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Regretand rejoicing over Bell Labs "Early Hi-Fi” senes. / by Robert Long

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PHOTO COURTESY BELL LABS

In the Heli Telenhone Laboratories on West Street, this eneineering group gatkered about 1930. Chckwise front left, they are P.B. Flanders, J.P. \1axfield, A.C. Keller, H C. Harrison. and D.G. Hlattner. fhe subject under discussion was electroacoustics.

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When i was a boy in suburban New Jersey. there were woods behind our house. If you sei out through those woods of a Saturday morning, armed with a little sustenance against the known scarcity of comer Stores among those hills, you could make your way back in time. Glimpses of petunia beds gave way to meadow and forest. A turn to the left at one point would take you toward the ruins of a prerevolutionary iron forge; the path 10 the right led to what we called “the hermifs house’¹—an apparently self-sustaining little pioneer plantation in the wildemess.

But there we generally turned back. Not a mile beyond that ramshackle house stood a monstrous bastion of brick—a huge, faceless błock in the midst of a vast mowed lawn, vaguely temfying in its incongruity. It was what cverybody called Bell Labs. and its functioning was as mysterious to me as its siting That it, as an institution. might have anything to do with Fantasia (which I watched. de-lighted, at the local movie house) was all but unthinkable: another irreconcilable incongruity.

The Murray Hill lab, begun during World War II and today sprawling out-

ward from the original building to meet the substaniial homes that have sprung up like bramble patches among the woods that I remember, was not the first “Bell Labs.® That was on West Street, near the Manhattan end of the Holland Tunnel. Like the Volta Laboratory in Washington before it. the Bell Tele-phone Laboratories was established to pursue icsearch in areas related to tele-phony. The Volta Lab became famous in phonographic history because the patent for the wax recording process. developed there by Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter, proved pivotal in the

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