Bell Laboratories

Today, Glass and his group at Bell Labs focus on two tasks: increasing the capacity of fiber-optic cables and coming up with creative ways to bundle and route wavelengths efficiently. "Now that we've brought the high-end fiber backbone into computer networks, the data people want the reliability of telecommunications and the telecommunications people want the low cost of data networks," said Glass.

Photonics researchers at Bell Labs have created new types of optic fibers, and are working on using more of the color spectrum by eliminating water from the fiber cable and capturing multiple wavelengths in a single laser, said sources.

"What are we doing all this for?" said Glass. "For multimedia and video. There's enough wavelength out there so anyone in the world can communicate with anyone else at fast rates."

Known for its no-nonsense, fiercely competitive culture, Bell Labs has banked its reputation on hiring individuals from some of the most prestigious campuses in the world, including Oxford and Stanford universities, said Bill Brinkman, vice president of Physical Sciences Research at Bell Labs. "You have to be accepted here as a top-tier researcher by your peers, and that's a tough group," Brinkman said. "People come here to compete,and win."

The outcome of a merger between AT&T Corp. and Western Electronics' engineering departments in 1925, Bell Labs has received more than 25,000 patents and today averages more than three inventions every day. In 1996, the laboratory severed ties with AT&T and became the research arm of a newly formed spin-off, Lucent.

Over the years, Bell Labs has showcased more than its fair share of prizewinners. In 1956, for example, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockly received the Nobel Prize in physics for their invention of the transistor in 1947. The National Medal of Technology, administered by the U.S. Department of Commerce and presented by the president, went to Bell Labs in 1985 for its decade-spanning contributions to modern communications systems. Since then, seven Bell Labs researchers have received the same honor. All told, the company's scientists and engineers have garnered thousands of awards and fellowships, said a Bell Labs spokeswoman.

In the past 70 years, the lab has made a name for itself with breakthroughs in electronics, networking, telecommunications and computing sciences, all of which have contributed to the vast mosaic of today's information technology industry.

Almost 20 years after Schawlow and Townes' technical paper on lasers, Bell Labs researchers unveiled Random Access Memory (RAM) devices and launched the first trial of a fiber-optic telecommunications system in Atlanta. In the late 1980s, Bell Labs delivered digital cellular technology, and scientists in the 1990s made notable advances in Internet-based communications via telephony and videoconferencing.

At today's Bell Labs Multimedia Communications Research Laboratory, researchers work daily to build the technological infrastructure for virtual classrooms, video-mail applications, multimedia chat rooms and digital-data management.

"We're developing new compression schemes for audio and video, running pilots for using the Internet in classrooms and working on natural-language voice-recognition technology for more user-friendly call centers," said Sid Ahuja, director of the multimedia group. "We've had a number of successful trials, and we expect to get some products to market in the next six months or so."

In the past few years, the gap between invention and product time to market has closed considerably for Bell Labs, said Glass. "We're at a point where things are moving so fast that we're disappointed if the lapse between innovation and product is more than a year. We used to be more like a university,more 'blue sky',in the old days, but now most of our stuff goes through to development," he said.

Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, where Bell Labs opened a facility in July, Bill Coughran guided a group of scientists toward the culmination of Bell Labs Automated Design System (BLADES), a configurator-type product aimed at helping Lucent's data sales force configure networks for its customers. Lucent will unveil BLADES to the channel in about two months, said Coughran.

The West Coast group also began work on high-speed enterprise and metropolitan networks about three months ago.

With a constant eye overseas, Bell Labs maintains more than 40 facilities throughout the world. Locations include Australia, England, France, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Mexico and Russia.

Capitalizing on the global nature of today's technology business, and on our collective craving to shed wires and cables, Bell Labs Wireless Research Laboratory is setting its sights on using more of the radio spectrum more efficiently.

The wireless folks live by a mantra: "Electronics are cheap; spectrum is expensive," said Rich Howard, who heads up Bell Labs' research in untethered apps.

With that in mind, Howard's group has packed an increasing number of circuits on the chips that go into wireless devices. They also have begun to develop "smart antennas," which allow for much higher data rates using the same amount of spectrum via focused, narrow beams.