The history of glass fibre based data transmission

It sounds like technology at the bleeding edge of telecommunications. High speed, high volume digital data transmission piggybacked seemingly on streams of light through miles of glass fibres. Over the past two decades data transmission via optic cables has changed the way that we watch television, access the Internet, or make a phone call. Surprisingly it isn’t cutting edge at all. Some might suggest that fibre optics is a 19th Century technology that finally came of age in the Cold War.

The origins of fibre optics in a sense are as old as Rome. It was the Romans who discovered that glass; silica sand transformed through heat could be drawn into fine fibres. But the practical use of those glass fibres would have to wait for two millennia. In the 1840’s in France engineers demonstrated a means of carrying light on jets of water to light public fountains. In 1854 a British physicist discovered that light could not only be carried in water it could be bent. In 1880 a pioneer in telephone communications built a working model of a phone using light to carry voice transmission. The optic phone was less reliable than a phone using electrical impulses. 1880 was also the year that light was first transmitted through a reflective pipe.

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By 1888, in Vienna, physicians succeeded in using bent glass rods to peer inside the human body. In 1895 a French engineer refined and bundled glass rods to both illuminate and to carry images. In 1898 in the US the first patent was granted for the medical application of fibre optics.

In the early 20th Century interest in fibre optics appeared to wane. In medicine, X-rays offered a means to look inside the body, while in communications radio allowed for communications across the airwaves. In the 1920’s glass rods transmitting light and imagines proved successful in early television experiments, and the first “fax” was carried on glass rods. In 1930 in Germany images and light were carried on bundled glass fibres, far more flexible than previous rods. In the early 1950’s glass and plastic fibres were clad and used in fibre optics, the first really practical optic cables.

In 1954 the development of microwave transmission and the development of operable lasers in the early 1960’s would both contribute to fibre optics.

The 1960’s and early 1970’s saw important refinements in glass fibre cables. The development of single wave mode transmission, and the invention of cables using waveguide fibres capable of carrying 65,000 times the information of standard wire led to the creation of early pure glass fibre networks. By 1975 the first non-experimental glass fibre links were used in telecommunications, and the defence application of fibre optics in networking computer facilities in secure locations was authorized. In 1991 the invention of a fibre optic cable with internal amplification further dramatically reduced the costs of optical networking and gave us the world that we live in today.

And it all started with illuminating a fountain.

© Barry Clewes short term car insurance  2010