Bell Laboratories

Bell Laboratories is a research and development company formed around 1925 in Manhattan to create products for the Bell telephone systems in the United States. It grew into a large R&D corporation which, by the early 1980's, employed more than 330,000 technologists, had many facilities across the U.S., and was credited with many important discoveries and advances in technology. It was broken into smaller pieces in 1983 by government intervention (and action called divestiture) in order to break the Bell System's monopoly on telephone equipment and services in the U.S. As of 2023, the entity called Bell Laboratories, and centered in Murray Hill, NJ, is owned by Nokia Corporation after having changed hands multiple times since the 1983 divestiture.