City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

BREAKTHROUGH 141
was an honor for a man whose vision seemed about to be realized. He rose
to the occasion, tracing progress from the discovery of radio waves and citing
major contributions by Stew Miller and Toni Karbowiak. He admitted that a
decade earlier developers had been ‘‘rather too sanguine about the prospects
of practical application.’’ Now he was convinced its time had finally arrived.
He joked about being accused of having a ‘‘pipe dream’’ and of almost being
driven ‘‘round the bend’’ by the bending losses in millimeter waveguides.
Then he looked to the future:
With most of these difficulties behind us, I feel quite sure that the journalists
from the other side of the Atlantic are quite realistic in describing the application
as ‘‘pipes of progress.’’ It is true that fully engineered prototypes
have still to be established, but so much work has already been done in a
practical environment that confidence in the ultimate success of the project
runs high.
Dielectric surface waveguides, including optical fibers, for telecommunications
are perhaps a little more remote at present, but their turn will come,
and even in the near future they could find valuable applications over the
shorter distances. 31
As group manager, Maurer made the trip to London and sat through the
handful of talks on optical fibers buried among the many on millimeter waveguides.
Dick Dyott came to describe his work at the Post Office. Charles Kao
came as well, but having made fiber optics a respectable cause, he was about
to turn to a more personal mission. His children were eight and six, and he
wanted them to learn what it meant to be Chinese. He was taking leave from
STL to teach at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and turning his fiberoptic
group over to Murray Ramsay.
Most of the crowd was not tuned in to fiber optics or to Bob Maurer. He
is a modest, matter-of-fact speaker, not a master showman, and he was talking
about a technology they thought was at least a generation away. He
buried the breakthrough datum—measured attenuation of 16 decibels per
kilometer—in a talk describing the details of scattering. It was an eye-opener
only to those who already had their eyes open.
‘‘A few people in that crowd were really turned on,’’ Maurer recalls. 32
Among them was Stew Miller. Not completely sure of the initial measurements,
Maurer only claimed to have reached 20 decibels per kilometer when
he spoke to Miller in July. By the end of September, he was convinced the
actual loss was 16 decibels per kilometer. Miller didn’t realize Maurer was
talking about the same fiber; he thought that Corning had made further improvements
since July. 33 The misunderstanding helped light a fire under Miller,
who feared Bell was falling further behind.
Engineers from a British electronics firm hustled Maurer off to lunch to
ask questions. Engineers from the Post Office and STL both asked Maurer to
bring samples for them to test in their own labs. Others seemed less excited,
not realizing the importance of the breakthrough, or knowing how easily
mistakes can be made in optical measurement.