The family moved to Crawley, West Sussex, in 1957 where Bell attended Thomas Bennett comprehensive school.
[2][3] He then received a Sarnoff Fellowship to visit RCA Laboratories at Princeton, N.J. as a postdoctoral researcher working, for nine months, on liquid crystals using optical Raman scattering to determine the molecular ordering of the nematic phase.
[1] In 1974, Bell completed his postdoc and joined the technical staff at the RCA David Sarnoff Research Center.
He was instrumental in the unification of the competing formats that resulted in the introduction of DVD and was a member of IBM's digital media team focused on copy protection technologies.
[8][10][11] In September 2009, Bell co-founded WR Entertainment with six other founders James F. Cardwell, Ryan Wiik, Duane M. Eberlein, Øyvind Holm-Johnsen, Steinar Larsen and Michael Joseph Smith.