# What is the most famous laboratory in history?

> Fourteen addresses where the work happened. Two are wooden sheds, one is a country house, one is a ring under the Swiss border.

*By YPB Team · Published September 1, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-most-famous-laboratory-in-history*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Los Alamos** — score 1000/1000
   The New Mexico site where the first nuclear weapons were designed under the Manhattan Project.
2. **Bell Labs** — score 875/1000
   The industrial lab that produced the transistor, the laser, information theory and nine Nobel Prizes.
3. **Fermilab** — score 700/1000
   America's particle accelerator laboratory outside Chicago, where the top quark was found.
4. **The Salk Institute** — score 577/1000
   La Jolla biology institute, as famous for Louis Kahn's concrete as for its research.
5. **Tesla's Wardenclyffe lab** — score 500/1000
   Tesla's Shoreham laboratory and tower, built for wireless power and abandoned unfinished.
6. **Edison's Menlo Park lab** — score 409/1000
   The New Jersey workshop of the 1870s where the phonograph and the practical light bulb were developed.
7. **The Cavendish Laboratory** — score 409/1000
   Cambridge physics department that produced the electron, the neutron and the structure of DNA.
8. **Jet Propulsion Laboratory** — score 409/1000
   NASA's robotic-spaceflight centre, responsible for the Mars rovers and the Voyagers.
9. **CERN** — score 300/1000
   The European particle physics lab where the Higgs boson was found and the web was written.
10. **Skunk Works** — score 300/1000
   Lockheed's secret shop behind the U-2, the SR-71 and the first stealth fighter.
11. **Bletchley Park** — score 300/1000
   The English country house where Enigma traffic was broken during the Second World War.
12. **Xerox PARC** — score 167/1000
   Palo Alto research centre that invented the graphical desktop, the mouse interface and Ethernet.
13. **The Pasteur Institute** — score 167/1000
   Paris foundation for infectious disease research, where HIV was identified in 1983.
14. **Woods Hole** — score 167/1000
   The Massachusetts oceanographic institution whose expedition found the wreck of the Titanic.

Tags: science, landmarks, historical