[egypturnash]

Because sometimes when you put a bunch of smart people in one place and let them fuck around with whatever they think is interesting with no regards to obvious, immediate applications, interesting things happen. Some of these interesting things turn into ways to make a shit-ton of money.

Wikipedia's article on Bell Labs has a long list of stuff that came out of it. Some of it's stuff they made money off of, some is stuff other people made money off of. Some of it's stuff other people made money off of that ended up also creating a lot of traffic on Bell's networks.