Bell Laboratories

U.S. research and development company (founded 1925) that develops telecommunications equipment and carries out defense-related research. Formerly part of AT&T, it now belongs to Lucent Technologies, Inc., which spun off from AT&T in 1996. Bell Labs has produced thousands of inventions, including the first synchronous-sound motion-picture system, the electrical-relay digital computer, the laser, the solar cell, UNIX, and the C and C++ programming languages. Several Bell researchers have won Nobel Prizes: Clinton Davisson, for demonstrating the wave nature of matter; John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain, and William B. Shockley, for inventing the transistor; and Arno Penzias and Robert W. Wilson, for discovering cosmic microwave background radiation. It operates today in some 20 countries.