Bell Labs

Nokia Bell Labs

Logo since 2023
Bell Labs' headquarters in Murray Hill, New Jersey in 2012
Company type	Subsidiary
Industry	Telecommunication, information technology, material science
Founded	January 1925; 100 years ago (1925-01) (as Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc.)
Headquarters	Murray Hill, New Jersey, U.S.
Parent	AT&T and Western Electric (1925–1996)[a] Lucent Technologies (1996–2006) Alcatel-Lucent (2006–2016) Nokia (2016–present)
Subsidiaries	Nokia Shanghai Bell
Website	bell-labs.com

Nokia Bell Labs,^[b] commonly referred to as Bell Labs, is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the company operates several laboratories in the United States and around the world.

As a former subsidiary of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), Bell Labs and its researchers have been credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages B, C, C++, S, SNOBOL, AWK, AMPL, and others, throughout the 20th century. Eleven Nobel Prizes and five Turing Awards have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.^[1]

Bell Labs had its origin in the complex corporate organization of the Bell System telephone conglomerate. The laboratory began operating in the late 19th century as the Western Electric Engineering Department, located at 463 West Street in New York City. After years of advancing telecommunication innovations, the department was reformed into Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1925 and placed under the shared ownership of Western Electric and the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. In the 1960s, laboratory and company headquarters were moved to Murray Hill, New Jersey. Its alumni during this time include a plethora of world-renowned scientists and engineers.

With the breakup of the Bell System, Bell Labs became a subsidiary of AT&T Technologies in 1984, which resulted in a drastic decline in its funding.^[2][3] In 1996, AT&T spun off AT&T Technologies, which was renamed to Lucent Technologies, using the Murray Hill site for headquarters. Bell Laboratories was split with AT&T retaining parts as AT&T Laboratories. In 2006, Lucent merged with French telecommunication company Alcatel to form Alcatel-Lucent, which was acquired by Nokia in 2016.

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