City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

THREE GENERATIONS IN FIVE YEARS 179
sales had been stubbornly low, but two victims of the layoff still saw a bright
future for fiber optics. Rich Cerny had been marketing fibers after earning an
MBA in the ample spare time afforded an Air Force captain tending missile
silos in North Dakota. Eric Randall had worked in fiber development after
earning a doctorate in glass science.
Boyishly bright and friendly, Cerny was a born salesman. Randall had the
technology down cold. Young and energetic, they went looking for cash to
get into the fiber business. American Optical turned them down flat, writing,
‘‘There’s no market for communications fiber optics.’’ 13 They got a better
reception from Jim Godbey, an ambitious former Air Force officer and president
of the Valtec Corp., a small company with stock traded over the counter.
Several years earlier, Godbey and two other veterans of Mosaic Fabrications
had started a company called Electro-Fiberoptics in an old pickle factory in
Worcester, Massachusetts, to make fiber-optic bundles for lamps and signs.
They changed the name to Valtec after a 1972 merger with Valpey, an optics
company headed by Ted Valpey, who contributed some family money and
became chairman while Godbey ran day-to-day operations. 14
Cerny and Randall did not have to start cold. Paul Dobson, a Valtec engineer,
had already talked Godbey into buying a high-temperature furnace to
draw silica fibers. Unable to make complex preforms, Dobson pulled fibers
from pure silica rods and clad them with a plastic with lower refractive index.
It was a simple way to make fibers, and other companies also were experimenting
with it, but Dobson had a knack for making things work that outweighed
his limited formal training and tiny budget. When Cerny and Randall
arrived, Dobson was producing the best plastic-clad silica fibers available, 15
with loss of only 3.5 decibels per kilometer at 850 nanometers. 16 However,
the process could not make graded-index or single-mode fibers, so its potential
was limited.
Godbey saw that Cerny’s salesmanship and Randall’s expertise in glass
science complemented Dobson’s practical skills. He hired them and set the
three up in a separate subsidiary called Valtec Communication Fiber Optics.
They built a glass lathe and started making graded-index fibers using the Bell
Labs vapor deposition process. After a local cable manufacturer failed disastrously
in its efforts to make fiber cable, they decided to build their own cable
plant. 17
You couldn’t buy ready-made equipment to cable fibers, so Dobson built
his own on a low budget. Lacking much machinery, he had to assemble the
cable in stages. First he packaged the fibers into loose tubes. Then he assembled
several tubes into a complete cable. Winding the fiber-containing tubes
around a central steel strength member required keeping the spools holding
the tubes aligned horizontally while winding them around the strength member.
Big companies custom-built elaborate heavy-duty machines with all sorts
of wheels and gears. Dobson built Valtec’s from plywood and 2 � 4s. 18 It did
the job, and the design had an added bonus. Separating the tubes at the ends
turned out to make cable installation easier.