Bell Telephone Laboratories -

Beautifully engraved RARE specimen from the Bell Telephone Laboratories estimated printed in the 1930's. This historic specimen was printed by the American Banknote Company and has an underprint of the Bell Labs Logo. This item has the printed signatures of the Company's Chairman, E. P. Clifford and is over 70 years old. The reverse shows a summary of the employee's benefits. This is the first time we have seen any specimen from the Bell Telephone Laboratories and believe it to be quite rare, possibly unique.






Certificate Vignette

Bell Telephone Laboratories Inc., also known as Bell Labs and AT&T Bell Laboratories, was the research and development arm of the US Bell System. It was the premier facility of its type, developing a range of revolutionary technologies including the transistor, Laser, and the UNIX operating system. There have been 6 Nobel Prizes awarded for work done at Bell Labs.

History

In 1925, Walter Gifford, then president of AT&T, established Bell Telephone Laboratories Inc as a separate entity which took over work previously conducted by the research division of Western Electric's engineering department. Half of Bell Labs was owned by Western Electric, the other half being owned by AT&T.

Discoveries and inventions at Bell Labs include:

1925: Facsimile (fax) transmission first demonstrated publicly

1927: Long-distance television transmission, of images of Herbert Hoover, from Washington to New York

1928: Thermal noise in a resistor is measured by J.B. Johnson; Harry Nyquist provides a theoretical analysis.

1920s: The one-time pad cipher invented by Gilbert Vernam and Joseph Mauborgne; Bell's Claude Shannon later proved that it was unbreakable

1933: Foundation of radio astronomy laid by Karl Jansky; in his work investigating the origins of static on long distance communications, he discovered that radio waves were being emitted from the centre of the galaxy

1933: Stereo signals transmitted live from Philadelphia to Washington D.C.

1937: The vocoder, the first electronic speech synthesizer, invented and demonstrated by Homer Dudley

1940: The photovoltaic cell developed by Russell Ohl

1947: The transistor is invented by John Bardeen, William Bradford Shockley, and Walter Houser Brattain, all of whom subsequently won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956

1948: "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", one of the founding works in information theory, published by Claude Shannon in the Bell System Technical Journal; it built in part on earlier work in the field by Bell researchers Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley

1949: First remote operation of a teleprinter, controlled in New Hampshire by a computer at Bell Labs in New York City

1956: TAT-1, the first transatlantic telephone cable laid between Scotland and Newfoundland

1957: MUSIC, one of the first computer programs to play electronic music, created by Max Mathews; New greedy algorithms developed by Robert C. Prim and Joseph Kruskal, revolutionizing network design as we know it

1958: The laser is first described in a technical paper by Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes

1962: Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) invented by Nick Holonyak

1964: Carbon dioxide laser invented by Kumar Patel

1965: Penzias and Wilson discovered the Cosmic Microwave Background (Nobel Prize 1978)

1966: Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), a key technology in wireless services, developed and patented by R. W. Chang

1968: Molecular beam epitaxy developed by J.R. Arthur and A.Y. Cho; allows semiconductor chips and laser matrices to be created one atomic layer at a time

1969: UNIX operating system is created by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson

1969: The Charge-coupled device (CCD) is invented by Willard Boyle and George E. Smith

1970: C programming language developed by Ritchie & Thompson.

1971: A computerized switching system for telephone traffic, invented by Erna Schneider Hoover, receives one of the first software patents

1976: Fiber optics systems first tested in Georgia

1980: First single-chip 32-bit microprocessor, the BELLMAC-32A, is demonstrated; it goes into production in 1982

1980: TDMA and CDMA digital cellular telephone technology patented

1982: Fractional quantum Hall effect discovered by Horst Störmer and former Bell Labs researchers Robert B. Laughlin and Daniel C. Tsui; they won a Nobel Prize for it in 1998

1983: The C++ programming language is developed by Bjarne Stroustrup

1984: Karmarkar Linear Programming Algorithm developed by mathematician Narendra Karmarkar

1985: Laser cooling used to slow and manipulate atoms by Steven Chu and team

1980s: Plan 9 operating system is devloped as a replacement for Unix

1980s: A Radiodrum, a three dimensional electronic instrument is developed

1988: TAT-8 is the first fiber optic transatlantic cable

1990: WaveLAN is the first wireless local area network (LAN)

1991: 56K modem technology patented by Nuri Dagdeviren and team

1994: Quantum cascade laser invented by Federico Capasso, Claire Gmachl and team

1995: Wireless internet access first demonstrated, code name Sky Broadband

1996: SCALPEL electron lithography, which prints features atoms wide on microchips, invented by Lloyd Harriott and team

1996: The Inferno operating system, an update of Plan 9, is created by Dennis Ritchie and team using the new concurrent Limbo programming language

1997: Smallest practical transistor created, 60 nanometers or 182 atoms wide

1998: First optical router

1998: First combination of voice and data traffic on an Internet Protocol (IP) network

2000: DNA machine prototypes developed

2000: Progressive geometry compression algorithm makes widespread 3-D communication practical

2000: First electrically powered organic laser

2000: Large-scale map of cosmic dark matter provided

2000: F-15, an organic material that makes plastic transistors possible, invented

Bell Labs logo, 1984-1995After the 1984 divestiture agreement with the government that broke up AT&T, Bellcore was split off from Bell Labs to provide the same R&D functions for the newly created local exchange carriers. AT&T was also limited to using the Bell trademark in association with Bell Labs.

In 1996 AT&T spun off Bell Labs, along with most of its equipment-manufacturing business, into a new company named Lucent Technologies. AT&T retained a smaller number of researchers to form AT&T Laboratories.

In 2002 Jan Hendrik Schön, a German physicist, was fired from Bell Labs after his work was found to contain fraudulent data; it was the first case of fraud in the lab's history. Over a dozen of Schön's papers were found to contain fictional or altered data, including a paper on molecular-scale transistors that was portrayed as a breakthrough.

At its height, Bell Labs had research and development facilities all over the USA,though mostly concentrated in the majority of areas in New Jersey; but before the telecomm bust of 2000, the Naperville-Lisle location had the single largest concentration of people (about 11,000). Among the locations were Westminster in Colorado, Crawford Hill, Freehold, Holmdel, Lincroft, Long Branch, Middletown, Murray Hill, Piscataway, Red Bank and Whippany in New Jersey, Naperville and Lisle in Illinois, Columbus in Ohio, Allentown and Breinigsville in Pennsylvania.

Bell Labs is currently located in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Within the past five years, many of the former Bell Labs locations have been scaled back or shut down entirely.

History from Wikipedia and Old Company Research Service.

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About Specimens

Specimen Certificates are actual certificates that have never been issued. They were usually kept by the printers in their permanent archives as their only example of a particular certificate. Sometimes you will see a hand stamp on the certificate that says "Do not remove from file".

Specimens were also used to show prospective clients different types of certificate designs that were available. Specimen certificates are usually much scarcer than issued certificates. In fact, many times they are the only way to get a certificate for a particular company because the issued certificates were redeemed and destroyed. In a few instances, Specimen certificates we made for a company but were never used because a different design was chosen by the company.

These certificates are normally stamped "Specimen" or they have small holes spelling the word specimen. Most of the time they don't have a serial number, or they have a serial number of 00000. This is an exciting sector of the hobby that grown in popularity and realized nice appreciation in value over the past several years.