HISTORY OF FIBER OPTICS
This week’s “History of Fiber Optics” is continued from George Gilder’s book, “Telecosm….” By May 1960, only four years after Niels Bohr and Von Neumann assured Charles H. Townes that Heisenberg’s “uncertainly principle” made coherent light (lasers), impossible, the first laser was built, and it was solid state—no messy gas-filled tube was needed to generate its bright red burst of photons (light).
At its heart it had a ruby, which “everyone,” including Townes and Schlawlow, “knew” wouldn’t work. Like any other complex crystal, rubies were harder to model than a gas, made up of free-floating atoms. And that same complexity—coupled with the tiny size of silicon chips—was deemed an overwhelming bar against building miniaturized semi-conductor lasers.
Far away from Charles Townes at Hughes Research Labs in Culver City, California, Theodore Maiman, an ex-Stanford engineer, built the first modern laser device. Maiman had taken a different tack: he reexamined the evidence on ruby photo-efficiency and discovered that Townes and Schlawlow’s prevailing calculations were completely wrong. Instead of one percent efficiency at converting energy into light, the real figure turned out to be closer to a stunning 70 percent—a number he eventually was able to push to nearly 100 percent.
Using a pink ruby cylinder recycled from one of his earlier masers (lasers), Maiman constructed a lasing chamber less than an inch long and half as wide, with both ends silvered to act as mirrors. At one end was a tiny hole to emit the stream of coherent light and spiraling around it all was a helical photographic flash lamp, used to impart the energy for stimulated light emission. The silvered mirrors were not perfect, but the simple little device did what it was supposed to: emit a brief flash of coherent light.
Within a month, Maiman submitted his amazing findings to the distinguished journal Physical Review Letters, under the title “Optical Maser Action in Ruby.” But instead of applause from astounded friends and rivals, there was silence. Maiman had not used Gould’s controversial new name, laser, for his device; and the journal’s editors, thinking they were getting yet another maser article, turned it down! Only after Schlawlow and his team at Bell Labs verified Maiman’s work was he assured his historic pinnacle as creator of the first working laser, or, in deference to Townes, “optical maser.”
It was of course, Gould’s more striking name “laser” that stuck. And in time, Maiman’s little device grew into a significant business for the Hughes Corporation. But in telecommunication terms, a more crucial breakthrough came two years later: lasers compressed inside a microchip. The tiny expanse of a semiconductor’s “p-n” junction—the interface between positively and negatively charged regions on a chip—ultimately proved to be the most efficient and useful of all lasers. Moving from large gaseous tubes to modest ruby crystals and finally to infinitesimal sized semi conductors, the smaller the laser, the more effective and powerful it would become; the scarcer the space inside the lasing chamber, the more abundant its output.
Physics simply could not grasp the complexities of solid crystals. Conventional scientific wisdom had deemed Maiman’s rubies too inefficient to produce much laser (coherent) light, but experiments started pushing the figure upward and as it transpired, semi-conductor “p-n” junction’s converted electrical currents into photons, at an efficiency rate of close to 100 percent. Nothing else turned out to be so effective in creating a flood of photonic energy as a mass of negatively charged “male” electrons falling into an array of positive “female” holes. And, it was both infinitely easier and efficient than using gasses, vacuum tubes or inch long crystals.
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