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Bell Labs was active in this area going all the way back to the 1930s, where its relative isolation was ideal for radio astronomy -- in fact, one can reasonably claim Holmdel as the origin of that field.

Also in this era, once you got a job at Bell Labs, then you were set for life...not getting filthy rich necessarily, but you could fully expect to spend your entire career with the one prestigious, stable, monopoly-supported employer, before retiring with a nice pension. As a result, the rank-and-file talent were happy to move and settle down in the towns surrounding these giant suburban/exurban campuses, which also had excellent public schools thanks to the affluent tax base and high concentration of engineer/scientist parents.

Aside from solid pay, you also got to work with some very smart people, of diverse nationalities. My father worked for Western Electric (at the location outside of Princeton, NJ). WE's role was to take the BLs' R&D and make it market-worthy. While he didn't have an advanced degree, many of peers did, and his bosses PhDs. His co-workers were Asian, SE Asian, and Mexican. This was long before diversity was all the rage.

When I was a kid - early 70s give or take - they'd have an annual open house for the families. I still remember being introduced to computers. I remember seeing fiber and hearing "this is the future" when all there was was copper twisted pair.

It didn't realize it then but I was a lucky SOB :)

Can confirm. That was the life. (My Dad worked at Holmdel until the divestiture.)

I still remember visiting on the Christmas Eve open house they would hold every year, with a brass band playing carols in the big atrium and all kinds of tech goodies to check out.

Regarding GP's point, New Jersey actually has a pretty strong heritage in engineering. There was Edison of course, and RCA (including their research lab near Princeton that did a lot of defense work in WWII) and lots of smaller radio companies--don't forget that especially pre-WWII the economic geography of the US was a lot different and the radio "startups" of the day would design and manufacture right in urban areas of the East Coast.

Marconi set up shop in NJ in the early days -- in fact my Dad does a lot of work these days with a museum of early communications technology, located at an old Marconi transmitter site not too far from Holmdel (infoage.org).

Other parts of the Bell System were in New Jersey too, with offices, labs, and facilities spread all over the state (including the famous Long Lines NOC where they monitored the health of the long distance system in real time.)

There were (and still are) plenty of chemical and pharmaceutical companies that hired scientists and engineers.

But I'd say that in the postwar era until about 2000 most scientists and engineers didn't particularly aspire to live in or commute to NYC. The suburban life was the dream. I remember in the late 90s/early 2000s it felt like all the technical work going on there was backend stuff for banks or dot-com startups with a media/marketing focus.

Hearing this I wonder where will be the next center of tech when people in the future say the same about SV

I presume wherever it is cheap and conventional without scaring off the workers themselves. I would've said Austin, TX as it was being groomed to be such a place but I am no longer sure about that partly because of how partisan it gets around there scaring off the programmers and partly because half of that was Elon betting on that location back when he had credibility.

Who knows what's next? Upstate NY maybe? Lots of cult bunkers there, might mesh positively with some of those weird almost cultish philosophies some of the more new-age SV tech companies seem to push.

> which also had excellent public schools thanks to the affluent tax base and high concentration of engineer/scientist parents.

Sounds a bit like the lifestyle from the late 1940s onwards for those in professional/scientific/research/engineering careers living in Los Alamos, NM or Oak Ridge, TN. Or the workforce for things like the Lincoln Lab, Brookhaven National Lab, etc.

> where its relative isolation was ideal for radio astronomy -- in fact, one can reasonably claim Holmdel as the origin of that field.

Fun things like the Holmdel Horn Antenna too:

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=holmdel+h...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holmdel_Horn_Antenna

Used for some of the earliest attempts at transatlantic C-band communications via geostationary satellites.

In the history of geostationary telecom satellite stuff the teleports near Holmdel are fairly important.

One of the other nearby noteworthy facilities is the giant teleport on Staten Island. Now all of the antennas and facilities have been removed and it's a vacant lot.

https://www.nytimes.com/1982/10/17/nyregion/staten-island-te...

I wish companies provided these sorts of opportunities today :)

I think the NJ location was discussed in the book "The Idea Factory" (or at least the Murray Hill location) - hard to imagine it as farmland with tons of open space compared to the NYC office! These days there are still a good number of legacy engineering companies in defense and telecom in the North Jersey area. There's a neat small-world feel to some of these places with all the people who scattered around after Lucent.

I believe so as well given the structure of the offices, they clearly described that the layout was designed in a way to allow for maximum quiet and concentration whilst enabling collaboration via the shared walk ways and common areas. It's a shame to see they've turned it into a glass walled hellscape.

Oh you're right, that does jog my memory of the book. To be fair, I believe the Murray Hill Labs (now Nokia Bell Labs) has this kind of layout, though I've only worked in one of the electronics lab areas and didn't really ever go to any offices.

I wish more office buildings were build like this. Beautiful!

I do like how the glass looks, but it could be distracting. If it was electrically frosting glass that was sound proof that might be the best of both worlds.

> chosen by the higher ranking executives to be conveniently close to their large homes in some leafy suburbs out in that particular part of NJ

Edison, NJ is not far away and was definitely a hotbed of tech in the late 1800s and early 1900s (Thomas Edison).

Minor correction: although Edison had his first lab in Menlo Park (today's Edison NJ) for ten years, he later moved to a larger campus in West Orange NJ in order to be closer to NYC, and spent four decades there. They're about 25 miles apart, in different counties. But yes, lots of tech history throughout NJ!

Sorry, probably a stupid question but isn't Menlo Park in Cali...where FB is??

There’s more than one Menlo Park in the US. We’re talking about the one in New Jersey:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menlo_Park,_New_Jersey

In 1876, Thomas Edison set up his home and research laboratory in Menlo Park, which at the time was the site of an unsuccessful real estate development named after the town of Menlo Park, California.[4] While there, he earned the nickname "the Wizard of Menlo Park".[5] The Menlo Park lab was significant in that it was one of the first laboratories to pursue practical, commercial applications of research.[6] It was in his Menlo Park laboratory that Thomas Edison invented the phonograph and developed a commercially viable incandescent light bulb filament. Christie Street in Menlo Park was one of the first streets in the world to use electric lights for illumination.

> compared to locating a company in some retrofitted space in NYC.

Speaking of that, Bell Labs' old NYC HQ [1] is an impressive set of buildings too! It was converted to the Westbeth artist live/work community in the late 60s [2], and they typically offer tours to the public during Open House New York weekend each year [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Laboratories_Building_(Ma...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westbeth_Artists_Community

[3] https://ohny.org/place/westbeth-artist-housing/

I love how these old, great pieces of architecture get a second life refurbished into some work of noble note. It's like a whale fall and all the little next-gen sea creatures feed on the giant carcass (house) of the old giant.

Many of the developers that work in the city live near this area. A lot of software developers live in Monmouth and Middlesex counties in NJ.

Correct. Cheaper and you can have a yard.

Is there a modern day version of what Bell Labs was at its peak?

Not really, to the extent that Bell Labs undertook true basic research for its own sake, without much concern for any short/medium-term commercial potential. (No need to rock the boat commercially, while the parent corporation had a regulated monopoly to milk!)

Maybe some case could be made for Alphabet's "Other Bets" collectively, but...the Bell Labs column has nine Nobel Prizes in it...

Yes, that's one disadvantage of anti-trust...we miss this second-order effect :.(

I don't think so. I'm definitely oversimplifying here...but at one point they literally employed 1000+ PhDs to just figure things out.

Not quite, research for its own sake in that vein was attributed to the collapse of RCA, so most companies not in such a position didn't quite pursue it. I would then only make gestures towards federal labs like DARPA, Los Alamos, NASA campuses, etc.

Perhaps you could make a case that the DOE-era national labs, collectively, have a similar basic science mission, and their rise coincides with AT&T's decline.