Steps: 3,427,001
Miles: 1433.23
Miles to New York: 12.77
The Virtual Walker's Location
The green balloon marks the location of Holmdel, NJ. As you can see, the Virtual Walker is not very far from the western end of Staten Island, NY. He plans to walk across Staten Island and cross into Long Island either via the Staten Island Ferry or the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. The plan is then to walk to the eastern end of Long Island and cross over to New London, CT on the Cross Sound Ferry. But first, Holmdel, NJ... why it is an important place in the USA.
In 1925 Western Electric Research Laboratories and part of the engineering department of AT&T were consolidated to form Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. as a separate entity.
At its peak, Bell Laboratories 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 completed at Bell Laboratories.
Each of these Nobel Prizes were for some really heavy stuff... In 1956 John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain and William Shockley received the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the transistor, arguably one of the most important Bell Labs discoveries.
Bell Labs Headquarters Building
Of interest to you Internet and music lovers, Bell Labs engineers did the following:
The electret microphone was invented by Gerhard M. Sessler and James Edward Maceo West in 1962.
The 56K modem technology was patented by Nuri Dagdeviren and his team in 1991.
And way back in December 1947, Bell Labs engineers Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young proposed hexagonal cells for mobile phones. The technology did not exist then however, and Cellular technology was undeveloped until the 1960s, when Richard H. Frenkiel and Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs developed the electronics.
My younger brother briefly worked at Bell Labs in 1989. He had some mighty brainy company.
3 comments:
very interesting....
Can ya hear me now....
To think that a portion of the mobile phone technology was invented all the way back in 1947. Wow! At one point in my State Government career, I worked with the telecommunications and data center arm of bureaucracy. I was constantly amazed at how dynamic technology is. What is in today is old stuff tomorrow. Interesting post Iggy.
As a teenager, my neighbors worked for a Bell Labs office here by Chicago. I always wondered what all they worked on. Now I know! Thanks Iggy!
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