Bell Labs

Bell Labs, formally Nokia Bell Labs and earlier Bell Telephone Laboratories, is an American industrial research and development organization, today owned by the Finnish company Nokia, with headquarters in Murray Hill, New Jersey. It grew out of the Western Electric Engineering Department in New York City and was reformed as Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1925 under the shared ownership of Western Electric and the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Its researchers have been credited with the transistor, the laser, information theory, the Unix operating system and the programming languages B, C and C++, and eleven Nobel Prizes and five Turing Awards have been awarded for work done there. After the breakup of the Bell System it passed to AT&T Technologies in 1984, to Lucent Technologies in 1996 and, through Alcatel-Lucent, to Nokia in 2016. For computing history it is the workplace of many pioneers, among them Harry Nyquist.