Bell Labs by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli sometimes fantasizes of having worked there in their golden years...
Original headquarters and laboratories: 463 West Street in New York, Manhattan area. On Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman Feynman mentions that in 1941 they could see the construction of the George Washington Bridge, presumably from that building, when William Shockley brought him over to visit to get a job there. However, the actual
101 Crawfords Corner Rd Holmdel, NJ 07733 USA
It started with radio research apparently, including Karl Guthe Jansky.
They had a smaller building first: youtu.be/BPq_ZyOvbsg?t=51 and in 1962 opened the large new building.
Video 1.
Holmdel 20th Anniversary by AT&T Tech Channel (1982)
Source.
Video 2.
N.J.’s historic Bell Labs complex brought back to life as Bell Works by nj.com (2022)
Source. Shows the renewed building after the Bell Labs Holmdel Complex closure.
Bell Labs Murray Hill by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
600 Mountain Ave bldg 5, New Providence, NJ 07974, United States.
Became headquarters in 1967,
Drone footage: www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0Ld2KFjaC8 Bell LABS Headquarters Murray Hill NJ in 4K Drone Flight by ESTOUCHFPV (2017)
Notable inventions made there:
This is where they moved the Chicago Pile-1 after they decided it might be a bad idea to run highly experimental nuclear reactions right in the middle of one of the most populous cities of the United States.
After it was reassembled, the Chicago Pile-1 was renamed as Chicago Pile 2 (CP2).
So more precisely, it is a continuation of the Metallurgical Laboratory.
It's still not that far though, only about 20 kilometers, and today is also a populated area.
Ciro Santilli maintains that they chose the site because the name is so cool. Wikipedia says it is derived from the Forest of Argonne, maybe it even shared etymology with the element argon.
Founded partly due to the influence of Edward Teller who thought Los Alamos National Laboratory was not making good progress on thermonuclear weapons, large part of which was developed there.
Located in Tennessee in the East of the United States.
The precursor organization to ORNL was called Clinton Engineer Works, where groundbreaking Manhattan Project experiments and nuclear production took place during World War II
Some key experiments carried out there include:
X-10 Graphite Reactor by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
This was an intermediate step between the nuclear chain reaction prototype Chicago Pile-1 and the full blown plutonium mass production at Hanford site. Located in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Figure 1.
Exterior of the X-10 Graphite Reactor in 1950
. Source.
Figure 2.
Workers loading Uranium into the X-10 Graphite Reactor with a rod
. Source.
Clinton Engineer Works by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Precursor organization to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, name that it took in January 1948.
Produced the enriched uranium used for Little Boy, located in the area/predecessor of Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Figure 1.
Y-12 shift change photograph
. Source. At the back, a poster reads:
Make C.E.W. count: continue to protect project information
What a fantastic picture!
Video 1.
Historic Manhattan Project Sites at Los Alamos by Los Alamos National Lab
. Source.
Historian Alan B. Carr:
LA-UR by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Publicly released documents from the Los Alamos National Laboratory are marked with this identifier. This is for example the case of each video on ther YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@LosAlamosNationalLab. E.g. Video "Historic, unique Manhattan Project footage from Los Alamos by Los Alamos National Lab" is marked with "LA-UR 11-4449".
www.osti.gov/biblio/1372821 contains "How to Get an LA-UR: Using RASSTI to Release Your Work" which is of interest: permalink.lanl.gov/object/tr?what=info:lanl-repo/lareport/LA-UR-17-26023. That document documents the acronym's expansion, plus it leaks some internal-only URLs such as lasearch.lanl.gov/oppie/service.
TODO is there somewhere you can search for the document for a given identifier? Some PDFs are listed at: sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/lanl/index2b.html

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    Figure 3.
    Visual Studio Code extension installation
    .
    Figure 4.
    Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
    .
    Figure 5.
    Web editor
    . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
    Video 4.
    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
    . Source.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact