I have written a few times about my time working at Bell Labs nearly 30 years ago.
When I was at Bell Labs, I worked on the AT&T Communications services side of the company; a good friend of mine developed photonics on the hardware side. I had a classmate from school who did pure mathematical research. He really didn’t know a thing about the telecom industry, but he did the kind of work that led to better ways to solve computational problems, leading to faster computer processes. In the old days, Bell Labs did research and it did development. These were two different needs, with different metrics for measuring returns.
I wrote about the need to examine ways to expand basic research: “So much industrial R&D is focused on development rather than research.”
The Bell Labs complex was one of the last projects by Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen, who had designed the St. Louis Gateway Arch and the main terminal at Washington Dulles airport, among his major works.
In one of my first blog posts, I wrote about Bell Labs’ Holmdel, NJ office building being put up for sale. That was where I worked when my son was born. The water tower was designed to look like a transistor, one of the inventions to come out of their labs. The building itself was one of the world’s first to be clad in glass. When it was built in the early 1960’s, it is as if the architect anticipated the communications industry transitioning from copper to glass.
And now, the Finnish telecom company Nokia is acquiring Alcatel-Lucent, the current parent of Bell Labs. Bell Labs vacated Saarinen’s building in 2006; the Finnish connection will be restored as Bell Labs finds a home inside Nokia.
Nokia North America chief Ricky Corker will be the June 1 closing speaker at the end of the first day of The 2015 Canadian Telecom Summit, and Nokia will be hosting this year’s cocktail reception. Be sure to register before May 1 to save $250.