TABLE OF CONTENTS The New York Times Abstract:
Investigation committee finds series of extraordinary advances in physics claimed by scientists at Bell Labs relied on fraudulent data; findings dismiss as fiction results from 17 papers that were promoted as major breakthrough in physics, including claims that Bell Labs had created molecular-scale transistors; committee concludes that data in disputed research, published between 1998 and 2001, was improperly manipulated, even fabricated; this confirms suspicions raised by outside scientists in May; committee places blame for deceit on Bell Lab scientist Dr J Hendrik Schon; Bell Labs immediately fires Schon; just last year he was thought to be on fast path to Nobel Prize; panel finds no other scientists were guilty of misconduct, but scandal has tarnished surrounding participants, including co-authors who noticed nothing amiss, scientific journals that quickly published sensational findings, and Lucent Technologies, Bell Labs' parent company; case raises questions about core of scientific process. (Chang, 2002)
In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone; his invention resulted in two issued patents. With two partners, Bell formed a company in 1877 that later became American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T). When Bell's second patent expired in 1894, competing telephone companies entered the market. By 1904 more than 6000 companies offered telephone service in localities through the United States. However, because networks from these companies were not interconnected, subscribers to different companies could not call each other. To address this lack of interconnection, the U.S.
