Bell Telephone Laboratories, originally a part of the AT&T Corporation and headquartered in Murray Hill, N.J., is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year.
Jointly owned by AT&T and Western Electric, BTL was established in 1925, dedicated to science and communications research.
Over the years, employees have helped earn 10 Nobel prizes, five Turing Awards for computer science breakthroughs, and more than 20,000 patents. Some of the world’s most important breakthroughs came out of BTL: the first transistor; components for military sonar, the laser; radio astronomy; cellular and satellite communications and the beginnings of artificial intelligence. BTL was also the birthplace of the Unix operating system and the C and C++ programming languages.
BTL was responsible for building and communicating with the first US satellite, Telstar, in 1962. Telstar signals were received by a BTL-invented horn antenna at the BTL Holmdel, N.J., facility, which is currently featured in the opening shots of the hit streaming series “Severance.”
In 2009, BTL received the Nobel Prize for inventing the Charge Coupled Device (CCD) common in most all digital cameras.
Western Electric initially selected Allentown, P.A., as a location for manufacturing vacuum tubes and crystals because of its proximity to an existing Western Electric on West Street in New York City. BTL, along with Western Electric, were the largest employers in Allentown, P.A., for many years after opening there in 1945. In 1951, the Allentown factory became the first to manufacture the transistor.
The BTL and Western Electric locations in the Lehigh Valley and Reading were spun out of BTL and went through many corporate name changes: AT&T Microelectronics; Lucent Technologies; Agere Systems; LSI; Avago/Broadcom and Intel—many employees keeping their offices and telephone numbers the same for many years.
This writer joined BTL in January 1979 and initially worked in Murray Hill and was transferred to one of the many locations in the Lehigh Valley in October of 1984. Over my years, there were many integrated chip firsts in the Lehigh Valley, Breinigsville and Reading: the first CMOS 32-bit microprocessor; many innovations in Dynamic Random Access Memory(DRAM); gated-diode crosspoints and lightwave components for telecommunications; the invention and spin-offs of the Digital Signal Processor (DSP) which led digitized voice to the consumer space and groundbreaking leadership in the Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) marketplace. In addition, the very first Universal Serial Bus (USB2) chips were designed and manufactured in Allentown.nThe same is true of the lesser known FireWire chips that won Apple Corp an Engineering Emmy award for revolutionizing the consumer video recording market.
In 2014, Avago/Broadcom sold their networking division which was largely based in the Lehigh Valley to Intel Corp. Over the years, the product focus in the Lehigh Valley migrated to cell phone chipsets and network processors for the bottom and top of cell phone towers for 3G/4G/5G.
In 2016, Nokia Corp became the current owner of BTL.
by David Thompson
