As An Industrial Laboratory, Bell Labs was primarily committed to improving AT&T's telephone operations. But Jewett and Arnold, his first director of research, wisely supported projects whose results might not necessarily be useful in the short run. Their commitment to such basic research was quickly rewarded in 1927 by a scientific breakthrough of epic proportions.

Observing electrons as they sped through a vacuum tube and ricocheted from a nickel crystal, physicist Clinton J. Davisson recognized that beams of these feisty subatomic particles seemed to behave like waves! The intriguing hypothesis that matter could have wavelike properties, proposed by Louis de Broglie, was just then the subject of heated debate in Europe. Davisson's serendipitous discovery of electron waves went a long way toward verifying de Broglie's theory—and earned him half of the 1937 Nobel Prize in physics, the first for Bell Labs.

The quantum description of matter that emerged from that 1920s' ferment soon found practical applications in the work of other Bell Labs scientists. It became essential to understanding electrical conduction in semiconductors such as silicon and germanium that emerged from the World War II U.S. radar program, in which Bell Labs and Western Electric played key R&D roles. This emerging quantum theory of solids was also crucial to the postwar invention of the transistor by physicists John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain, and William B. Shockley—then working at Bell Labs' new home, a sprawling suburban campus in Murray Hill, N.J.

But the transistor was still a long way from becoming the mass-produced gizmo that would reshape—or create—huge industries, including radio, television, microelectronics, and aerospace. More than a decade of development—involving silicon purification, crystal growing, and the diffusion of chemical agents called dopants into semiconductors—was required before transistors could begin to assume the forms they are found in today. Much of that work took place not at Bell Labs but at two Western Electric plants in Pennsylvania, in Allentown and nearby Reading, where engineers developed the precision manufacturing processes and techniques needed to mass-produce transistors. The clean room, used today in almost every aspect of semiconductor manufacturing, was born and raised in Allentown.

"Bell Laboratories scientists in Murray Hill, N.J., may have won the Nobel Prizes and gotten most of the press, but Allentown and Reading delivered the goods," notes Stuart W. Leslie, a historian of science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "Their research and production engineers, tool-and-die makers, layout operators, and assembly-line workers figured out how to transform prize-winning research into devices that were reliable, durable, consistent, and cheap."

Many other innovations spewed forth from Bell Labs during the 1950s in the wake of the transistor's invention, for which Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley received the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics. Silicon technology spawned the integrated circuit. It also led to the solar cell, which provided a durable power source for generations of satellites in succeeding decades. And electrical engineer John R. Pierce perfected the wartime traveling-wave radar tube into an efficient microwave source to make his dream of satellite communications a reality. He played a key role in the development of Telstar, the satellite that carried an amplification circuit designed to retransmit signals over enormous distances.

Then, in 1964, using a huge horn-shaped antenna salvaged from the Telstar project, physicists Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson accidentally stumbled across the dim afterglow of the universe's birth: the remnant microwaves from the big bang. Their discovery triggered a revolution in cosmology and earned them a 1978 trip along the by then well-worn path from Bell Labs to Stockholm.