The letter “A” and the letter “L.” The “A” stands for Alcatel, and the “L” stands for Lucent. Alcatel-Lucent owns Bell Labs. Most of us have never heard of Alcatel-Lucent, but, essentially, it builds and maintains a huge chunk of the Internet. The company was formed in 2006 by the 25-billion-euro merger of France’s Alcatel and the U.S. firm Lucent Technologies. It employs 80,000 people in 130 countries and has annual revenue of 16 billion euros. Alcatel-Lucent helps us transmit our voices, our movies and our data between landlines, mobile devices and the Internet. In this sense, it’s a platform company: it doesn’t provide content, it provides channels. You likely interact with Alcatel-Lucent hundreds of times a day without knowing it. Alcatel’s work is at the core of humanity’s internal rewiring, as well as spin-off effects such as the Arab Spring and China’s quasi-democracy. Once inside the building proper, I meet Deb McGregor from the press department—a glamorous person from the school of Moneypenny. Our schedule is tight. Deb takes me past a set of windows overlooking a courtyard area to the west, where an apple tree is dozing through the winter. She tells me the tree was grown from a cutting taken from Sir Isaac Newton’s apple orchard. Its variety is the Pride of Kent. So this New Jersey tree is a descendant of the apple tree that dropped the apple that Newton saw falling, triggering the thoughts that became his theory of gravity. Newton dealt with planets and solar systems. What would he have made of the past two hundred years? Almost every invention of note stems not from knowledge of the vastness of the universe but from its opposite: from knowledge of what happens at the tiniest of levels, with bacteria, viruses, atoms, and their sub components of electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks and so forth. Newton would be furious to have missed out on such a good science party.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Sep 2014 08:34:04 +0000
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