Bell Laboratories

Bell Laboratories is a research and development group, dating from ~1925, formed to create products for the Bell telephone company in the U.S. By the early 1980s, it employed more than 330,000 scientists and technologists and had made many important advances such as discovering the existence of cosmic microwave background, inventing the transistor, and creating Unix and C (programming language). In 1983 it was broken up by government fiat to break its monopoly on telephone services. A much smaller version still exists, centered in Murray Hill, NJ, and owned by Nokia Corporation, after having changed hands multiple times since the 1983 divestiture