When gas was topping $4 a gallon last summer, the urgency to find alternative sources of energy to power cars and trucks became clear to most Americans. But with oil prices toppling since, the push for new energy technologies is being shoved aside by the nation's other economic woes. That is a mistake that could cost the United States everything - especially if this recession is followed by a period of fast growth.
50 years: A conference in Stockholm today celebrates the 50th anniversary of the world's first mobile telephone system. In 1956 the telecommunications company Ericsson created the pioneering mobile network called "Mobile Telephony A " (MTA) in the Swedish capital.
In telecom, nobody wants to be just a dumb pipe.
SAN FRANCISCO (Business 2.0 Magazine) - Sometimes the most useful gear isn't the newest.
Flyby Math
Before he arrived at Google in 2001 to serve as adult supervision for Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt was little known outside SiliconValley.
An "electric nose" that can distinguish the personal scent of an individual may begin to replace four-digit pin numbers and secret passwords within the next decade.
Artist Max Gschwind illustrates NASA's moon-shot calculations, from "A Problem in Celestial Gunnery," June 1962.
At AT&T's very last annual meeting, on June 30, shareholders voted to accept a takeover bid from SBC, one of its former corporate children. It spelled the end for Ma Bell, the 120-year-old behemoth...
Countries are a lot like companies. For both of them, it's a lot easier to maintain a position of competitive advantage than to regain leadership once it's lost. Skeptics say no president can do mu...
What killed the cat makes us rich. To be more specific: If it weren't for the intellectual curiosity of engineers and scientists thinking things through, trying out ideas, and taking wild guesses i...
On Oct. 13, 1983, Bob Barnett, an executive at Ameritech, the erstwhile Baby Bell, sat in a car parked outside Soldier Field in Chicago and made the country's first commercial cellular phone call. ...
New technologies rarely change the world overnight. The tipping point is hard to predict. That's why investing in tech startups is such a high-risk gamble. When does a technology become "real"? Whe...
Science-fiction fans may feel they already know about "holographic storage," having witnessed Princess Leia's desperate, recorded plea to Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. Alas, that's not quite the use...
Beyond gurus
I grew up in a house just a few hundred yards from Bell Laboratories, back when it was the research-and-development arm of AT&T. I knew every ball field on the campus, every building, every post wh...
Call me a geek, but I've never been much of a car guy. The stock market? I love it. Mutual funds? I'm fascinated. But for some reason cars never really made my blood churn. Until I met Lawrence Ulr...
When it comes to Narad Networks, neither of its co-founders, Dev Gupta and Andy Chapman, is prone to understatement. "This is the next-generation Internet," says CEO Gupta. Adds Chapman, who heads ...
Think you've got a pretty strong grip on the progress of the Info Age? Okay, answer this: How many transistors do you own?
Bell Labs gave birth to the transistor. And the laser. And motion pictures. And long-range TV broadcasts. And real-time language translation. And on and on, so that over time this venerable institu...
Arno Penzias, former chief scientist of Bell Labs, is now a venture capitalist at New Enterprise Associates. He won the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics for his contribution to the big bang theory. He w...
Barely one in 5,000 Africans has access to the Internet, often through services such as the one advertised at left, in Kampala, Uganda. But a project is under way to encircle the continent with 32,...
When it comes to the mirrors in optical switches, small is all. That's because the smaller the mirrors, the more of them you can cram into a single switch, making it possible to route ever more opt...
A group of scientists from Lucent Technologies' vaunted Bell Labs are eating lunch and talking about the most delicate subject in corporate America, or anywhere else in America: race. Over sandwich...
I was really sorry to see that Paul Allen closed his Interval Research lab in Palo Alto. Paul is a nice guy who continues to do interesting things--it is amazing what you can do when you have $20 b...
Northern Telecom used to be a sleepy Canadian maker of (yawn) telephone-switching equipment. Then came John Roth. As head of North American operations, and CEO since 1997, he dismantled Northern Te...
As the hottest sector of telecommunications gets hotter, new wireless telephones, pagers, and related gadgets are surging into the market from such makers as Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, and...
Driving into the old Ascend headquarters in Alameda, Calif., you first notice the flags flying in front of the building: One sports Lucent Technologies' stylish, lipstick-red logo; the other, the C...
Who changed your life the most? Throughout human existence, life has typically varied little in 100 years; yet no one at the 20th century's dawn could have imagined the reality of life at its end. ...
When you make an airline reservation, why can't the computer take care of setting up the whole trip? The computer knows you need transportation to and from your home airport, and a hotel room and r...
On May 1, Nobel laureate and Bell Labs chief scientist Arno Penzias retired after 37 years with AT&T and Lucent. The day before he signed off, he joined a group of FORTUNE editors for lunch and gav...
As his whirlybird settles on the landing pad beside Lucent's Darth Vader-esque New Jersey headquarters on a golden, still April afternoon, CEO Richard McGinn, 51, is surely the master of his domain...
If Lucent Technologies President Richard McGinn ever forgets how different the future will be for his company, he's apt to get a reminder at home. "My daughter wants to increase her access to the I...
Sure, working at home can be good for your health. No horn-honking commute to add stress, no germ-laden recirculated air to keep that flu virus incubating, and no harsh fluorescent lighting to wear...
THIS MONTH:
To what stupidities are the smart especially prone? FORTUNE asked Dr. Arno Penzias--astrophysicist, research scientist, Nobel Prize-winner, and really, really smart guy--who, as Bell Labs' chief sc...
Monsanto CEO Bob Shapiro leans across his black marble desk in Creve Coeur, Missouri, and extols that ultimate hierarchy buster, E-mail. "I love it," he says. "I'm directly connected with 25,000 of...
From early childhood on, our children are taught to equate progress with promotions. Playtime, nursery, prekindergarten, and kindergarten--a series of grades recognize the child's growth and prepar...
NO SET OF WORKERS is at once so valuable and yet, typically, so poorly managed as creative people. Incomprehension and at times outright distaste on the part of many managers feed this neglect: Acc...
If Arno Penzias had arrived at AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1991 instead of 1961, he would never have won a Nobel Prize in physics. Today Penzias, 60, is a top manager at Bell Labs, with a substantial...
IS AMERICA investing enough in research and development, a cornerstone of future economic success? Total U.S. outlays for government and civilian R&D peaked at $157 billion in 1989 and have since s...
You are lolling by the azure waters of a tropical atoll, 10,000 miles from workaday cares, suspended in the blissful limbo of a brochure-perfect honeymoon. At last you have a soul mate who apprecia...
If you can't wait for the wireless revolution, a new service from AT&T will get you partway there: You can now drop in on friends and turn their phone into your own personal extension. Unlike call ...
Remember B. Stanley Pons, a former professor at the University of Utah, and his British collaborator, Martin Fleischmann? In 1989 they claimed to have produced cold fusion in a jar, potentially ope...
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency -- Darpa, for short -- may have & done more for U.S. competitiveness than any other organization. The Pentagon agency started or funded some of the mos...
The Commerce Department has begun a new effort to help fund research that is supposed to give U.S. companies -- and the U.S. itself -- a competitive boost. The 11 beneficiaries of this year's $9 mi...
SOMETIMES THE U.S. underestimates its own strength. In this age of increasing global competition, American science still sets the pace. According to the National Science Foundation, Americans inves...
LAST MONTH a delegation of high-ranking executives from AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, made a quiet pilgrimage to the sunlit Palo Alto, California, headquarters of Hewlett-Packa...
REMEMBER Woody Hayes? The late, great Ohio State football coach had a passion for winning the old-fashioned way. His teams moved downfield not with razzle- dazzle passes but by grinding out 3 1/2 y...
ELDER CARE COUNSELING Halfway across the country your widowed mother is recovering from a recent stroke. The worst is over, and the hospital is letting her go home. But she needs special therapy an...
More and more people in business are genuine intellectuals, and managing these brainy, often quirky individualists can be quite a challenge. Few executives had more experience -- or were better at ...
WHAT you're seeing in the photograph at right is a practical embodiment of one of man's most brilliant intellectual achievements. The tiny semiconductor laser in the palm of the scientist's hand is...
CRITICS WERE nearly apoplectic when the Justice Department, citing antitrust laws, moved to break up the phone company. The laments echoed across America: Why mess with a telecommunications system ...
ALL IS VANITY, said the Preacher, and there is nothing new under the sun. Well, maybe there wasn't in the time of King Solomon, and anyway the author of Ecclesiastes was pondering the human conditi...
WHEN AT&T was broken up on January 1, 1984, admirers of Ma Bell's deep commitment to research wondered about the fate of AT&T Bell Laboratories -- the great American invention factory. Bell Labs ha...
MONEY & MARKETS/Cover Story
No other corporate R&D operation matches Bell Labs in size and scope, but some do as impressive a job in a number of areas. IBM's research division -- often % referred to by connoisseurs as ''the o...
AFTER MONTHS of rising excitement, the big breakthrough came in May at IBM's sleekly sinuous Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. Scientists had been making astoundingly ...
VITTORIO CASSONI sometimes lies awake at night worrying that orders for AT&T's computers aren't piling up fast enough. Small wonder. When the fashionably tailored native of Parma, Italy, arrives at...
AFTER A CHIEF EXECUTIVE finishes the giant helping of reading he is required to consume, it seems remarkable that he would have any appetite left. But as FORTUNE found in an informal survey, many C...
IN THE HEADLONG RUSH of high technology, the driving force has been the computer and everything connected with it -- semiconductor chips, robots, telecommunications. By the year 2000 the electronic...
WHERE ARE SCIENCE and technology heading between now and the dawn of the 21st century? All indications are that the biggest advances over the next 15 years or so will come in two fields -- physics ...
THE MYSTERIOUS gleaming object in the gloved hand on our cover is not an exotic fragment from a distant galaxy but just one of the everyday wonders of the technological revolution: a silicon wafer ...
THE PROBLEM, all too common among U.S. corporations: Too many of the company's formerly vaunted, fully automated whiz-bangs are banging when they should whiz. Customers are threatening to take up w...
THE COMPUTER REVOLUTION is at a turning point. Breakthrough after breakthrough in physics, semiconductor materials, and electrical engineering has created computers that process information at ever...
A COMPUTER CHIP that combines the knowledge of experts and the imprecision of amateurs could bring artificial intelligence down to earth. Developed at AT&T Bell Laboratories, the experimental chip ...
TECHNOLOGY, often cited as a cause of runaway health costs, may yet help slow the rate at which hospital bills are rising. An innovation called PACS, for picture archival communications system, pro...
AT AT&T's famed Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, garden-variety slugs are nudging forward the frontier of computer science. Inspired by the discoveries of physicist John Hopfield, a team of Bell La...
ANGELA AZZARETTI, 25, the daughter of Italian immigrants, was graduated from the University of Illinois and took a job at Caterpillar's headquarters in Peoria during the summer of 1987. Angela's wa...
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