City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

BREAKTHROUGH 135
Zimar continued experiments with fused silica in his custom-built furnace.
He collapsed pure-silica tubes onto rods of titanium-doped fused silica, then
drew them into fibers. It was hot and difficult work, but Zimar persevered.
He was no scientific superstar, just a solid experimentalist who knew his
furnace and his materials. His fused silica fibers had attenuation of about 10
decibels per meter, ten times higher than the best imaging fibers. Maurer was
not discouraged; everyone at Corning had expected fused silica to be difficult.
It was time to expand the project by adding a specialist in glass science and
hiring a young physicist to work on fibers full-time.
The Strategist and the Young Scientists
As a research manager, much of Maurer’s job was to plot strategy. He had
already focused on fused silica to exploit Corning’s unique expertise in the
material. He weighed that strength against the risks that silica might be intractable,
that its loss might be irreducible, or that there might be no way to
make it into a viable light-guiding fiber. As a good strategist, he marshaled
human assets as well as physical ones.
Compared to Kao and Roberts, Maurer was a master of glass, but other
Corning scientists knew more. In late 1967, he asked the glass chemistry
department for help. They pointed him to Peter Schultz, hired just months
earlier after earning a doctorate in ceramic engineering from Rutgers University.
Ironically, Schultz had earned his degree by developing a glass doped
with iron and lithium for computer memories that was absolutely black.
Tall, thin, and self-directed, Schultz was barely 25, a kid from workingclass
New Jersey whose fascination with space drew him into science. He
grew interested in aerospace ceramics as a Rutgers undergraduate and stayed
there for graduate school, where he fell under the spell of Norbert Kriedl, a
world-class glass scientist who had headed research and development at
Bausch and Lomb until he turned 60. 14 When Schultz graduated, Kriedl told
him Corning was the best place in the country to work on glass science.
Corning put him to work on fused silica when he joined the glass chemistry
research group in July 1967. 15 Just a few months later, Maurer asked him to
make the clearest glass ever known.
With money for a full-time physicist, Maurer went recruiting and found
Donald Keck. Born in Lansing on January 2, 1941, Keck went straight
through Michigan State University, receiving a doctorate in 1967. Jobs were
plentiful for physics graduates as NASA pushed for the moon and the Pentagon
pushed new weapons for Vietnam; Keck had a choice of offers. A compact
man full of energy and enthusiasm, he had grown intrigued by the
propagation of electromagnetic waves. Maurer hooked him with the bait of
building a low-loss optical waveguide. In January 1968, just after his 27th
birthday, Keck began working full-time on the fiber project. 16 He soon got
help from a young Canadian, Felix Kapron, who had joined Maurer’s applied
physics department the previous year after receiving his doctorate from the