Mario Romero worked at one of the busiest, most high-profile research laboratories in the world for 30 years. But, if you ask him, it never felt much like a job.

“Let me tell you, I never felt I was going to work, never,” said Romero, who retired as a corporate accountant in 2009 from the famed Bell Labs headquarters in Murray Hill.

“I felt that I was going to school, I felt that I was going to learn something, that I was going to contribute to something,” said Romero, 64. “I didn’t ever drag my feet going into work, it didn’t feel that way.”

Romero and other former employees of Bell Labs talk about their time working at the research company’s historic New Jersey headquarters with the same fondness college graduates describe their alma maters.

The sprawling Murray Hill campus on Mountain Avenue was a bustling center for innovation in suburban Union County for decades. It served as the headquarters for a 90-year-old company whose researchers helped earn 10 Nobel Prizes, five Turing Awards for computer science breakthroughs and more than 20,000 patents.

At its height, Bell Labs employed nearly 15,000 people in New Jersey, including some of the world’s top scientists and innovators. Many worked in the more than a half-dozen buildings spread throughout 240 acres at the country club-like Murray Hill headquarters on the border of Berkeley Heights and New Providence.

When Nokia’s research arm, Nokia Bell Labs, said in early December the company will move out of the Murray Hill campus over the next five years to relocate to a new tech hub being built in New Brunswick, the announcement spurred an outpouring of memories online from current and former employees.

“It was an honor to work there,” one former employee wrote on Facebook. “I’ll never forget what a great place it was to work at,” said another.

Some of the world’s most important breakthroughs have come out of Bell Labs, including the first transistor, the laser, radio astronomy, the dawn of cellular and satellite communications and the beginnings of artificial intelligence. Bell Labs was also the birthplace of the UNIX computer operating system, C++ and numerous programming languages.

Bell Labs began in 1925 as the Bell Telephone Laboratories, a science and communication research arm of the Bell system with ownership evenly split between AT&T and Western Electric. At its prime, the lab produced Nobel Prize-winning discoveries and even helped the United States win World War II.

In the 1980s, AT&T Technologies took over the company, according to the Nokia Bell Labs website. In 1996, AT&T spun off most of Bell Laboratories and its equipment manufacturing business into Lucent Technologies, leading to a series of ownership changes.

Following a merger in 2007, Bell Laboratories and the former research and innovations division of Alcatel were combined into a single organization. And in 2016, Nokia acquired Alctael-Lucent, merging Bell Labs and Nokia’s research arm FutureWorks.

Bell Labs’ new headquarters will be located at the HELIX innovation center in New Brunswick. Originally known as “The Hub,” the HELIX innovation center will be a large complex in the city’s downtown on the site of the former Ferren Mall.

Nokia said the change in location will help Nokia Bell Labs to adapt and evolve to remain at the forefront of cutting-edge technology.

It is a major change for Bell Labs, which has been a fixture in Murray Hill and has had numerous satellite locations around New Jersey.

Bell Labs’ research center in Holmdel in Monmouth County was a center for major scientific developments, including cellular technology and the Horn Antenna used to confirm the Big Bang theory.

But the company closed the location in 2006 and it was eventually purchased and redeveloped into a 2-million-square-foot “work, live, play” campus called Bell Works, which includes entertainment, dining and fitness amenities. Bell Works was dubbed the most iconic building in New Jersey in 2018 by Architectural Digest.

It is unclear what will happen to the Murray Hill site once Bell Labs leaves. The mayors of New Providence and Berkeley Heights have both said they are working with each other, as well as state and local officials, to find a new use for the property.

“Our priority will be preserving open space, exploring recreation opportunities, protecting environmentally sensitive areas, ensuring that we meet our affordable requirements, and attracting commercial businesses that will support our community,” New Providence Mayor Al Morgan said in a statement.

‘A factory for ideas’

Science fiction author and futurist Arthur C. Clarke described Bell Labs as “a factory for ideas” when he visited the Murray Hill headquarters in the late 1950s.

“At first sight, when one comes upon it in its surprisingly rural setting, the Bell Telephone Laboratories’ main New Jersey site looks like a large and up-to-date factory, which in a sense it is. But it is a factory for ideas, and so its production lines are invisible,” Clarke wrote in the 1958 book “Voice Across the Sea” on the history of intercontinental communication.

Bell Labs opened its Murray Hill headquarters in 1942, just as the United States was engulfed in World War II.

The laboratory was essential to the war effort, conducting wartime research projects, according to newspaper articles from the time. Researchers worked on finding alternatives for scarce resources, including copper and quartz, which were difficult to get at the time.

Bell Labs helped develop synthetic crystals for the U.S. Navy’s sonar equipment, according to news articles. Sonar was instrumental in foiling the Nazi submarine campaign and enabled American subs to destroy Japanese shipping.

The physicists at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill were also responsible for creating the transistor in 1947, which transformed telecommunication and sparked a revolution in electronics. The transistor would later be a key component in the Telstar 1 satellite, the first active orbiting communication satellite to relay live television transmissions and phone signals between the United States and Europe.

“The satellite was built at a special Bell Laboratories plant in Hillsdale, New Jersey — underwent testing at Bell Labs in Murray Hill and Whippany — and the signals transmitted via Telstar from the ground station at Andover, Maine were picked up by the huge horn antenna at Bell Laboratories in Holmdel,” according to a July 1962 article in the Bridgeton Evening News.

Some of the inventors who spent time in Murray Hill won the Nobel Prize for their discoveries.

In 2009, two Bell Labs scientists who created the technology behind digital photography received the Nobel Prize in physics.

Willard S. Boyle, then 85, and George E. Smith, then 79, were honored for inventing the eye of the digital camera, a sensor able to transform light into a large number of pixels, the tiny points of color that are the building blocks of every digital image. The technology is found in devices ranging from the cheapest point-and-shoot digital camera to robotic medical instruments that let surgeons perform delicate operations deep inside the human body.

Bell Labs has also been the site of extraordinary achievements by pioneering Black scientists and engineers, according to research published by the American Institute of Physics.

READ MORE: A plan to open a $27M Black inventors museum in New Jersey

Physicist and inventor James West created the foil electret microphone — a small microphone that did not require a battery — which revolutionized the communications industry. Today, around 90% of microphone technology is based on the electret microphone and the invention has been used in hearing aids and space technology, according to the American Institute of Physics.

When West arrived at Bell Labs in 1957, there were just seven Black technical workers.

West and a small number of Black professionals at Bell Labs formed the Association of Black Laboratory Employees in 1970 to promote diversity in the STEM world. At the group’s urging, Bell Labs agreed to fund a first-of-its-kind fellowship program that recruited promising scientists of color, funded their PhD research, and paired them with a mentor already on Bell Labs’ staff.

The fellowship program went on to support alumni including James Hunt, who co-invented the Hunt-Szymanski algorithm which is widely employed in computer science and mathematics.

Even as the company began to change ownership, it continued to churn out new innovations.

In 1989, researchers at AT&T Bell Laboratories devised a new computer chip, called a photonic integrated circuit, capable of handling 2,048 transactions simultaneously, according to a story in The Star-Ledger.

The following year, scientists in Murray Hill confirmed the existence of a third state of matter, known as “quasicrystals,” according to a 1990 article in The Star-Ledger.

Bell Labs’ new home at the Helix in New Brunswick will break ground in 2025. The state-of-the-art facility will be developed by SJP Properties with support from the New Brunswick Development Corporation, the New Jersey Economic Development Authority and the city of New Brunswick.

Bell Labs does not expect to reduce its staff due to the move, a Nokia spokeswoman said.

The new building in New Brunswick will have “bespoke” laboratories build specifically for the needs of the Bell Labs researchers and their areas of focus, the company said.

“Ultimately, we want a facility that feels right for the next 100 years of Nokia Bell Labs,” Nishant Batra, chief strategy and technology officer at Nokia, said last month when the move was announced.

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Jackie Roman may be reached at [email protected].