This is the famous Horn Antenna at what was once AT&T Bell Labs which the physicists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson used to detect the cosmic microwave radiation generated by the birth of our part of the universe.
They were not looking for it. A group of physicists at nearby Princeton University (29 miles west) were. And got scooped. Eventually the two groups learned of each other's work and published together.
In 1978 Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery.
Bell Labs was the research arm of AT&T, which had a government granted monopoly on telephone service in the United States until 1982. A consequence of being a monopoly meant that they could invest in basic science and thus today we have such things as the transistor, the C programing language and derivatives, the UNIX operating system and variants including Linux and macOS (an iOS), and more. But the breakup of the Bell System in '82 signaled the end of an era. Today, Bell Labs is owned by the Finish company Nokia, once a cellphone powerhouse.
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Side note #1: At the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum the is a metal trap, owned by Robert Wilson, and used to catch a pair of pigeons which had taken up residence in the antenna. When Penzias and Wilson were trying to determine what the noise they were picking up was they discovered the nesting pigeons and needed to remove them and their droppings (described by Penzias in the scientific paper as a "white dielectric material"). But the noise remained. The noise was of course the cosmic microwave background radiation, the echo of the Big Bang.
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Side note #2: Once upon a time I was a college student, working toward a degree in Physics (got it, BS RPI '82). And Penzias came to give a talk. I remember little of the talk. I do remember talking with him afterward, and hitting him up for a summer job at Bell Labs. Alas, there were no jobs to be had.
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