Bell Labs: The Invention Factory #manufacturingmonday
Check out this great piece from TheNewYorker archives, which was originally published back in 1931. It gives a detailed tour of NYC’s Bell Labs, once a center of innovation.
The Bell Telephone Laboratories, which is the research department of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company, is a good specimen of the modern invention factory, and handy to anyone who enjoys scientific peepshows. The ten-story main laboratory has fifteen acres of floor and takes up the block in West Street between Bethune and Bank Streets. Depression or not, the Telephone Company still finds it pays to spend nineteen million dollars a year there on research.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
