Listeners: Want to hear something fun? We recorded two balloons popping, one outside and one inside Bell Labs' famed anechoic chamber, which is devoid of reverberation. Take a listen below.

This year, it’s the centenary birthday of Bell Labs — set up by the monopoly phone company of the day, AT&T. Currently owned by Nokia, we owe much of modern life to the innovation and technology that came out of this hub.

Back in 2022, I visited one of the Bell Labs locations in New Jersey. I was able to hold the very first prototype of the transistor: a cockeyed metal spring, pushing a kind of arrowhead wrapped in gold foil down into a shard of germanium, the semiconductor, all that on top of a metal base.

I had to wear protective gloves. Despite the small scale, the transistor’s role as a building block for our digital age is enormous.

Some more of the innovations to come out of Bell Labs? The laser; the charged coupled device that became the digital camera; and Telstar, the first satellite to beam television live from one continent to another.

“They started around the beginning of 1900 to losing out on competition through regional operators. They needed foundational research to achieve that hard problem of coast-to-coast communication,” said Peter Vetter, current president of Bell Labs Core Research. “After 10 years of research, they got there, and they realized this is the way, this is how they can remain a technology leader and transform their business.”

There was a culture there, though, of allowing the geniuses employed at Bell Labs to investigate things that may not have been fully focused on just telephones.

“Indeed, there has always been a mindset of 'work on a real-world problem that solves a real human need with a demonstrable impact on society,’” Vetter added. “A very important scientific example is, in the process of creating the first Telstar satellite, they discovered a noise on the horn antenna that they could not explain, and they kept looking for it, and it was in all directions of the sky, and then digging deep enough, they discovered this is the cosmic background radiation that proved the Big Bang Theory.”

The reverberations of the universe were tuned in by a big Bell Labs antenna over by New Jersey's Garden State Parkway. The recording from 1965 is almost comically subtle for something so cosmically significant.

“This radiation comes from all directions and has a thermal spectrum. It sounds, therefore, very much like the noise you would hear on an FM set or a TV set, which is tuned to an unused channel,” explained astronomer Bob Wilson in archival tape. Wilson of 10 Bell Labs researchers who went on to win Nobel prizes.

One set of innovations Bell Labs couldn't claim for decades: computers. AT&T was a monopoly phone company, and antitrust regulators wanted to reserve computer R&D for others. But with other Bell inventions that weren't specifically about improving the phone system, AT&T shared them out to the world — that transistor included.

“This is indeed also part of the history of Bell Labs. If there is no home inside the company, we do enable also the incubation and spin-outs,” said Vetter.

These days, under Nokia's management, Bell Labs has hubs from Finland to Cambridge, England, to Shanghai, where researchers are, for instance, working on a piece of the burgeoning space economy: devising how to build wireless networks on the moon.

The lab is also allowed to get into computers now, where researchers are looking at a quantum leap from zeros and ones into computer bits that can be both at the same time: quantum bits, qubits.

“We're very excited about our qubit, which is the equivalent of the transistor for the future quantum computer,” Vetter said. “The topological qubit that we work on for a useful quantum computer and [could] do such things as future drug design, protein design, or solve any problem that is exponentially hard for a classical computer.”