City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

10
Trying to Sell a Dream
(1965–1970)
If you really look at it, I was trying to sell a dream. ...
There was very little I could put in concrete to tell these
people it was really real.
—Charles K. Kao 1
C harles Kao saw the future of communications and it was fiber optics.
Fibers would simply and elegantly avoid the problems that plagued millimeter
waveguides and hollow optical waveguides. All that he needed to
reach that future was glass as clear as air. Will Hicks, Toni Karbowiak, Rudy
Kompfner, and Stew Miller, men of no mean imagination and intelligence,
had turned back at the sheer challenge of making so perfectly transparent a
solid. Only Charles Kao had the vision and daring to charge full-speed ahead.
He could see no fundamental barrier blocking his goal of clear glass fibers.
He had the good fortune to enlist the visionary support of Alec Reeves, who
could plead his case to top management. Kao had not invested any crucial
part of his ego in millimeter waveguides, gas lenses, or confocal lens waveguides.
He could see that thin, flexible fibers not only offered high transmission
capacity, but also would be simpler and far cheaper to install than delicate
bulky pipes that required underground burial.
Fiber optic communication was a simple and elegant idea, tiny flexible
‘‘pipes’’ compared to the brute-force technology of thick millimeter waveguides
that had to be laid absolutely straight. In his twenties, Kao had seen
the transistor revolution sweep through electronics, with compact solid-state
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