By Jeff Hecht Reproduced from Fiber Optics Technician's Handbook, by Jim Hayes, Delmar Publishers, Albany, New York.

For the full history of fiber optics, see my book, City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics, Oxford University Press, New York, 1999. (ISBN 0-19-510818-3) A book in the Sloan Foundation Technology series. For near-immediate gratification, order now from Amazon.com. Optical communication systems date back two centuries, to the "optical telegraph" that French engineer Claude Chappe invented in the 1790s. His system was a series of semaphores mounted on towers, where human operators relayed messages from one tower to the next. It beat hand-carried messages hands down, but by the mid-19th century was replaced by the electric telegraph, leaving a scattering of "Telegraph Hills" as its most visible legacy. Alexander Graham Bell patented an optical telephone system, which he called the Photophone, in 1880, but his earlier invention, the telephone, proved far more practical. He dreamed of sending signals through the air, but the atmosphere didn't transmit light as reliably as wires carried electricity. In the decades that followed, light was used for a few special applications, such as signalling between ships, but otherwise optical communications, like the experimental Photophone Bell donated to the Smithsonian Institution, languished on the shelf. In the intervening years, a new technology slowly took root that would ultimately solve the problem of optical transmission, although it was a long time before it was adapted for communications. It depended on the phenomenon of total internal reflection, which can confine light in a material surrounded by other materials with lower refractive index, such as glass in air. In the 1840s, Swiss physicist Daniel Collodon and French physicist Jacques Babinet showed that light could be guided along jets of water for fountain displays. British physicist John Tyndall popularized light guiding in a demonstration he first used in 1854, guiding light in a jet of water flowing from a tank. By the turn of the century, inventors realized that bent quartz rods could carry light, and patented them as dental illuminators. By the 1940s, many doctors used illuminated plexiglass tongue depressors. Optical fibers went a step further. They are essentially transparent rods of glass or plastic stretched so they are long and flexible. During the 1920s, John Logie Baird in England and Clarence W. Hansell in the United States patented the idea of using arrays of hollow pipes or transparent rods to transmit images for television or facsimile systems. However, the first person known to have demonstrated image

transmission through a bundle of optical fibers was Heinrich Lamm, than a medical student in Munich. His goal was to look inside inaccessible parts of the body, and in a 1930 paper he reported transmitting the image of a light bulb filament through a short bundle. However, the unclad fibers transmitted images poorly, and the rise of the Nazis forced Lamm, a Jew, to move to America and abandon his dreams of becoming a professor of medicine. In 1951, Holger Mller [or Moeller, the o has a slash through it] Hansen applied for a Danish patent on fiber-optic imaging. However, the Danish patent office denied his application, citing the Baird and Hansell patents, and Mller Hansen was unable to interest companies in his invention. Nothing more was reported on fiber bundles until 1954, when Abraham van Heel of the Technical University of Delft in Holland and Harold. H. Hopkins and Narinder Kapany of Imperial College in London separately announced imaging bundles in the prestigious British journal Nature. Neither van Heel nor Hopkins and Kapany made bundles that could carry light far, but their reports the fiber optics revolution. The crucial innovation was made by van Heel, stimulated by a conversation with the American optical physicist Brian O'Brien. All earlier fibers were "bare," with total internal reflection at a glass-air interface. van Heel covered a bare fiber or glass or plastic with a transparent cladding of lower refractive index. This protected the total-reflection surface from contamination, and greatly reduced crosstalk between fibers. The next key step was development of glassclad fibers, by Lawrence Curtiss, then an undergraduate at the University of Michigan working part-time on a project to develop an endoscope to examine the inside of the stomach with physician Basil Hirschowitz, physicist C. Wilbur Peters. (Will Hicks, then working at the American Optical Co., made glass-clad fibers at about the same time, but his group lost a bitterly contested patent battle.) By 1960, glass-clad fibers had attenuation of about one decibel per meter, fine for medical imaging, but much too high for communications. Meanwhile, telecommunications engineers were seeking more transmission bandwidth. Radio and microwave frequencies were in heavy use, so they looked to higher frequencies to carry loads they expected to continue increasing with the growth of television and telephone traffic. Telephone companies thought video telephones lurked just around the corner, and would escalate bandwidth demands even further. The cutting edge of communications research were millimeter-wave systems, in which hollow pipes served as waveguides to circumvent poor atmospheric transmission at tens of gigahertz, where wavelengths were in the millimeter range. Even higher optical frequencies seemed a logical next step in 1958 to Alec Reeves, the forward-looking engineer at Britain's Standard Telecommunications Laboratories who invented digital pulse-code modulation before World War II. Other people

climbed on the optical communications bandwagon when the laser was invented in 1960. The July 22, 1960 issue of Electronics magazine introduced its report on Theodore Maiman's demonstration of the first laser by saying "Usable communications channels in the electromagnetic spectrum may be extended by development of an experimental optical-frequency amplifier." Serious work on optical communications had to wait for the continuouswave heliumneon laser. While air is far more transparent at optical wavelengths than to millimeter waves, researchers soon found that rain, haze, clouds, and atmospheric turbulence limited the reliability of long-distance atmospheric laser links. By 1965, it was clear that major technical barriers remained for both millimeter-wave and laser telecommunications. Millimeter waveguides had low loss, although only if they were kept precisely straight; developers thought the biggest problem was the lack of adequate repeaters. Optical waveguides were proving to be a problem. Stewart Miller's group at Bell Telephone Laboratories was working on a system of gas lenses to focus laser beams along hollow waveguides for long-distance telecommunications. However, most of the telecommunications industry thought the future belonged to millimeter waveguides. Optical fibers had attracted some attention because they were analogous in theory to plastic dielectric waveguides used in certain microwave applications. In 1961, Elias Snitzer at American Optical, working with Hicks at Mosaic Fabrications (now Galileo Electro-Optics), demonstrated the similarity by drawing fibers with cores so small they carried light in only one waveguide mode. However virtually everyone considered fibers too lossy for communications; attenuation of a decibel per meter was fine for looking inside the body, but communications operated over much longer distances, and required loss no more than 10 or 20 decibels per kilometer. One small group did not dismiss fibers so easily -- a team at Standard Telecommunications Laboratories initially headed by Antoni E. Karbowiak, which worked under Reeves to study optical waveguides for communications. Karbowiak soon was joined by a young engineer born in Shanghai, Charles K. Kao. Kao took a long, hard look at fiber attenuation. He collected samples from fiber makers, and carefully investigated the properties of bulk glasses. His research convinced him that the high losses of early fibers were due to impurities, not to silica glass itself. In the midst of this research, in December 1964, Karbowiak left STL to become chair of electrical engineering at the University of New South Wales in Australia, and Kao succeeded him as manager of optical communications research. With George Hockham, another young STL engineer who specialized in antenna theory, Kao worked out a proposal for long-distance communications over singlemode fibers. Convinced that fiber loss should be reducible below 20 decibels per

kilometer, they presented a paper at a London meeting of the Institution of Electrical Engineers. The April 1, 1966 issue of Laser Focus noted Kao's proposal:

"At the IEE meeting in London last month, Dr. C. K. Kao observed that shortdistance runs have shown that the experimental optical waveguide developed by Standard Telecommunications Laboratories has an information-carrying capacity ... of one gigacycle, or equivalent to about 200 tv channels or more than 200,000 telephone channels. He described STL's device as consisting of a glass core about three or four microns in diameter, clad with a coaxial layer of another glass having a refractive index about one percent smaller than that of the core. Total diameter of the waveguide is between 300 and 400 microns. Surface optical waves are propagated along the interface between the two types of glass." "According to Dr. Kao, the fiber is relatively strong and can be easily supported. Also, the guidance surface is protected from external influences. ... the waveguide has a mechanical bending radius low enough to make the fiber almost completely flexible. Despite the fact that the best readily available lowloss material has a loss of about 1000 dB/km, STL believes that materials having losses of only tens of decibels per kilometer will eventually be developed." Kao and Hockham's detailed analysis was published in the July 1966 Proceedings of the Institution of Electrical Engineers. Their daring forecast that fiber loss could be reduced below 20 dB/km attracted the interest of the British Post Office, which then operated the British telephone network. F. F. Roberts, an engineering manager at the Post Office Research Laboratory (then at Dollis Hill in London), saw the possibilities, and persuaded others at the Post Office. His boss, Jack Tillman, tapped a new research fund of 12 million pounds to study ways to decrease fiber loss. With Kao almost evangelically promoting the prospects of fiber communications, and the Post Office interested in applications, laboratories around the world began trying to reduce fiber loss. It took four years to reach Kao's goal of 20 dB/km, and the route to success proved different than many had expected. Most groups tried to purify the compound glasses used for standard optics, which are easy to melt and draw into fibers. At the Corning Glass Works (now Corning Inc.), Robert Maurer, Donald Keck and Peter Schultz started with fused silica, a material that can be made extremely pure, but has a high melting point and a low refractive index. They made cylindrical performs by depositing purified materials from the vapor phase, adding carefully controlled levels of dopants to make the refractive index of the core slightly higher

than that of the cladding, without raising attenuation dramatically. In September 1970, they announced they had made single-mode fibers with attenuation at the 633nanometer helium-neon line below 20 dB/km. The fibers were fragile, but tests at the new British Post Office Research Laboratories facility in Martlesham Heath confirmed the low loss. The Corning breakthrough was among the most dramatic of many developments that opened the door to fiber-optic communications. In the same year, Bell Labs and a team at the Ioffe Physical Institute in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) made the first semiconductor diode lasers able to emit continuouswave at room temperature. Over the next several years, fiber losses dropped dramatically, aided both by improved fabrication methods and by the shift to longer wavelengths where fibers have inherently lower attenuation. Early single-mode fibers had cores several micrometers in diameter, and in the early 1970s that bothered developers. They doubted it would be possible to achieve the micrometer-scale tolerances needed to couple light efficiently into the tiny cores from light sources, or in splices or connectors. Not satisfied with the low bandwidth of stepindex multimode fiber, they concentrated on multi-mode fibers with a refractive-index gradient between core and cladding, and core diameters of 50 or 62.5 micrometers. The first generation of telephone field trials in 1977 used such fibers to transmit light at 850 nanometers from gallium-aluminum-arsenide laser diodes. Those first-generation systems could transmit light several kilometers without repeaters, but were limited by loss of about 2 dB/km in the fiber. A second generation soon appeared, using new InGaAsP lasers which emitted at 1.3 micrometer, where fiber attenuation was as low as 0.5 dB/km, and pulse dispersion was somewhat lower than at 850 nm. Development of hardware for the first transatlantic fiber cable showed that single-mode systems were feasible, so when deregulation opened the longdistance phone market in the early 1980s, the carriers built national backbone systems of single-mode fiber with 1300-nm sources. That technology has spread into other telecommunication applications, and remains the standard for most fiber systems. However, a new generation of single-mode systems is now beginning to find applications in submarine cables and systems serving large numbers of subscribers. They operate at 1.55 micrometers, where fiber loss is 0.2 to 0.3 dB/km, allowing even longer repeater spacings. More important, erbium-doped optical fibers can serve as optical amplifiers at that wavelength, avoiding the need for electro-optic regenerators. Submarine cables with optical amplifiers can operate at speeds to 5 gigabits per second, and can be upgraded from lower speeds simply to changing terminal electronics. Optical amplifiers also are attractive for fiber systems delivering the same

signals to many terminals, because the fiber amplifiers can compensate for losses in dividing the signals among many terminals. The biggest challenge remaining for fiber optics is economic. Today telephone and cable television companies can cost-justify installing fiber links to remote sites serving tens to a few hundreds of customers. However, terminal equipment remains too expensive to justify installing fibers all the way to homes, at least for present services. Instead, cable and phone companies run twisted wire pairs or coaxial cables from optical network units to individual homes. Time will see how long that lasts.

History of Fiber Optics

As far back as Roman times, glass has been drawn into fibers. Yet, it was not until the 1790s that the French Chappe brothers invented the first "optical telegraph." It was a system comprised of a series of lights mounted on towers where operators would relay a message from one tower to the next. Over the course of the next century great strides were made in optical science.

John Tyndall, British physicist, demonstrated that light signals could be bent. In the 1840s, physicists Daniel Collodon and Jacques Babinet showed that light could be directed along jets of water for fountain displays. In 1854, John Tyndall, a British physicist, demonstrated that light could travel through a curved stream of water thereby proving that a light signal could be bent. He proved this by setting up a tank of water with a pipe that

ran out of one side. As water flowed from the pipe, he shone a light into the tank into the stream of water. As the water fell, an arc of light followed the water down. Alexander Graham Bell patented an optical telephone system called the photophone in 1880. His earlier invention, the telephone, proved to be more realistic however. That same year, William Wheeler invented a system of light pipes lined with a highly reflective coating that illuminated homes by using light from an electric arc lamp placed in the basement and directing the light around the home with the pipes.

Sketch of a telephone system by Alexander Graham Bell. Bell patented an optical telephone system which assisted in the advancement of optical technology. Doctors Roth and Reuss, of Vienna, used bent glass rods to illuminate body cavities in 1888. French engineer Henry Saint-Rene designed a system of bent glass rods for guiding light images seven years later in an early attempt at television. In 1898, American David Smith applied for a patent on a dental illuminator using a curved glass rod. In the 1920s, John Logie Baird patented the idea of using arrays of transparent rods to transmit images for television and Clarence W. Hansell did the same for facsimiles. Heinrich Lamm, however, was the first person to transmit an image through a bundle of optical fibers in 1930. It was an image of a light bulb filament. His intent was to look inside inaccessible parts of the body, but the rise of the Nazis forced Lamm, a Jew, to move to America and abandon his dream of becoming a professor of medicine. His effort to file a patent was denied because of Hansell's British patent. In 1951, Holger Moeller applied for a Danish patent on fiber-optic imaging in which he proposed cladding glass or plastic fibers with a transparent low-index material, but was denied because of Baird and Hansell's patents. Three years later, Abraham Van Heel and Harold H. Hopkins presented imaging bundles in the British journal Nature at separate times. Van Heel later produced a cladded fiber system that greatly reduced signal interference and crosstalk between fibers. Also in 1954, the "maser" was developed by Charles Townes and his colleagues at Columbia University. Maser stands for "microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation." The laser was introduced in 1958 as a efficient source of light. The concept was introduced by Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow to show that masers could be made to operate in optical and infrared regions. Basically, light is reflected back and forth in an energized medium to generate amplified light as opposed to excited molecules of gas

amplified to generate radio waves, as is the case with the maser. Laser stands for "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation."

A helium-neon gas laser (He-Ne) is tested in a laboratory setting. The laser tube is made from lead glass- the same glass used in neon signs. Image courtesy of J&K Lasers. In 1960, the first continuously operating helium-neon gas laser is invented and tested. That same year an operable laser was invented which used a synthetic pink ruby crystal as the medium and produced a pulse of light. In 1961, Elias Snitzer of American Optical published a theoretical description of single mode fibers whose core would be so small it could carry light with only one wave-guide mode. Snitzer was able to demonstrate a laser directed through a thin glass fiber which was sufficient for medical applications, but for communication applications the light loss became too great. Charles Kao and George Hockham, of Standard Communications Laboratories in England, published a paper in 1964 demonstrating, theoretically, that light loss in existing glass fibers could be decreased dramatically by removing impurities. In 1970, the goal of making single mode fibers with attenuation less then 20dB/km was reached by scientists at Corning Glass Works. This was achieved through doping silica glass with titanium. Also in 1970, Morton Panish and Izuo Hayashi of Bell Laboratories, along with a group from the Ioffe Physical Institute in Leningrad, demonstrated a semiconductor diode laser capable of emitting continuous waves at room temperature.

Military scientists have utilized laser technology for variety of military applications. In 1973, Bell Laboratories developed a modified chemical vapor deposition process that heats chemical vapors and oxygen to form ultra-transparent glass that can be mass-produced into low-loss optical fiber. This process still remains the standard for fiber-optic cable manufacturing.

The first non-experimental fiber-optic link was installed by the Dorset (UK) police in 1975. Two years later, the first live telephone traffic through fiber optics occurs in Long Beach, California. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, telephone companies began to use fibers extensively to rebuild their communications infrastructure. Sprint was founded on the first nationwide, 100 percent digital, fiber-optic network in the mid-1980s. The erbium-doped fiber amplifier, which reduced the cost of long-distance fiber systems by eliminating the need for optical-electrical-optical repeaters, was invented in 1986 by David Payne of the University of Southampton and Emmanuel Desurvire at Bell Labratories. Based on Desurvire's optimized laser amplification technology, the first transatlantic telephone cable went into operation in 1988. In 1991, Desurvire and Payne demonstrated optical amplifiers that were built into the fiber-optic cable itself. The alloptic system could carry 100 times more information than cable with electronic amplifiers. Also in 1991, photonic crystal fiber was developed. This fiber guides light by means of diffraction from a periodic structure rather then total internal reflection which allows power to be carried more efficiently then with conventional fibers therefore improving performance. The first all-optic fiber cable, TPC-5, that uses optical amplifiers was laid across the Pacific Ocean in 1996. The following year the Fiber Optic Link Around the Globe (FLAG) became the longest single-cable network in the world and provided the infrastructure for the next generation of Internet applications. Today, a variety of industries including the medical, military, telecommunication, industrial, data storage, networking, and broadcast industries are able to apply and use fiber optic technology in a variety of applications.

The Birth of Fiber Optics

Fiber optics is the contained transmission of light through long fiber rods of either glass or plastics.

By Mary Bellis

In 1854, John Tyndall demonstrated to the Royal Society that light could be conducted through a curved stream of water, proving that a light signal could be bent.

More on Fiber Optics Fiber Optics To read or research more on fiber optics, history, timelines, glossary of fiber optic terms, fiber optics industry magazines and associations, FAQs, and biographies of the inventors.

In 1880, Alexander Graham Bell invented his 'Photophone', which transmitted a voice signal on a beam of light. Bell focused sunlight with a mirror and then talked into a mechanism that vibrated the mirror. At the receiving end, a detector picked up the vibrating beam and decoded it back into a voice the same way a phone did with electrical signals. Many things - a cloudy day for instance -- could interfere with the Photophone, causing Bell to stop any further research with this invention. In 1880, William Wheeler invented a system of light pipes lined with a highly reflective coating that illuminated homes by using light from an electric arc lamp placed in the basement and directing the light around the home with the pipes. In 1888, the medical team of Roth and Reuss of Vienna used bent glass rods to illuminate body cavities. In 1895, French engineer Henry Saint-Rene designed a system of bent glass rods for guiding light images in an attempt at early television. In 1898, American David Smith applied for a patent on a bent glass rod device to be used as a surgical lamp. In the 1920's, Englishman John Logie Baird and American Clarence W. Hansell patented the idea of using arrays of transparent rods to transmit images for television and facsimiles respectively. Fiber optics is the contained transmission of light through long fiber rods of either glass or plastics. The light travels by a process of internal reflection. The core medium of the rod or cable is more reflective than the material surrounding the core. That causes the light to keep being reflected back into the core where it can continue to travel down the fiber. Fiber optic cables are used for transmitting voice, images and other data at close to the speed of light. In 1930, German medical student, Heinrich Lamm was the first person to assemble a bundle of optical fibers to carry an image. Lamm's goal was to look inside inaccessible parts of the body. During his experiments, he reported transmitting the image of a light bulb. The image was of poor quality, however. His effort to file a patent was denied because of Hansell's British patent. n 1954, Dutch scientist Abraham Van Heel and British scientist Harold. H. Hopkins

separately wrote papers on imaging bundles. Hopkins reported on imaging bundles of unclad fibers while Van Heel reported on simple bundles of clad fibers. He covered a bare fiber with a transparent cladding of a lower refractive index. This protected the fiber reflection surface from outside distortion and greatly reduced interference between fibers. At the time, the greatest obstacle to a viable use of fiber optics was in achieving the lowest signal (light) loss. In 1961, Elias Snitzer of American Optical published a theoretical description of single mode fibers, a fiber with a core so small it could carry light with only one wave-guide mode. Snitzer's idea was okay for a medical instrument looking inside the human, but the fiber had a light loss of one decibel per meter. Communications devices needed to operate over much longer distances and required a light loss of no more than 10 or 20 decibels (measurement of light) per kilometer. In 1964, a critical (and theoretical) specification was identified by Dr. C.K. Kao for longrange communication devices, the 10 or 20 decibels of light loss per kilometer standard. Kao also illustrated the need for a purer form of glass to help reduce light loss. In 1970, one team of researchers began experimenting with fused silica, a material capable of extreme purity with a high melting point and a low refractive index. Corning Glass researchers Robert Maurer, Donald Keck and Peter Schultz invented fiber optic wire or "Optical Waveguide Fibers" (patent #3,711,262) capable of carrying 65,000 times more information than copper wire, through which information carried by a pattern of light waves could be decoded at a destination even a thousand miles away. The team had solved the problems presented by Dr. Kao. In 1975, the United States Government decided to link the computers in the NORAD headquarters at Cheyenne Mountain using fiber optics to reduce interference. In 1977, the first optical telephone communication system was installed about 1.5 miles under downtown Chicago, and each optical fiber carried the equivalent of 672 voice channels. Today more than 80 percent of the world's long-distance traffic is carried over optical fiber cables, 25 million kilometers of the cable Maurer, Keck and Schultz designed has been installed world wide.

The Nineteenth Century

Figure 1 - John Tyndall's Experiment.

In 1870, John Tyndall, using a jet of water that flowed from one container to another and a beam of light, demonstrated that light used internal reflection to follow a specific path. As water poured out through the spout of the first container, Tyndall directed a beam of sunlight at the path of the water. The light, as seen by the audience, followed a zigzag path inside the curved path of the water. This simple experiment, illustrated in Figure 1, marked the first research into the guided transmission of light. William Wheeling, in 1880, patented a method of light transfer called "piping light". Wheeling believed that by using mirrored pipes branching off from a single source of illumination, i.e. a bright electric arc, he could send the light to many different rooms in the same way that water, through plumbing, is carried throughout buildings today. Due to the ineffectiveness of Wheeling's idea and to the concurrent introduction of Edison's highly successful incandescent light bulb, the concept of piping light never took off. That same year, Alexander Graham Bell developed an optical voice transmission system he called the photophone. The photophone used free-space light to carry the human voice 200 meters. Specially placed mirrors reflected sunlight onto a diaphragm attached within the mouthpiece of the photophone. At the other end, mounted within a parabolic reflector, was a light-sensitive selenium resistor. This resistor was connected to a battery that was, in turn, wired to a telephone receiver. As one spoke into the photophone, the illuminated diaphragm vibrated, casting various intensities of light onto the selenium resistor. The changing intensity of light altered the current that passed through the telephone receiver which then converted the light back into speech. Bell believed this invention was superior to the telephone because it did not need wires to connect the transmitter and receiver. Today, free-space optical links find extensive use in metropolitan applications.

The Twentieth Century

Figure 2 - Optical Fiber with Cladding.

Fiber optic technology experienced a phenomenal rate of progress in the second half of the twentieth century. Early success came during the 1950's with the development of the fiberscope. This image-transmitting device, which used the first practical all-glass fiber, was concurrently devised by Brian O'Brien at the American Optical Company and Narinder Kapany (who first coined the term 'fiber optics' in 1956) and colleagues at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London. Early allglass fibers experienced excessive optical loss, the loss of the light signal as it traveled the fiber, limiting transmission distances. This motivated scientists to develop glass fibers that included a separate glass coating. The innermost region of the fiber, or core, was used to transmit the light, while the glass coating, or cladding, prevented the light from leaking out of the core by reflecting the light within the boundaries of the core. This concept is explained by Snell's Law which states that the angle at which light is reflected is dependent on the refractive indices of the two materials ' in this case, the core and the cladding. The lower refractive index of the cladding (with respect to the core) causes the light to be angled back into the core as illustrated in Figure 2. The fiberscope quickly found application inspecting welds inside reactor vessels and combustion chambers of jet aircraft engines as well as in the medical field. Fiberscope technology has evolved over the years to make laparoscopic surgery one of the great medical advances of the twentieth century. The development of laser technology was the next important step in the establishment of the industry of fiber optics. Only the laser diode (LD) or its lower-power cousin, the light-emitting diode (LED), had the potential to generate large amounts of light in a spot tiny enough to be useful for fiber optics. In 1957, Gordon Gould popularized the idea of using lasers when, as a graduate student at Columbia University, he described the laser as an intense light source. Shortly after, Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow at Bell Laboratories supported the laser in scientific circles. Lasers went through several generations including the development of the ruby laser and the helium-neon laser in 1960. Semiconductor lasers were first realized in 1962; these lasers are the type most widely used in fiber optics today. Because of their higher modulation frequency capability, the importance of lasers as a means of carrying information did not go unnoticed by communications engineers. Light has an information-carrying capacity 10,000 times that of the highest radio frequencies being used. However, the laser is unsuited for open-air transmission because it is adversely affected by environmental conditions such as rain, snow, hail, and smog. Faced with the challenge of finding a transmission medium other than air, Charles Kao and Charles Hockham, working at the Standard Telecommunication Laboratory in England in 1966, published a landmark paper proposing that optical fiber might be a suitable transmission medium if its attenuation could be kept under 20 decibels per kilometer (dB/km). At the time of this proposal, optical fibers exhibited losses of 1,000 dB/ km or more. At a loss of only 20 dB/km, 99% of the light would be lost over only 3,300 feet. In other words, only 1/100th of the optical power that was transmitted reached the receiver. Intuitively, researchers postulated that the current, higher optical losses were the result of impurities in the glass and not the glass itself. An optical loss of 20 dB/km was within the capability of the electronics and opto-electronic components of the day. Intrigued by Kao and Hockham's proposal, glass researchers began to work on the problem of purifying glass. In 1970, Drs. Robert Maurer, Donald Keck, and Peter Schultz of Corning succeeded in developing a glass fiber that exhibited attenuation at less than 20 dB/km, the threshold for making fiber optics a viable technology. It was the purest glass ever made. The early work on fiber optic light source and detector was slow and often had to borrow technology developed for other reasons. For example, the first fiber optic light sources were derived from visible indicator LEDs. As demand grew, light sources were developed for fiber optics that offered higher switching speed, more appropriate wavelengths, and higher output power. For more information on light emitters see Laser Diodes and LEDs.

Figure 3 - Four Wavelength Regions of Optical Fiber.

Fiber optics developed over the years in a series of generations that can be closely tied to wavelength. Figure 3 shows three curves. The top, dashed, curve corresponds to early 1980's fiber, the middle, dotted, curve corresponds to late 1980's fiber, and the bottom, solid, curve corresponds to modern optical fiber. The earliest fiber optic systems were developed at an operating wavelength of about 850 nm. This wavelength corresponds to the so-called 'first window' in a silica-based optical fiber. This window refers to a wavelength region that offers low optical loss. It sits between several large absorption peaks caused primarily by moisture in the fiber and Rayleigh scattering. The 850 nm region was initially attractive because the technology for light emitters at this wavelength had already been perfected in visible indicator LEDs. Low-cost silicon detectors could also be used at the 850 nm wavelength. As technology progressed, the first window became less attractive because of its relatively high 3 dB/km loss limit. Most companies jumped to the 'second window' at 1310 nm with lower attenuation of about 0.5 dB/km. In late 1977, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) developed the 'third window' at 1550 nm. It offered the theoretical minimum optical loss for silica-based fibers, about 0.2 dB/km. Today, 850 nm, 1310 nm, and 1550 nm systems are all manufactured and deployed along with very low-end, short distance, systems using visible wavelengths near 660 nm. Each wavelength has its advantage. Longer wavelengths offer higher performance, but always come with higher cost. The shortest link lengths can be handled with wavelengths of 660 nm or 850 nm. The longest link lengths require 1550 nm wavelength systems. A 'fourth window,' near 1625 nm, is being developed. While it is not lower loss than the 1550 nm window, the loss is comparable, and it might simplify some of the complexities of long-length, multiple-wavelength communications systems.

The Nineteenth Century The earliest attempts to communicate via light undoubtedly go back thousands of years. Early long distance communication techniques, such as "smoke signals", developed by native North Americans and the Chinese were, in fact, optical communication links. A larger scale version of this optical communication technique was the "optical telegraph" deployed in France and elsewhere in the late 18th century. The "optical telegraph" was a series of tall towers that passed along messages at a rate of a few words per minute by means of large semaphore flags that could be manipulated to spell out words. However, the development of fiber optic communication awaited the discovery of TIR (Total Internal Reflection) and a host of additional electronic and optical innovations. Jean-Daniel Colladon, a 38-year-old Swiss professor at University of Geneva, demonstrated light guiding or TIR for the first time in 1841. He wanted to show the fluid flow through various holes of a tank and the breaking up of water jets. However, in the lecture hall the audience could not see the flowing water. He solved the problem by collecting and piping sunlight through a tube to the lecture table. The light was focused through the water tank and was made to incident on the edge of the jet at a glancing angle. TIR trapped the light in the liquid forcing it to follow the curved path until the water jet broke up. Instead of traveling in a straight line, the light followed the curvature of the water flow. Colladon later on wrote:"I managed to illuminate the interior of a stream in a dark space. I have discovered that this strange arrangement offers in results one of the most beautiful, and most curious experiments that one can perform in a course on Optics." ( Comptes Rendes, 15, 800-802 Oct. 24, 1842). Colladon demonstrated light guiding in water jets through a number of public performances to the urban intelligentsia of Paris. Auguste de la Rive, another Geneva Physicist, duplicated Colladon's experiment using electric arc light. Colladon designed a spectacular device using arc light for Conservatory of Arts and Science of Paris in 1841, Oct.. Colladon sent a paper to his friend Francois Arago who headed the French Academy of Sciences and edited its journal Comptes Renedes. Arago recalled that Jacques Babinet, a French specialist in Optics had made similar demonstrations in Paris. He focused candle light on to the bottom of a glass bottle as he poured a thin stream of water from the top. TIR guided the light along the

Figure 1 - Jean-Daniel Colladon

Figure 2 - Jacques Babinet

Figure 3 - John Tyndall

jet. Arago asked Babinet to write down his work, but Babinet did not think that the work is very important. Yet he made a comment that "the idea also works very well with a glass shaft curved in what ever manner and I had indicated that (it could be used) to illuminate the inside of the mouth (Comptes Rendes 15, Oct. 24, 1842). After sending his letter to Arago, Babinet never returned to guiding of light before he died in 1872. In 1870, John Tyndall, using a jet of water that flowed from one container to another and a beam of light, demonstrated that light used internal reflection to follow a specific path. As water poured out through the spout of the first container, Tyndall directed a beam of sunlight at the path of the water. The light, as seen by the audience, followed a zigzag path inside the curved path of the water. This simple experiment, illustrated in Figure 4, marked the first research into the guided transmission of light. William Wheeling, in 1880, patented a method of light transfer called piping light. Wheeling believed that by using mirrored pipes branching off from a single source of illumination, i.e. a bright electric arc, he could send the light to many different rooms in the same way that water, through plumbing, is carried throughout buildings today. Due to the ineffectiveness of Wheelings idea and to the concurrent introduction of Edisons highly successful incandescent light bulb, the concept of piping light never took off.

Figure 4 - Typical Early TIR (Total Internal Reflection) Demonstration

That same year, Alexander Graham Bell developed an optical voice transmission system he called the photophone. The photophone used free-space light to carry the human voice 200 meters. Specially placed mirrors reflected sunlight onto a diaphragm attached within the mouthpiece of the photophone. At the other end, mounted within a parabolic reflector, was a light-sensitive selenium resistor. This resistor was connected to a battery that was, in turn, wired to a telephone receiver. As one spoke into the photophone, the illuminated diaphragm vibrated, casting various intensities of light onto the selenium resistor. The changing intensity of light altered the current that passed through the telephone receiver which then converted the light back into speech. Bell believed this invention was superior to the telephone because it did not need wires to connect the transmitter and receiver. Today, free-space opticallinks find extensive use in metropolitan applications. The Twentieth Century Fiber optic technology experienced a phenomenal rate of progress in the second half of the twentieth century. Early success came during the 1950s with the development of the fiberscope. This image-transmitting device, which used the first practical all-glass fiber, was concurrently devised by Brian OBrien at the American Optical Company and Narinder Kapany (who first coined

Figure 5 - Optical Fiber with Cladding

the term fiber optics in 1956) and colleagues at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London. Early all-glass fibers experienced excessive optical loss, the loss of the light signal as it traveled through the fiber, limiting transmission distances. This motivated scientists to develop glass fibers that included a separate glass coating. The innermost region of the fiber, or core, was used to transmit the light, while the glass coating, or cladding, prevented the light from leaking out of the core by reflecting the light within the boundaries of the core. This concept is explained by Snells Law which states that the angle at which light is reflected is dependent on the refractive indices of the two materials - in this case, the core and the cladding. The lower refractive index of the cladding (with respect to the core) causes the light to be angled back into the core as illustrated in Figure 5. The fiberscope quickly found application inspecting welds inside reactor vessels and combustion chambers of jet aircraft engines as well as in the medical field. Fiberscope technology has evolved over the years to make laparoscopic surgery one of the great medical advances of the twentieth century. The development of laser technology was the next important step in the establishment of the industry of fiber optics. Only the laser diode (LD) or its lower-power cousin, the light-emitting diode (LED), had the potential to generate large amounts of light in a spot tiny enough to be useful for fiber optics. In 1957, Gordon Gould popularized the idea of using lasers when, as a graduate student at Columbia University, he described the laser as an intense light source. Shortly after, Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow at Bell Laboratories supported the laser in scientific circles. Lasers went through several generations including the development of the ruby laser and the helium-neon laser in 1960. Semiconductor lasers were first realized in 1962; these lasers are the type most widely used in fiber optics today. Because of their higher modulation frequency capability, the importance of lasers as a means of carrying information did not go unnoticed by communications engineers. Light has an informationcarrying capacity 10,000 times that of the highest radio frequencies being used. However, the laser is unsuited for open-air transmission because it is adversely affected by environmental conditions such as rain, snow, hail, and smog. Faced with the challenge of finding a transmission medium other than air, Charles Kao and Charles Hockham, working at the Standard Telecommunication Laboratory in England in 1966, published a landmark paper proposing that optical fiber might be a suitable transmission medium if its attenuation could be kept under 20 decibels per kilometer (dB/km). At the time of this proposal, optical fibers exhibited losses of 1,000 dB/ km or more. Even at a loss of only 20 dB/km, 99% of the light would still be lost over only 3,300 feet. In other words, only 1/100th of the optical power that was transmitted reached the receiver. Intuitively, researchers postulated that the current, higher optical losses were the result of impurities in the glass and not the glass itself. An optical loss of 20 dB/km was within the capability of the electronics and optoelectronic components of the day. Intrigued by Kao and Hockhams proposal, glass researchers began to work on the problem of purifying glass. In 1970, Drs. Robert Maurer, Donald Keck, and Peter Schultz of Corning succeeded in developing a glass fiber that exhibited attenuation at less than 20 dB/km, the threshold for making fiber optics a viable technology. It was the purest glass ever made. The early work on fiber optic light source and detector was slow and often had to borrow technology developed for other reasons. For example, the first fiber optic light sources were derived from visible indicator LED's. As demand grew, light sources were developed for fiber optics that offered higher switching speed, more appropriate wavelengths, and higher output power. For more information on light emitters see Laser Diodes and LED's.

Fiber optics developed over the years in a series of generations that can be closely tied to wavelength. Figure 6 shows three curves. The top, dashed, curve corresponds to early 1980s fiber, the middle, dotted, curve corresponds to late 1980s fiber, and the bottom, solid, curve corresponds to modern optical fiber. The earliest fiber optic systems were developed at an operating wavelength of about 850 nm. This wavelength corresponds to the so-called first window in a silica-based optical fiber. This window refers to a wavelength region that offers low optical loss. It sits between several large absorption peaks caused primarily by moisture in the fiber and Rayleigh scattering.

Figure 6 - Four Wavelength Regions of Optical Fiber The 850 nm region was initially attractive because the technology for light emitters at this wavelength had already been perfected in visible indicator and infrared (IR) LED's. Low-cost silicon detectors could also be used at the 850 nm wavelength. As the technology progressed, the first window became less attractive because of its relatively high 3 dB/km loss limit. Most companies jumped to the second window at 1310 nm with lower attenuation of about 0.5 dB/km. In late 1977, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) developed the third window at 1550 nm. It offered the theoretical minimum optical loss for silica-based fibers, about 0.2 dB/km. Today, 850 nm, 1310 nm, and 1550 nm systems are all manufactured and deployed along with very low-end, short distance, systems using visible wavelengths near 660 nm. Each wavelength has its advantage. Longer wavelengths offer higher performance, but always come with higher cost. The shortest link lengths can be handled with wavelengths of 660 nm or 850 nm. The longest link lengths require 1550 nm wavelength systems. A fourth window, near 1625 nm, is being developed. While it is not lower loss than the 1550 nm window, the loss is comparable. Applications in the Real World The U.S. military moved quickly to use fiber optics for improved communications and tactical systems. In the early 1970s, the U.S. Navy installed a fiber optic telephone link aboard the U.S.S. Little Rock. The Air Force followed suit by developing its Airborne Light Optical Fiber Technology (ALOFT) program in 1976. Encouraged by the success of these applications, military R&D programs were funded to develop stronger fibers, tactical cables, ruggedized, high-performance components, and numerous demonstration systems ranging from aircraft to undersea applications. Commercial applications followed soon after. In 1977, both AT&T and GTE installed fiber optic telephone systems in Chicago and Boston respectively. These successful applications led to the increase of fiber optic telephone networks. By the early 1980s, single-mode fiber operating in the 1310 nm and later the 1550 nm wavelength windows became the standard fiber installed for these networks. Initially, computers, information networks, and data communications were slower to embrace fiber, but today they too find use for a transmission system that has lighter weight cable, resists lightning strikes, and carries more information faster and over longer distances. The broadcast industry also embraced fiber optic transmission. In 1980, broadcasters of the Winter

Olympics, in Lake Placid, New York, requested a fiber optic video transmission system for backup video feeds. The fiber optic feed, because of its quality and reliability, soon became the primary video feed, making the 1980 Winter Olympics the first fiber optic television transmission. Later, at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, fiber optics transmitted the first ever digital video signal, an application that continues to evolve today. In the mid-1980s the United States government deregulated telephone service, allowing small telephone companies to compete with the giant, AT&T. Companies like MCI and Sprint quickly went to work installing regional fiber optic telecommunications networks throughout the world. Taking advantage of railroad lines, gas pipes, and other natural rights of way, these companies laid miles fiber optic cable, allowing the deployment of these networks to continue throughout the 1980s. However, this created the need to expand fibers transmission capabilities. In 1990, Bell Labs transmitted a 2.5 Gb/s signal over 7,500 km without regeneration. The system used a soliton laser and an erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) that allowed the light wave to maintain its shape and density. In 1998, they went one better as researchers transmitted 100 simultaneous optical signals, each at a data rate of 10 gigabits (giga means billion) per second for a distance of nearly 250 miles (400 km). In this experiment, dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM technology, which allows multiple wavelengths to be 12 combined into one optical signal, increased the total data rate on one fiber to one terabit per second (10 bits per second). The Twenty-first Century and Beyond Today, DWDM technology continues to develop. As the demand for data bandwidth increases, driven by the phenomenal growth of the Internet, the move to optical networking is the focus of new technologies. At this writing, over 800 million people have Internet access and use it regularly. That's over 12% of the entire world's population of 6.4 billion people. The world wide web already hosts over 350 million domain names, 8 billion web pages (that's only the visible, indexed, Internet, the invisible Internet is estimated to be up to 100 times larger), and according to estimates people upload more than 3.5 million new web pages everyday. The Internet dominates traditional voice communication as shown inFigure 7. The important factor in these developments is the increase in fiber transmission capacity, which has grown by a factor of 200 in the last decade. Figure 8 illustrates this trend. Because of fiber optic technologys immense potential bandwidth, 50 THz or greater, there are extraordinary possibilities for future fiber optic applications. Already, the push to bring broadband services, including data, audio, and especially video, into the home is well underway. Broadband service available to a mass market opens up a wide variety of interactive communications for both consumers and businesses, bringing to reality interactive video networks, interactive banking and

Figure 7 - Projected Internet Traffic Increases

shopping from the home, and interactive distance learning. The last mile for optical fiber goes from the curb to the television set top, known as fiber-to-thehome (FTTH) and fiber-to-the-curb (FTTC), allowing video on demand to become a reality.