Innovation Machine: Technicians attach the 77-kilogram Telstar 1 satellite to a launching rocket for its journey into orbit in 1962.

A scientist performs an acoustic experiment at Bell Labs' anechoic chamber, a room devoid of echoes and reverberations.

Bell Labs researchers in Murray Hill, N.J., invented the transistor, but a Western Electric plant in Allentown, Pa., developed most of the precision manufacturing processes needed to mass-produce it.