Bell Labs

Nokia Bell Labs, commonly called Bell Labs, is an American industrial research and development company owned by the Finnish technology company Nokia, with headquarters in Murray Hill, New Jersey. It began in the late nineteenth century as 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 are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device, information theory and the Unix operating system, 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, Lucent Technologies and Alcatel-Lucent, and Nokia acquired it in 2016. It appears in this atlas because the engineer Mohamed M. Atalla began his career there.