Bell Labs: Imagination Inc.

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With 22,500 people on its payroll (3,000 of them Ph.D.s), 19,000 patents and an annual budget of $1.6 billion, Bell Laboratories is a mighty engine of research and development. It is possibly the finest, and certainly the largest, private operation of its kind anywhere.

The think tank of the Bell System, Bell Labs is also a gigantic down-to-earth workshop, where imagination is turned into practical products and services. To one degree or another, Bell Labs has been responsible for most of the innovations in voice communications in this century. That is why AT&T was so anxious to keep this corporate crown jewel, when the Government forced the telephone company to spin off some of its operations.

Bell officials say that the wonders coming out of its labs should increase now that Washington is freeing it to go into other fields. They claim that massive regulation of the utility has slowed development of a number of Bell Labs products and kept others off the market. Typical is the example of an advanced mobile telephone. The company came up with the technology for the product in the 1960s, but the Federal Communications Commission gave it final clearance to sell the service only last month. Says Bell Labs Executive Vice President Solomon J. Buchsbaum: "The agreement should unleash us."

Even without being unleashed, Bell Labs has built up an impressive record of technological innovation in the nearly 60 years since it was formed from the engineering department of Western Electric, with a research budget of $12.6 million There are now 18 labs in the Bell Labs organization, most of them clustered around its headquarters in Murray Hill, N.J.,with others in Colorado, Georgia, Ohio, Illinois and Massachusetts.

In 1947, Bell Labs gave the world the transistor, for which three of its scientists won the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics. It also developed the laser, high-fidelity phonograph records, stereo and sound movies. In 1927, Bell Labs demonstrated the first long-distance, live, television transmission over wires. One of its early computers helped direct antiaircraft fire during World War II and knocked down 76% of Nazi buzz bombs in areas it defended in England. Bell scientists pioneered work in semiconductors, integrated circuits and microchips, all necessary parts of the computer explosion. They have now won a total of seven Nobel Prizes in physics.

For telephone service, Bell Labs invented a plethora of devices and systems. Among themf Direct Distance Dialing (1951), Wide Area Telephone Service (WATS lines, 1961) Touch-Tone (1964) and the 911 emergency communications system (1968).

Many developments out of the labs are not so obvious to telephone users. In 1959, engineers came up with Time Assignment Speech Interpolation (TASI), a high-speed switching and transmission technique that seeks out natural pauses and listening time during telephone calls and fits other conversations into those moments of silence, greatly increasing the carrying capacity of communications channels.