2016-4-6

For a long stretch of the twentieth century, Bell Labs was the most innovative scientific organization in the world.

在20世纪很长的一段时间，贝尔实验室世界一直是科学创兴的典范。

It was arguably among the world’s most important commercial organizations as well, with countless entrepreneurs building their businesses upon the Labs’ foundational inventions, which were often shared for a modest fee.

贝尔实验室基本上可以称之为最重要的商业组织，有数不清的创业大厦中的费用适度的创业项目是基于实验室的基础性发明中。

Strictly speaking, this wasn’t Bell Labs’ intended function. Rather, its role was to support the research and development efforts of the country’s then-monopolistic telephone company, American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), which was seeking to create and maintain a system—the word “network” wasn’t yet common—that could connect any person on the globe to any other at any time.

严格地说，这不是贝尔实验室的职能。相反，它的作用是支持该国的垄断性电话公司，美国电话和电报（在科技），这是寻求建立和维护一个系统的“网络”这个词的研究和发展的努力是不常见的，可以连接任何人在地球上任何其他任何时间。

AT&T’s dream of “universal” connectivity was set down in the early 1900s. Yet it took more than three-quarters of a century for this idea to mature, thanks largely to the work done at Bell Labs, into a fantastically complex skein of copper cables and microwave links and glass fibers that tied together not only all of the planet’s voices but its images and data, too.

上世纪90年代AT&T的梦想在全球设立广泛地连接。这个想法花了超过四分之三个世纪去使技术思想成熟，其中很大程度上要归功于贝尔实验室所做的工作，建立非常复杂的绞铜电缆和微波链路和光钎，不仅使地球上所有的声音可以连通，也可以使图像和数据相互交流。

In those evolutionary years, the world’s business, as well as its technological progress, began to depend on information and the conduits through which it moved. Indeed, the phrase used to describe the era that the Bell scientists helped create, the age of information, suggested we had left the material world behind. A new commodity—weightless, invisible, fleet as light itself—defined the times.

逐渐地世界的商业和技术进步，开始依赖于信息和连通的渠道。事实上，这个现象是由于贝尔实验室的科学家帮助创造的时代，信息时代，我们逐渐地离开了物质世界。迎来了一个新的时代，如同光一般无线、不可见、迅速。