The fourth most important historical development in science and technology was the telephone. Bell Telephone Laboratories was established. It was a direct descendant of Alexander Graham Bell’s Laboratory in Boston.
Probably no means of communication has revolutionized the daily lives of ordinary people more than the telephone. The actual history of the telephone is a subject of complex dispute. The controversy began with the success of the invention and continues today. Some of the inventors credited with inventing the telephone include Antonio Meucci, Philip Reis, Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell. Bell’s experiments with his assistant Thomas Watson finally proved successful on March 10, 1876, when the first complete sentence was transmitted: “Watson, come here; I want you.”.
Bell Telephone Laboratories Inc. was established 1925 by Walter Gifford, president of AT&T as a separate entity which would take over the work being conducted by Western Electric’s engineering department’s research division. Its principal work was to design and support the equipment Western Electric built for Bell System operating companies, including switches. It also carried out consulting work for them, and US government work including Project Nike. A few workers were assigned to basic research, which attracted much attention. Until the 1940s, the principal locations were in New York.
The largest facility in the country was in Illinois, at Naperville-Lisle, which had the single largest concentration of employees (about 11,000) prior to the telecomm downturn of 2001.
At its peak, Bell Labs was the premier facility of its type, developing a wide range of revolutionary technologies, including radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, information theory, the UNIX operating system, and the C programming language. There have been 6 Nobel Prizes awarded for work done at Bell Labs.
The telephone can be classified under technological innovation theory because it has gone through changes in designs or materials. New datas where also obtained and new knowledge were generated.
Under technological innovation, the telephone is an invention wherein it is devised by independent inventors as well as by individuals or team of workers in an industrial facility. There are factors that can help explain invention in modern Western society includes:
1. external pressures exerted by social and natural environments
2. motives of inventors and related decision makers
3. flexibility in the face of change discoveries
In the case of Bell Laboratories, had a tradition of allowing some of its researchers to pursue interesting phenomena discovered serendipitously in the course of mission oriented research, even if such discoveries currently lack any visible economic pay of potential. This is where it was recognized that inventive activity can be kept on too tight aleash.
