In 1925 Walter Gifford (president of AT&T) established the separate entity called the Bell Telephone Laboratories Inc., which took over work previously conducted by the research division of [Western Electric]?'s engineering department. Bell Labs was 50 percent owned by Western Electric, and 50 percent owned by AT&T.
The transistor was invented by Bell Labs in 1947. The people responsible for the discovery, John Bardeen, [William Shockley]?, and [Walter Brattain]?, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956.
Bell Labs developed the [photovoltaic cell]?.
Bell Labs was also the original home to the UNIX operating system and the C programming language, developed by Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, and Ken Thompson in the early 1970s, as well as the C++ programming language developed by Bjarne Stroustrup in the 1980s.
See also Lucent.