3 ms·

For anyone interested in this in general, googling "history of Bell Labs" has a number of fascinating pages to read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs ht

For anyone interested in this in general, googling "history of Bell Labs" has a number of fascinating pages to read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs https://www.wired.com/2014/09/coupland-bell-labs/ https://www.wired.com/2014/09/coupland-bell-labs/ I was following the re-use of this building into modern smaller office spaces shortly before covid19 hit the commercial real estate market. I hope they're doing OK. Spaces were getting leased and companies were moving in and then a vast number of things shifted to remote work/full work-from home, and I'm not sure to what extent they've really recovered. I have a theory that the original placement of Bell Labs, back in the day, was chosen by the higher ranking executives to be conveniently close to their large homes in some leafy suburbs out in that particular part of NJ. It's not really what you could call a hotbed of tech innovation and local commute-distance talent pool nowadays, compared to locating a company in some retrofitted space in NYC.

jmartrican 4y ago
Many of the developers that work in the city live near this area. A lot of software developers live in Monmouth and Middlesex counties in NJ.
- roflyear 4y ago
  Correct. Cheaper and you can have a yard.
TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
> chosen by the higher ranking executives to be conveniently close to their large homes in some leafy suburbs out in that particular part of NJ Edison, NJ is not far away and was definitely a hotbed of tech in the late 1800s and early 1900s (Thomas Edison).
- evanelias 4y ago
  Minor correction: although Edison had his first lab in Menlo Park (today's Edison NJ) for ten years, he later moved to a larger campus in West Orange NJ in order to be closer to NYC, and spent four decades there. They're about 25 miles apart, in different counties. But yes, lots of tech history throughout NJ!
  - graderjs 4y ago
    Sorry, probably a stupid question but isn't Menlo Park in Cali...where FB is??
    - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
      There’s more than one Menlo Park in the US. We’re talking about the one in New Jersey: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menlo_Park,_New_Jersey https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menlo_Park,_New_Jersey In 1876, Thomas Edison set up his home and research laboratory in Menlo Park, which at the time was the site of an unsuccessful real estate development named after the town of Menlo Park, California.[4] While there, he earned the nickname "the Wizard of Menlo Park".[5] The Menlo Park lab was significant in that it was one of the first laboratories to pursue practical, commercial applications of research.[6] It was in his Menlo Park laboratory that Thomas Edison invented the phonograph and developed a commercially viable incandescent light bulb filament. Christie Street in Menlo Park was one of the first streets in the world to use electric lights for illumination.
dnamlin 4y ago
Bell Labs was active in this area going all the way back to the 1930s, where its relative isolation was ideal for radio astronomy -- in fact, one can reasonably claim Holmdel as the origin of that field. Also in this era, once you got a job at Bell Labs, then you were set for life...not getting filthy rich necessarily, but you could fully expect to spend your entire career with the one prestigious, stable, monopoly-supported employer, before retiring with a nice pension. As a result, the rank-and-file talent were happy to move and settle down in the towns surrounding these giant suburban/exurban campuses, which also had excellent public schools thanks to the affluent tax base and high concentration of engineer/scientist parents.
- walrus01 4y ago
  > where its relative isolation was ideal for radio astronomy -- in fact, one can reasonably claim Holmdel as the origin of that field. Fun things like the Holmdel Horn Antenna too: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=holmdel+horn+antenna https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=holmdel+h... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holmdel_Horn_Antenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holmdel_Horn_Antenna Used for some of the earliest attempts at transatlantic C-band communications via geostationary satellites. In the history of geostationary telecom satellite stuff the teleports near Holmdel are fairly important. One of the other nearby noteworthy facilities is the giant teleport on Staten Island. Now all of the antennas and facilities have been removed and it's a vacant lot. https://www.nytimes.com/1982/10/17/nyregion/staten-island-teleport-is-seen-as-a-link-to-future.html https://www.nytimes.com/1982/10/17/nyregion/staten-island-te...
- walrus01 4y ago
  > which also had excellent public schools thanks to the affluent tax base and high concentration of engineer/scientist parents. Sounds a bit like the lifestyle from the late 1940s onwards for those in professional/scientific/research/engineering careers living in Los Alamos, NM or Oak Ridge, TN. Or the workforce for things like the Lincoln Lab, Brookhaven National Lab, etc.
- chiefalchemist 4y ago
  Aside from solid pay, you also got to work with some very smart people, of diverse nationalities. My father worked for Western Electric (at the location outside of Princeton, NJ). WE's role was to take the BLs' R&D and make it market-worthy. While he didn't have an advanced degree, many of peers did, and his bosses PhDs. His co-workers were Asian, SE Asian, and Mexican. This was long before diversity was all the rage. When I was a kid - early 70s give or take - they'd have an annual open house for the families. I still remember being introduced to computers. I remember seeing fiber and hearing "this is the future" when all there was was copper twisted pair. It didn't realize it then but I was a lucky SOB :)
stn8188 4y ago
I think the NJ location was discussed in the book "The Idea Factory" (or at least the Murray Hill location) - hard to imagine it as farmland with tons of open space compared to the NYC office! These days there are still a good number of legacy engineering companies in defense and telecom in the North Jersey area. There's a neat small-world feel to some of these places with all the people who scattered around after Lucent.
- notacop31337 4y ago
  I believe so as well given the structure of the offices, they clearly described that the layout was designed in a way to allow for maximum quiet and concentration whilst enabling collaboration via the shared walk ways and common areas. It's a shame to see they've turned it into a glass walled hellscape.
  - graderjs 4y ago
    I wish more office buildings were build like this. Beautiful! I do like how the glass looks, but it could be distracting. If it was electrically frosting glass that was sound proof that might be the best of both worlds.
  - stn8188 4y ago
    Oh you're right, that does jog my memory of the book. To be fair, I believe the Murray Hill Labs (now Nokia Bell Labs) has this kind of layout, though I've only worked in one of the electronics lab areas and didn't really ever go to any offices.
cobertos 4y ago
Is there a modern day version of what Bell Labs was at its peak?
- dnamlin 4y ago
  Not really, to the extent that Bell Labs undertook true basic research for its own sake, without much concern for any short/medium-term commercial potential. (No need to rock the boat commercially, while the parent corporation had a regulated monopoly to milk!) Maybe some case could be made for Alphabet's "Other Bets" collectively, but...the Bell Labs column has nine Nobel Prizes in it...
  - graderjs 4y ago
    Yes, that's one disadvantage of anti-trust...we miss this second-order effect :.(
- grubbs 4y ago
  I don't think so. I'm definitely oversimplifying here...but at one point they literally employed 1000+ PhDs to just figure things out.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Perhaps you could make a case that the DOE-era national labs, collectively, have a similar basic science mission, and their rise coincides with AT&T's decline.
- uni_rule 4y ago
  Not quite, research for its own sake in that vein was attributed to the collapse of RCA, so most companies not in such a position didn't quite pursue it. I would then only make gestures towards federal labs like DARPA, Los Alamos, NASA campuses, etc.
evanelias 4y ago
> compared to locating a company in some retrofitted space in NYC. Speaking of that, Bell Labs' old NYC HQ [1] is an impressive set of buildings too! It was converted to the Westbeth artist live/work community in the late 60s [2], and they typically offer tours to the public during Open House New York weekend each year [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Laboratories_Building_(Manhattan) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Laboratories_Building_(Ma... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westbeth_Artists_Community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westbeth_Artists_Community [3] https://ohny.org/place/westbeth-artist-housing/ https://ohny.org/place/westbeth-artist-housing/
- graderjs 4y ago
  I love how these old, great pieces of architecture get a second life refurbished into some work of noble note. It's like a whale fall and all the little next-gen sea creatures feed on the giant carcass (house) of the old giant.

jmartrican 4y ago

Many of the developers that work in the city live near this area. A lot of software developers live in Monmouth and Middlesex counties in NJ.

roflyear 4y ago
Correct. Cheaper and you can have a yard.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago

> chosen by the higher ranking executives to be conveniently close to their large homes in some leafy suburbs out in that particular part of NJ Edison, NJ is not far away and was definitely a hotbed of tech in the late 1800s and early 1900s (Thomas Edison).

evanelias 4y ago
Minor correction: although Edison had his first lab in Menlo Park (today's Edison NJ) for ten years, he later moved to a larger campus in West Orange NJ in order to be closer to NYC, and spent four decades there. They're about 25 miles apart, in different counties. But yes, lots of tech history throughout NJ!
- graderjs 4y ago
  Sorry, probably a stupid question but isn't Menlo Park in Cali...where FB is??
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    There’s more than one Menlo Park in the US. We’re talking about the one in New Jersey: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menlo_Park,_New_Jersey https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menlo_Park,_New_Jersey In 1876, Thomas Edison set up his home and research laboratory in Menlo Park, which at the time was the site of an unsuccessful real estate development named after the town of Menlo Park, California.[4] While there, he earned the nickname "the Wizard of Menlo Park".[5] The Menlo Park lab was significant in that it was one of the first laboratories to pursue practical, commercial applications of research.[6] It was in his Menlo Park laboratory that Thomas Edison invented the phonograph and developed a commercially viable incandescent light bulb filament. Christie Street in Menlo Park was one of the first streets in the world to use electric lights for illumination.

dnamlin 4y ago

Bell Labs was active in this area going all the way back to the 1930s, where its relative isolation was ideal for radio astronomy -- in fact, one can reasonably claim Holmdel as the origin of that field. Also in this era, once you got a job at Bell Labs, then you were set for life...not getting filthy rich necessarily, but you could fully expect to spend your entire career with the one prestigious, stable, monopoly-supported employer, before retiring with a nice pension. As a result, the rank-and-file talent were happy to move and settle down in the towns surrounding these giant suburban/exurban campuses, which also had excellent public schools thanks to the affluent tax base and high concentration of engineer/scientist parents.

walrus01 4y ago
> where its relative isolation was ideal for radio astronomy -- in fact, one can reasonably claim Holmdel as the origin of that field. Fun things like the Holmdel Horn Antenna too: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=holmdel+horn+antenna https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=holmdel+h... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holmdel_Horn_Antenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holmdel_Horn_Antenna Used for some of the earliest attempts at transatlantic C-band communications via geostationary satellites. In the history of geostationary telecom satellite stuff the teleports near Holmdel are fairly important. One of the other nearby noteworthy facilities is the giant teleport on Staten Island. Now all of the antennas and facilities have been removed and it's a vacant lot. https://www.nytimes.com/1982/10/17/nyregion/staten-island-teleport-is-seen-as-a-link-to-future.html https://www.nytimes.com/1982/10/17/nyregion/staten-island-te...
walrus01 4y ago
> which also had excellent public schools thanks to the affluent tax base and high concentration of engineer/scientist parents. Sounds a bit like the lifestyle from the late 1940s onwards for those in professional/scientific/research/engineering careers living in Los Alamos, NM or Oak Ridge, TN. Or the workforce for things like the Lincoln Lab, Brookhaven National Lab, etc.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
Aside from solid pay, you also got to work with some very smart people, of diverse nationalities. My father worked for Western Electric (at the location outside of Princeton, NJ). WE's role was to take the BLs' R&D and make it market-worthy. While he didn't have an advanced degree, many of peers did, and his bosses PhDs. His co-workers were Asian, SE Asian, and Mexican. This was long before diversity was all the rage. When I was a kid - early 70s give or take - they'd have an annual open house for the families. I still remember being introduced to computers. I remember seeing fiber and hearing "this is the future" when all there was was copper twisted pair. It didn't realize it then but I was a lucky SOB :)

stn8188 4y ago

I think the NJ location was discussed in the book "The Idea Factory" (or at least the Murray Hill location) - hard to imagine it as farmland with tons of open space compared to the NYC office! These days there are still a good number of legacy engineering companies in defense and telecom in the North Jersey area. There's a neat small-world feel to some of these places with all the people who scattered around after Lucent.

notacop31337 4y ago
I believe so as well given the structure of the offices, they clearly described that the layout was designed in a way to allow for maximum quiet and concentration whilst enabling collaboration via the shared walk ways and common areas. It's a shame to see they've turned it into a glass walled hellscape.
- graderjs 4y ago
  I wish more office buildings were build like this. Beautiful! I do like how the glass looks, but it could be distracting. If it was electrically frosting glass that was sound proof that might be the best of both worlds.
- stn8188 4y ago
  Oh you're right, that does jog my memory of the book. To be fair, I believe the Murray Hill Labs (now Nokia Bell Labs) has this kind of layout, though I've only worked in one of the electronics lab areas and didn't really ever go to any offices.

cobertos 4y ago

Is there a modern day version of what Bell Labs was at its peak?

dnamlin 4y ago
Not really, to the extent that Bell Labs undertook true basic research for its own sake, without much concern for any short/medium-term commercial potential. (No need to rock the boat commercially, while the parent corporation had a regulated monopoly to milk!) Maybe some case could be made for Alphabet's "Other Bets" collectively, but...the Bell Labs column has nine Nobel Prizes in it...
- graderjs 4y ago
  Yes, that's one disadvantage of anti-trust...we miss this second-order effect :.(
grubbs 4y ago
I don't think so. I'm definitely oversimplifying here...but at one point they literally employed 1000+ PhDs to just figure things out.
jeffbee 4y ago
Perhaps you could make a case that the DOE-era national labs, collectively, have a similar basic science mission, and their rise coincides with AT&T's decline.
uni_rule 4y ago
Not quite, research for its own sake in that vein was attributed to the collapse of RCA, so most companies not in such a position didn't quite pursue it. I would then only make gestures towards federal labs like DARPA, Los Alamos, NASA campuses, etc.

evanelias 4y ago

> compared to locating a company in some retrofitted space in NYC. Speaking of that, Bell Labs' old NYC HQ [1] is an impressive set of buildings too! It was converted to the Westbeth artist live/work community in the late 60s [2], and they typically offer tours to the public during Open House New York weekend each year [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Laboratories_Building_(Manhattan) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Laboratories_Building_(Ma... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westbeth_Artists_Community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westbeth_Artists_Community [3] https://ohny.org/place/westbeth-artist-housing/ https://ohny.org/place/westbeth-artist-housing/

graderjs 4y ago
I love how these old, great pieces of architecture get a second life refurbished into some work of noble note. It's like a whale fall and all the little next-gen sea creatures feed on the giant carcass (house) of the old giant.