2015-09-27 40 -74

Location

The Bayonet Farm, in Holmdel near an ex-Bell Labs campus

Participants

OtherJack

Plans

Friday morning at work. The point looked too far away to attempt, deep in the wilds of New Jersey, but I zoomed in on the satellite picture out of curiosity. Wait, what's that perfect double-ellipse of roads and ponds a couple fields north of the hash, that looks like it landed from outer space? I zoomed in further and... "Bell Laboratories Rd"! Whoa! This is where modern electronics all got started with the transistor in the late 1940s, among other really important discoveries. A day later I realized I had to go there.

Consulting train schedules and bike maps, I decided it was feasible and legal to take my bike on NJ Transit to Hazlet or Middletown stations, and bike a few miles to the hash-farm... followed (hopefully) by a trip around the corner to Bell Labs. Currently planning ETA 3:50 or so at the point, but flexible.

-- OtherJack (talk) 22:33, 26 September 2015 (EDT)

Expedition

Made the point, and made Bell Labs! Now awaiting the train back to the city. Will upload photos when I get home, since geohash droid upload is acting funny... -- OtherJack (talk) 17:26, 27 September 2015 (EDT)

Notes on the implementations page point to some sort of Captcha problem; the reported error is some sort of XML. I took a screen shot of it on 2015-09-16 47 -122. --Thomcat (talk) 20:51, 27 September 2015 (EDT)

Yes, I had that same error... hopefully they'll fix it! Anyway, it turned out not to be THE Bell Labs, but was still a cool and interesting expedition.

Part 1: The hash

After a hurried and somewhat late departure, I rode my bike the two minutes to the nearest subway stop, carried it down the stairs, and headed for Penn Station. (I originally meant to bike all the way to the station of course, but with the delay it was too dicey.) Made it in plenty of time and got the 2:10 New Jersey Transit train to Middletown. Passed over Raritan Bay and a nice stretch of coastline en route, and met a lady with very particular apple preferences.

It had been clear and sunny in the city, but by the time my bike and I got out in Middletown at 3:25 or so, the sky looked gray and threatening. Rain wasn't in the forecast though, and the local radar looked clear, so I set out... and in the end I didn't get a single drop. Science works sometimes. (I guess this was the very edge of the big weather system that was dousing Virginia and the Carolinas.)

The roads were decent two-lane blacktops, the scenery pretty with gentle curves, hilly but not too hilly, a lot of trees and vegetation, and houses on big lots. It was kind of suburban and rural at the same time. Soon I noticed other cyclists passing in the opposite direction... and then more, and more, and more, and more. Was there some sort of organized ride going on?

I turned a corner, and indeed there was: A little tent village with trucks and snack tables was set up in a park-district parking lot and the cyclists were all stopped there getting their stomachs full and their bladders emptied. There was even a fountain of melted chocolate to coat your half-bananas with! Unfortunately I'd just eaten on the train and wasn't hungry. My dad had just texted me a picture of his own organized-spandex-ride rest stop 1000km away in 41,-86 that day, coincidentally enough.

After using the convenient porta-john, I pressed on to the hash, which was in a more rural area of farm fields. I knew it was between Bayonet Farm, a town-owned property for weddings and the like, and the next property over. Google street view had made it look like easy access, and indeed the simple wooden fence had a big gap you could easily walk through. I leaned my bike on the inside of the fence and started in. I hardly even needed the heavy jeans I'd worn for this purpose.

To make it even easier, the field turned out to be grass (not crops) and was clearly also part of the public Bayonet Farm property since it had wide-open mowed passages to it in a couple places (rather than a fence or an overgrown strip.) No longer worried about either plants or property owners, I strode north about 300 meters and easily found the hash after minimal dancing in the field. The view of the old wooden farm buildings on the neighbor property was really cute, too.

I turned east to briefly explore the main part of Bayonet Farm, with its wedding-buildings and hedges, and then it was back out to the road and my trusty bike for...

Part 2: Bell Labs!

To reach the campus that I thought was the site of the legendary Bell Labs of yore, I had to climb, steeply at times. However, I was rewarded when I turned left onto Bell Laboratories Road, which was marked with a small, not-very-menacing "Private Road" sign and a wide-open gate. This road was also much flatter, wider, grander, and better-landscaped than the regular roads I'd been riding on, but obviously hadn't been paved in a while and was full of gnats from the surrounding swamps. I could already sense the eerie abandonment.

When I rounded the curve, I was greeted by a massive, beautiful, perfectly symmetrical, and almost perfectly empty campus. A vast elliptical area of paved utterly empty parking lot, studded with a monoculture of shortish but pleasing hardwoods just beginning their autumn color, surrounded a minimalist glass-and-steel rectangular masterpiece of a building. (OK, you can just look at the picture when I upload it.) All was quiet but for cars on the distant main road, and the occasional honking of the geese that had settled the surrounding acres and acres of grass. There was a single black SUV parked over on the other side of the ellipse, with a window down.

For a while I just stood there in awe of the emptiness, picturing the activity that would have been here back in its heyday. Eventually though, I remembered to actually explore the place. The side of the building nearest me turned out to have an open outer glass door due to construction, but the inner glass door was locked. I could see the huge empty boxy atrium inside though. A sign indicated that all visitors should go to the main entrance, so I rode around to the north side of the vast building. This area was better maintained, with newly planted flowers and several nice cars in front.

When I came up the wide concrete steps to the front doors, a security officer strode out from his desk in another identical atrium and explained that I couldn't come inside. But he seemed to have no problem that I was exploring the exterior and taking photos. It seemed like they were trying to re-develop the place as office space after Bell had abandoned it - there were construction sites in various spots around the building, though they were not active on Sunday.

After many more photos I rolled out the west exit towards Roberts Rd, carrying my bike over a little overgrown trail around the closed and posted exit gate. (Good thing I didn't try to come in this way!) Other than the status of the gate, though, the west end of the giant campus looked precisely the same as the east. I didn't even need to take photos of it - they wouldn't have been distinguishable.

Finally I headed home via 1) an exhilarating ride on newly paved rolling roads back to Hazlet station, 2) NJ Transit back to the city, 3) two great New York slices at 2 Bros on 38th, and 4) the final four miles pedaling up Central Park West. It was only then, preparing to write this up, that I learned it wasn't the main, famous Bell Labs campus! That facility was in Murray Hill, which is in a totally different part of the state. Apparently Bell Labs later (post-1955) built a zillion other huge campuses all over NJ, and this was just one of them. I'd thought the architecture looked awfully forward-looking for 1940! Turns out it was Eero Saarinen in 1959.

So, I did not find the birthplace of the transistor after all. (They did have an old-school transistor-shaped water tower, though!)

-- OtherJack (talk) 02:49, 28 September 2015 (EDT)