Bell Labs Celebrates 40th Anniversary of the Birth of Modern Telecommunications.

Business/Technology Editors

A Pivotal Year, 1962 Saw the Arrival of Communications Satellites,

Cellular Telephony, Paging, and Digital Transmission

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the launch of Telstar I, the world's first communications satellite, which was designed by Bell Labs, now the R&D division of Lucent Technologies (NYSE: LU). Bell Labs also achieved significant milestones in the development of three other key communications technologies in 1962, making that year a major watershed in the history of modern communications.

"With important achievements in digital, mobile and intercontinental transmissions, 1962 can be viewed as the year the modern communications revolution began," said Bill O'Shea, president of Bell Labs and executive vice president of corporate strategy and marketing for Lucent.

The concept of a communications satellite was first proposed in 1945 by engineer-turned-science-fiction-writer Arthur C. Clarke. Nine years later, John R. Pierce, a Bell Labs research director (who also dabbled in science-fiction writing), unaware of Clarke's earlier proposal, discussed a similar concept in a talk to a group of engineers at Princeton University in 1954.

In 1960, Bell Labs and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched into orbit Echo, a large plastic balloon that served as a "passive" reflector and relay for communications traffic. Telstar I, launched two years later, became the world's first active communications satellite. Active satellites process, re-transmit and, most importantly, amplify the signals they receive from the ground; passive satellites simply reflect the original signals.

A sphere roughly a yard in diameter and weighing 175 pounds, Telstar was a technology tour de force, incorporating dozens of seminal innovations from Bell Labs. It was powered by 3,600 solar cells (invented at Bell Labs in 1954), for example, and used a new traveling-wave tube (invented in Europe during World War II, but improved by Pierce at Bell Labs in the 1950s) as its microwave radio source. The satellite had a capacity of 600 voice channels or one television channel. Telstar I was in service for only about a year, but was followed by a long succession of increasingly sophisticated satellites that also carried the Telstar name.

"Telstar demonstrated the feasibility of using satellites to provide voice, data and video communications between continents, which was a giant leap forward in the creation of the global communications village we enjoy today," said O'Shea. "Telstar erased any distinctions between phoning around the corner and phoning around the world, in terms of the speed and quality of the connection. It also ushered in the era of transcontinental television transmission, adding the phrase 'live via satellite' to the common vernacular."

On July 11, 1962, a day after the satellite's launch from Florida's Cape Canaveral by a Delta rocket, the first transatlantic broadcast transmission of a television signal occurred via Telstar. U.S. network television viewers saw a picture of the American flag waving from Telstar's U.S. earth station in Andover, Maine. Then, similar images from earth stations in Pleumeur-Bodou, France and Goonhilly Downs, Cornwall, England were sent to American television networks. A video clip of Telstar's development, launch and the July 11, 1962 events can be seen on the web at http://www.lucent.com/minds/telstar.

The new communications satellite fired the imaginations of people around the world. The global television audience for the Telstar debut numbered in the hundreds of millions. An instrumental hit called "Telstar" by a British rock group, the Tornadoes, stayed on the Billboard Top 40 music chart for 13 weeks, including three weeks at No. 1. And Jazz legend Duke Ellington composed a short piece also entitled "Telstar".

Tomorrow, July 11, 2002, Lucent Technologies and Bell Labs will join with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), BT Group, France Telecom, and WorldCom to commemorate Telstar's 40th anniversary at a celebration at the Town Commons in Andover, Maine. The event, open to the public, will feature a display of an actual Telstar satellite, and will be linked via videoconference to similar events held in the other two sites of Telstar's original earth stations in Goonhilly and in Pleumeur-Bodou. For more event information, call the IEEE Maine Chapter at 207-791-1023.

Other Technology Anniversaries

While Telstar extended the technology of broadcast communications, a new era of personal communications opened up the same year, when the Bell System - the U.S. telephone monopoly that existed at the time -- introduced its Bellboy radio paging system at the Seattle World's Fair that year. Bellboy was the first commercial system for personal paging. It also marked one of the first consumer applications of the transistor, for which three Bell Labs inventors had been awarded the Nobel Prize six years earlier. Solid-state circuitry enabled the Bellboy pager to fit into a customer's pocket or purse-something that wasn't possible in the age of vacuum tubes.

Mobile communications made further progress in 1962, when the Bell System inaugurated Skyphone air-to-ground service on selected TWA flights.

It was also in 1962 that Bell Labs first began tests of a new mobile communications concept, called "cellular radio." Cellular technology helped to overcome the innate shortage of radio frequencies by using low-power transmitters in numerous base stations, each covering a small hexagonal geographic area, or cell. This allows the same frequencies to be used for different conversations in different cells, with calls handed off from one cell to the next as cars cross their invisible borders. Cellular technology multiplies the number of mobile customers that can be accommodated in a given region by thousands.

In 1972, Bell Labs received a key U.S. patent for cellular telephony, which detailed the handoff of calls between cells. Political and legal issues delayed the commercial availability of cellular phones for many years, but today more than 100 million Americans use wireless phones and data terminals based on the Bell Labs cellular concept, and Lucent Technologies is the global leader in CDMA (code division multiple access) technology, the most advanced wireless technology in widespread use.

Finally, in the fall of 1962, Bell Labs ushered in the era of digital, high-speed communications when the Illinois Bell Telephone Co. turned up the first commercial digital transmission system, running from downtown Chicago to Skokie, Illinois, 13.5 miles away. This system, called T1, was revolutionary because it carried telephone calls digitally in binary code (1's and 0's) instead of continuous electrical (analog) waves. Digital transmission allows more phone calls to be carried over each cable, with improved quality and exceptional resistance to static. The T1 system enabled 24 high-quality telephone calls to be transmitted over two pairs of copper wires.

Today's state-of-the-art networks are digital optical systems, and Bell Labs and Lucent are still at the leading edge. Lucent's LambdaXtreme Transport (tm) system, for example, is the most advanced long-distance communications system on the market today, and it makes use of key Bell Labs innovations in Raman amplifiers, solitons, and fiber dispersion compensators.

"The innovations that emerged from Bell Labs in 1962 have touched the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world," said O'Shea. "They are just a small part of the proud heritage that is shared by the people of Bell Labs and Lucent today as we continue to invent and develop breakthrough communications technologies for tomorrow's networks."

With over 10,000 employees in 16 countries, Bell Labs is the leading source of new communications technologies. Bell Labs has generated more than 28,000 patents since 1925 and has played a pivotal role in inventing or perfecting key communications technologies, including transistors, digital networking and signal processing, lasers and fiber-optic communications systems, communications satellites, cellular telephony, electronic call switching, touch-tone dialing, and modems. Bell Labs scientists have received six Nobel Prizes in Physics, nine U.S. Medals of Science and eight U.S. Medals of Technology. For more information about Bell Labs, visit its Web site at http://www.bell-labs.com.

Lucent Technologies, headquartered in Murray Hill, N.J., USA, designs and delivers networks for the world's largest communications service providers. Backed by Bell Labs research and development, Lucent relies on its strengths in mobility, optical, data and voice networking technologies as well as software and services to develop next-generation networks. The company's systems, services and software are designed to help customers quickly deploy and better manage their networks and create new, revenue-generating services that help businesses and consumers. For more information on Lucent Technologies, visit its Web site at http://www.lucent.com.