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What Would It Take to Recreate Bell Labs? - by Brian Potter

construction-physics.com · 6,465 words · saved by 3 readers

For most of the 20th century, AT&T was almost entirely responsible for building and operating America’s telephone infrastructure. It manufactured the phones and electrical equipment, laid hundreds of millions of miles of wire across the country, and built and operated the switchboards and exchanges that made it possible for anyone with a phone to call anyone else. This huge network required billions of dollars worth of equipment: telephones, switches, cables, amplifiers, repeaters, and so on. All this equipment was built by AT&T’s manufacturing subsidiary, Western Electric. But it was designed and developed by AT&T’s research arm, Bell Telephone Laboratories, better known as Bell Labs. To students of technological progress, Bell Labs is a giant. For decades, Bell Labs was considered not only the best industrial research lab in the world, but arguably the best research lab in the world, period. One Bell Lab alumnus described it as “a parallel organization to almost all the academic inst

For most of the 20th century, AT&T was almost entirely responsible for building and operating America’s telephone infrastructure. It manufactured the phones and electrical equipment, laid hundreds of millions of miles of wire across the country, and built and operated the switchboards and exchanges that made it possible for anyone with a phone to call anyone else. This huge network required billions of dollars worth of equipment: telephones, switches, cables, amplifiers, repeaters, and so on. All this equipment was built by AT&T’s manufacturing subsidiary, Western Electric. But it was…

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