Sad photo

[PhilO 0]

This reminds me of the remains of the 20th Century Motor Factory:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/m...llery_bell_labs

[RayK 0]

My dad befriended an engineer that worked at Bell Aerospace out of Niagara Falls, New York in 1980. This gentleman was extremely bright and enjoyed his work very much. My dad and this gentleman had two things in common, a love of horses and a respect for the armed forces (this gentleman was a prior Marine). We would go over to his house very often and when the subject changed from their other interest it would almost always end up on his field of engineering. Although he could not give us a full view of what they at Bell were working on he would give us a quick glimpse at what they were doing. Not only did I get excited listening to this person, but he would become enthralled in discussing the subject also.

I agree with Phil, it is sad to see something that once held such greatness and purpose to be disregarded.

[Carlos 0]

Oh no... this is really sad indeed. I don't want to live in a world where the only Physics research that happens is in academia. (plus I would like to get a job in industry after getting PhD in Physics).

I would be really surprised if this doesn't come back to bite them in the rear end, as semiconductor research is sure to constantly churn out innovation after innovation.

Makes me wonder though how many physics researchers' salaries could be covered by the amount of money wasted on income tax every year?

[Carlos 0]

Oh no... this is really sad indeed. I don't want to live in a world where the only Physics research that happens is in academia. (plus I would like to get a job in industry after getting PhD in Physics).

I would be really surprised if this doesn't come back to bite them in the rear end, as semiconductor research is sure to constantly churn out innovation after innovation.

Makes me wonder though how many physics researchers' salaries could be covered by the amount of money wasted on income tax every year?

It also makes me wonder how much of the money taken from them will be wasted on senseless projects like the Large Hadron Collider...

[ewv 0]

Bell Labs was also instrumental in the early development of radar to win WWII.

[ruveyn ben yosef 0]

Bell Labs was also instrumental in the early development of radar to win WWII.

The real triumph of Bell Labs was the development of the practical field effect transistor. That and the integrated circuit (first made by Texas Instrument Inc.) is what made electronics in the last half of the 20th century.

ruveyn

[ruveyn ben yosef 0]

This reminds me of the remains of the 20th Century Motor Factory:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/m...llery_bell_labs

I must admit this gave me a twinge. To see Bell Labs turned into a shopping mall is really a sad thing. The glory of Bell Labs was that it joined the cutting edge of theoretical physics with technological advances, the best possible combination of theoretical and applied physics.

Such an enterprise will arise elsewhere, but unfortunately, not in the United States of America. Perhaps China? I weep for the Republic.

ruveyn

[ewv 0]

Such an enterprise will arise elsewhere, but unfortunately, not in the United States of America. Perhaps China? I weep for the Republic.

Is there any such thing as private research in China?

[piz 0]

My first job in my field after college was with Western Electric, starting in 1983, for about six months before the breakup of AT&T became official. Then the company became AT&T Microelectronics, and I left in 1990 before it became Lucent. I worked with a good number of people in Bell Labs, though primarily support people as I was in IT and not directly involved in research or manufacturing. Still, it was easy to see that the engineers and scientists working there were very impressive.*

However, it seems those impressive people were not in management. My dad also worked for Western Electric/AT&T-ME for his entire career. Shortly after I started there, he said that AT&T was so big, "we could be out of business right now and not know it for 30 years." When I left, AT&T-ME was losing money at the rate of about a million dollars a day. Looking at what's become of AT&T and its subsidiaries and spinoffs since the breakup in 1984, I guess it turns out that my dad was rather prophetic.

_____

*OTOH, there were also an annoying number of prima donnas. They were good, but they used that to treat the people they worked with like crap - think Jim Taggart to Eddie Willers. Usually, though, they were merely good for a laugh.

[Carlos 0]

Does anyone know why the lab is closing?

A commenter on a blog made an intelligent observation about this:

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.

...all of which technologies are based on the fundamental research they themselves did in 30-50 years ago.

Was there a good reason to close the lab, or is this a very unfortunate case of corporate shortsightedness?

[ruveyn ben yosef 0]

Such an enterprise will arise elsewhere, but unfortunately, not in the United States of America. Perhaps China? I weep for the Republic.

Is there any such thing as private research in China?

Bell Tel was in part a creation of the government. It was a regulated monopoly with its rates guaranteed. It was fortunate that the company used some of the profits (generated by government force) to invest in real science. Whatever else Bell Tel was it was not free enterprise.

ruveyn

[Carlos 0]

Here is an article from 1996 saying the future of Bell labs could be grim because of the AT&T breakup:

http://www.vii.org/papers/amn3.htm

[Carlos 0]

Here is an article from 1996 saying the future of Bell labs could be grim because of the AT&T breakup:

http://www.vii.org/papers/amn3.htm

While the closing of Bell Labs may appear to some as an example of the failure of Capitalism, from reading this article I get the impression that Bell Labs would still be up and running if the old parent company had not been broken up because of anti-trust laws!

[Free Capitalist 0]

Wow that's a sad picture indeed. And what worries me the most is that short little comment in the article, that thus goes one of the last basic physics laboratories in the world. Who will pick up the slack? It's disconcerting.

[Abaco 0]

Shokley-related article... This was in yesterday's paper here. I think you guys may find it interesting.

[SteveH 0]

I had the pleasure of working with Larry S who left Bell Labs to form his own company in 1993. Larry worked on the first Cellular phone network in Chicago around 1986 (don't quote me on the date) and told some terrific stories about those early days. Interestingly, my first job was in Peoria, IL in the late 1980's. My position required that have a 'car phone' - which used that same cell phone network Larry had installed and optimized.

I joined the company he formed, TEC Cellular, in 1995. They had created a program for predicting the cell phone coverage of a group of towers. It was not Nobel-caliber work, but it had some innovations that no one could match for about 5 years. First, it ran on a desktop computer. RF Planning tools at the time relied on UNIX-based computers, limiting their use for day-to-day engineering. Second, the program had a little application that managed the combination of prediction grids. The competitor's tools forced users to run coverage prediction in a step-wise process (predict the path loss of each tower, then determine the signal level on the ground based on the antenna pattern, then combine a set of individual predictions to determine the actual coverage for a combination of towers). The app within Wizard managed this for the engineer so all he had to do was select the towers to be included and wait for the results. This is now standard in the industry, but at the time, it was like magic (hence the product name - Wizard)

The product is still on the market - Wizard RF Planning Tool.

I enjoyed Larry's work ethic. He also brought a practical sensibility to designing cellular networks and programming.