But perhaps the most significant legacy of the telephone lay in a strange and marvelous organization that grew out of it: Bell Labs, an organization that would play a critical role in creating almost every major technology of the twentieth century. Radios, vacuum tubes, transistors, televisions, solar cells, coaxial cables, laser beams, microprocessors, computers, cell phones, fiber optics—all these essential tools of modern life descend from ideas originally generated at Bell Labs.
