Fiber Optics

FIBER OPTICS

FIBER OPTICS. Narinder Kapany did not believe a high school teacher who told him that light could only travel in a straight line. His fascination with the idea set off a lifetime of research into fiber optics, which involves the use of reflection to transmit light through fibers of glass or plastic. In 1954, Kapany reported in the British journal Nature that he had successfully transmitted images through fiber optic bundles of transparent glass or plastic rods. Kapany's research built on more than 200 years of research and investigation into sending communications over translucent devices.

The American inventor Alexander Graham Bell dreamed of sending communications signals through the air via light impulses. He patented an optical telephone system in 1880, called the Photophone, but his invention of the landline telephone was more practical, thus receiving the lion's share of his time and effort. Further innovation in fiber optics was uneven until the 1920s when Clarence W. Hansell of the United States and John Logie Baird in England patented the idea of using hollow rods to transmit images for television systems. Despite the patent, the first person that established image transmission through a bundle of optical fibers was Heinrich Lamm, a medical student in Germany, who later moved to the United States to avoid persecution by the Nazis.

In 1955, after receiving a doctorate, Kapany journeyed to the United States to teach at the University of Rochester, in New York. In 1960, he moved to California's Silicon Valley and founded Optics Technology, taking it public in 1967. Another Northern California team, this one based at Stanford University, also worked on fiber optic research. Antoni E. Karbowiak and Charles K. Kao led a team examining the properties of fiber and concluded that impurities led to loss of transmission. The team attempted to figure out why light dimmed only a few yards down fiber optic strands, called "fiber attenuation." In 1966, after Karbowiak left Stanford, Kao developed a proposal for long-distance fiber optic communications over single-mode fibers. Although skeptics doubted Kao's research, he proved that fiber could be used for communications systems.

In the 1960s, Kao continued his theoretical and practical research, receiving twenty-nine patents for ideas on manufacturing pure glass fibers to splicing fibers to form communications lines. For their important early work, many observers have dubbed either Kapany or Kao as "the father of fiber optics."

Corning Glass Works produced the first commercial fiber optic cable in 1970. Company scientists used fused silica, an extremely pure material with a high melting point, to perfect fiber optic cable. Less than a decade later, in 1978, communications giant AT&T demonstrated the first fiber communications system. From this humble beginning, several million miles of fiber have been installed around the world, both on land and undersea.

In the early 1980s, when deregulation opened the telecommunications industry, telephony carriers built the national backbone of the industry on fiber optics. Soon, the technology spread from long-distance to other applications, ultimately setting the stage for nationwide fiber systems and the Internet.

In the mid-to late-1990s, the growth of the Internet and a "New Economy" based online solidified the idea that future communications networks would be built on fiber optics, or "broadband" technology. At the height of dot-com mania, companies rushed to connect Internet users to vast broadband networks, which offered the kind of high-speed access needed to fuel the growth of the wired economy.

After the dot-com economic bubble burst, however, the fiber optics industry virtually collapsed. Many formerly solid companies, such as Lucent and Nortel, foundered and startup money for new companies vanished. The fiber optic industry successfully increased bandwidth around the world, but was spread too thin in an effort to build new systems. When an economic recession hit the United States in the early 2000s, many companies were extended beyond their means.

Fiber optic data transmissions carried over silica fiber is at the heart of worldwide communications. The high bandwidth, light-carrying medium transports voice, video, and data and is the keystone of the Internet. Since the 1980s, communications companies have placed more than 300 million miles of fiber optic cable in the ground. However, less than 10 percent of this wiring is being used, eliminating any hope for profitability among many companies. These companies overextended their credit limits to install the fiber optic lines, but could not get enough users "lit" to justify the expense.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hecht, Jeff. City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Hitz, Breck, James J. Ewing, and Jeff Hecht. Introduction to Laser Technology. 3d ed. New York: Wiley-IEEE Press, 2001.

Palais, Joseph C. Fiber Optic Communications. 4th ed. Garden City, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1998.

Bob Batchelor

See also Computers and Computer Industry ; Telecommunications .