Bell Labs

Bell Telephone Laboratories was formed on 1 January 1925 by consolidating the engineering research of AT&T and its manufacturing arm, Western Electric, into a single jointly owned research organisation. Credited with no single founder, it produced an unusually dense run of twentieth-century breakthroughs from a corporate research lab, including the transistor (1947), information theory (1948), the laser (1958, built there though the underlying physics was developed elsewhere), and the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation (1964), work spanning multiple Nobel Prizes in Physics. It was based in New York City from its founding until 1967, when it moved to Murray Hill, New Jersey, where its main site remains. Six scientists on this atlas's roster worked there: Claude Shannon, who wrote the founding paper of information theory in 1948; William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain, who together demonstrated and developed the transistor between 1947 and 1951; and Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, who detected the cosmic microwave background there in 1964 and 1965.