But finding out how and where to spend the pure research dollar is key. We have to drive them. But even then binary computation has limitations. Hofmann has kicked into that smartness warp I mentioned earlier. How we use bandwidth right now is wasteful. There are certain gains that can be made simply by more smartly allocating how the spectrum gets used. Nobody expected your thirteen-year-old daughter to want to watch high-res vampire movies on a hand-held mobile device while waiting for a bus.
Bell Labs is on this in a major way, to reduce energy use by a factor of one thousand. We have to face the fact that God might actually be bored by knowing all the answers to everything. Hofmann gives a dry chuckle. But manufacturing competition is crazy, and we have such quick feedback now. Andy Warhol believed that all the Chinese restaurants in Manhattan had just one jumbo kitchen underground that they all got their food from.
Is the company pursuing too many near-term projects? Are we overestimating their impact? How much should you spend on internal research, as opposed to buying new technologies? Prioritizing ideas is crucial. I remember that I forgot my phone today. That predictable homesicky wave washes over me. What is it about forgetting your phone? We all know the sensation.
Or in the car. What am I missing? Sometimes I look at those dogs people tether to posts outside the local grocery store, those dutiful dogs waiting for their masters to emerge so they can complete their canine pack animal sense of self, and I think that mobile phones and the Internet have collectively turned us all into dogs waiting outside the Safeway.
Curiously, the conversion from dog into cat is dealt with in an oblique manner by my next Alcatel-Lucent interviewee, Marcus Weldon. Weldon is Corporate Chief Technology Officer and has a large office, which he has made some commitment to personalizing with a large magnetic spinning globe that works bravely to combat the beige paint and sun-faded blond hardwoods and oatmeal carpeting. His dryerase whiteboard panels are the cleanest in the building, showing no ghosts at all of meetings past.
As his bio, pillaged directly from the Alcatel-Lucent website, proves, this guy really knows his stuff:. In , Dr. The two of us quickly fall into a discussion about modern communications. People used UNIX command-line addresses. It is in this massive amount of trivia that Weldon sees the future of communications technology. Nobody wants to drink water from a fire hose.
I need to be interacting with a set of machines that will allow me to optimize my life. We also need to make the physical world and the virtual world interact—as what happens playing with Kinect and Wii. And the future is a machine that learns you. Most of us leave scads of digital traces behind us almost every second of our lives. If your phone has a GPS connected to a single downloaded app, then your presence on earth can be perpetually recorded. Whenever there is a sound that can be interpreted as a word, Google will do so, effectively transforming your entire life into a searchable document.
I used to collect high-school yearbooks; the faces in them often trigger interesting ideas for characters and plot twists. In a friend and I wrote a script for a movie called Doppelgangers. Its premise is that the villain uses secret facial recognition software to locate his look-alike and, of course, murder ensues.
Just yesterday, someone pointed out to me that I have written well over a thousand messages on Twitter. Charged-coupled device UNIX Telstar 1 satellite The laser The solar cell Information theory The cellular concept The transistor Television transmission Sound motion pictures Close-up view of a recording turntable. An attendant is shown viewing the record-cut through a microscope.
Dig deeper into Nokia Bell Labs history Innovation stories The stories behind innovations that changed the world and how we communicate. A goliath amongst giants - Claude E. Innovation timeline Chronicling plus years of paradigm-shifting breakthroughs. Claude Shannon poses with "Theseus,", a mouse that could navigate a maze device, which many consider a precursor to AI.
Discover how Claude Shannon conceived of Information Theory and heralded the digital age. Read more Confirming the Big Bang The story of horn antenna and the discovery the cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang. Charge-coupled device The breakthrough that enabled digital imaging — from DSLR cameras to medical endoscopes. Dennis Ritchie's archived website While at Bell Labs, Dennis Ritchie created some of the most important programming languages still in use today.
But research didn't just stop. In , for example, Karl Jansky, working at the Holmdel, New Jersey facility, discovered radio astronomy. Another trend was closer cooperation with the military, which had begun during World War I, and which continued in the s as Bell Labs began working on radar and military communication systems. At the end of the war Bell Labs was at the peak of its power. From the late s through the late s, it reigned unchallenged as the largest and perhaps most inventive industrial laboratory in the world.
Its engineers and scientists invented or brought to fruition numerous technologies, including the first transistor and many of its important variations. Although the integrated circuit was invented elsewhere, construction techniques invented at Bell Labs established many of the necessary precursors to it. The same could be said for fiber optic transmission, electronic switching systems, cellular telephony , satellite communication , solar power, and other technologies we use today. Although not all of their elements were invented at Bell Labs, it was there that the long and incredibly expensive development process brought them to maturity.
The Charge-Coupled Device or CCD, now universally used in digital cameras, video cameras, the Hubble telescope, and elsewhere, was one such development. These divested operations became the seven regional "Baby Bells. But with Bell Labs now being owned by a much smaller company in the competitive businesses of long distance telephone service and telecommunications equipment, the financial resources were much smaller, and Bell Labs gradually contracted, particularly in pure research.
The labs split as well, with researchers following the business whose work they supported. Explore content Browse by Subject.
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