, Princeton engineering dean Andrea Goldsmith said, “I’ve never been more worried about the innovation ecosystem in the U.S.” Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in a keynote that “the current administration seems to be trying to destroy university R&D.” Nevertheless, Schmidt and others expressed optimism about the future of innovation at Bell Labs and the United States more generally. “We will win, because we are right, and R&D is the foundation of economic growth,” he said.
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