The Optical Fiber

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

In 1965, the glass fiber then available for guiding light lost most of its signal within a few meters, far too lossy for any real communications use. Charles Kao and George Hockham, working at Standard Telephones and Cables, argued that the loss was not a property of glass itself but of the impurities inside it, and that a fiber purified below twenty decibels of loss per kilometer would be practical for telecommunications. The claim was bold enough that much of the field doubted it. Kao spent years afterward pressing glassmakers to test the idea rather than dismiss it, and in 2009 the wait was rewarded: he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for a proposal that had taken the telecommunications industry most of two decades to fully believe and adopt. The proof that Kao and Hockham were right did not come from them. It came from a glass company that had never made a telephone cable in its life.

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.