Timeline Of Discoveries

In the interest of brevity, here are some of the many milestones in fiber optic research and development.

• Circa 2500 B.C. Earliest known glass
• Roman Era Glass drawn into fibers
• 1842 JacQues Babinet reports light guiding in water jet and bent glass rods (Paris)
• 1880 Alexander Graham Bell invents Photophone (Washington)
• 1880 William Wheeler invents system of light pipes to illuminate homes from and electric arc lamp in a basement (Concord, Mass.)
• 1888 Dr. Roth and Prof. Reuss of Vienna use bent glass rods to illuminate body cavities
• 1895 Henry C. Saint-Rene designs a system of bent glass rods for guiding light in an early television scheme (Crezancy, France)
• June 2, 1926 C. Francis Jenkins applies for a U.S. patent on a mechanical television receiver in which light passes along quartz rods in a rotating drum to form an image
• Oct. 15, 1926 John Logie Baird applies for British Patent on an array of parallel glass rods or hollow tubes to carry image in a mechanical television. He later built an array of hollow tubes.
• Dec. 30, 1926 Clarence W. Hansell outlines principals of the fiber-optic imaging bundle in his notes at the RCA Rocky Point Laboratory on Long Island. U.S. patent application Aug. 13, 1927.
• October 1951 Brian O'Brien ( University of Rochester) suggests to Abraham C.S. Van Heel ( Technical University of Delft) that applying transparent cladding would improve transmission of fibers in his imaging bundle.
• Sep. 1954 American optical hires Will Hicks to implement develop fiber-optic image scramblers, an idea proposed to the Central Intelligence Agency
• 1959 Working with Hicks, American Optical draws fibers so fine that they transmit only a single mode of light. Elias Snitzer recognizes the fibers as single-mode waveguides
• 1967 Maurer(Corning glass) recruits Peter Schultz from Corning's glass chemistry department to help make pure glasses
• 1968 Kao (University of New South Wales)and M. W. Jones measure intrinsic loss of bulk fused silica at 4 decibels per kilometer, the first evidence of ultratransparent glass, prompting Bell Labs to seriously consider fiber-optics
• 1971-1972 Focus shifts to graded-index fibers because single mode offers few advantages and many problems at 850 nanometers
• 1973 John MacChesney develops modified chemical vapor deposition process for fiber manufacture at Bell Labs.
• 1986 AT&T sends 1.7 billion bits per second through single mode fibers originally installed to carry 400 million bits per second.
• Feb. 1996 Fujitsu, NTT Labs, and Bell Labs all report sending one trillion bits per second through single optical fibers in separate experiments using different techniques.