How Corning Turned Glass Into a Wire

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Corning Glass Works was not in the telephone business in 1970, but three of its researchers, Robert Maurer, Donald Keck and Peter Schultz, took Charles Kao's contested claim seriously: that a purer glass fiber could carry light with almost no loss over real distances. Their first working fiber, doped with titanium, reached seventeen decibels of loss per kilometer, just inside the twenty decibel threshold Kao and Hockham had proposed as the line between a laboratory curiosity and a usable cable. It was not long before they did better still, switching to a germanium dioxide dopant and cutting the loss to four decibels per kilometer, four times clearer than the threshold that had seemed barely reachable five years earlier. What Corning had built was not just a better wire. Glass fiber this clear could carry more information over a longer distance than any copper cable of the same size, and within a generation it had become the physical layer under nearly every long distance telephone call and internet connection on Earth.