It’s worth remembering this was Bell Labs. It was a research and development organization. These weren’t line maintenance people and telephone operators free to create things during their work. They did a lot of applied research and a lot of pure research at Bell Labs back in the day.
Lasers, fiber optics, underseas cables, communication satellites, transistors, discovery of the cosmic microwave background, and more came out of that organization. It was largely supported by the consent deal between the US government and AT&T that allowed them a telephone monopoly so long as their non-telephone research and inventions didn’t get marketed separately. So they’d create things that helped the company and the rest of the world, and then just release those things to the rest of the world.
Lasers, fiber optics, underseas cables, communication satellites, transistors, discovery of the cosmic microwave background, and more came out of that organization. It was largely supported by the consent deal between the US government and AT&T that allowed them a telephone monopoly so long as their non-telephone research and inventions didn’t get marketed separately. So they’d create things that helped the company and the rest of the world, and then just release those things to the rest of the world.