HISTORY OF FIBER OPTICS
This week’s “History of Fiber Optics” is taken from George Gilder’s book, Telecosm. The essence of laser science quickly became molecular manipulation, the central art of all modern telecommunications. During the 1960s at both Leningrad and Bell Labs, engineers contrived hetero-junctions, combining multiple elements inside silicone chips to confine the reactions in newly discovered lasing devices. Zhores Alferov and his Russian team developed the first room-temperature laser, but Soviet politics stifled further development. Mort Panish and Izuo Hayashi at Bell Labs also made dramatic progress, but their lasers lasted mere minutes rather than the millions of hours needed for practical telecommunication and other modern electronic devices. Barney de Loach of Bell finally succeeded in contriving a room temperature laser that lasted. It was a hetero-junction device made of gallium arsenide, aluminum, indium phosphide, and other elements that combine to form energy stair steps down which cascading photons resonantly tumble. Quantum well devices, the smallest and most efficient lasers in widespread use today, which reduce this progress to the size of a single electron wavelength inside a single silicone, chip. Costing barely $3 a piece in 1999, they are now manufactured by the million for use in CD players and other new-wave electronic devices.
In a climax to the laser’s microcosmic evolution, Jerome Faist and Federico Capasso at Lucent’s Bell Labs in the late 1960s moved the lasing area down to the level of individual quanta. Generating photons from an array of twenty-five separate quantum wells, with each successive stage set at a lower energy level than the one before, like a quantum staircase. Carried from one well to the next by transmission channels, a passing electron emits not one photon, but twenty-five. Unlike most lasers, this still experimental device can propagate coherent light through all the visible and infrared bands of Maxwell’s rainbow.
As Gordon Gould’s fevered notebooks predicted, lasers have emerged as weapons, anti-missile shields, cancer treatments, spectroscopic surveying tools, carpenter levels, theatrical props, unlimited “fusion energy” applications and countless other technologies. But the lasers most important use was scarcely mentioned by most laser pioneers: fiber-optic communications and fiber-optic transcontinental bundles that would eventually connect every business and personal computer on our planet with geostationary communications satellites in earth’s orbit. Until now optical communications have remained mostly the obscure province of C.I.A. Spooks and other government agencies, but now it’s becoming available to the rest of us…
Special thanks and congratulations are in order for Fort Wayne’s Mayor Graham Richard for being one of the first mayor’s in our state to bring fiber optic technology to the people…This man who wrote the article in a men’s magazine that proclaimed Fort Wayne to be the dumbest city in the U.S. must be an idiot? The poor uninformed “schmuck” must be oblivious to the fact that a lot of the technology in today’s world was developed right here in the Fort. We might justly be called the most “conservative city,” but if it wasn’t for the technology developed here, that “schmuck” would be living in a world without electric motors, or any of the other modern conveniences that he takes for granted.
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