City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

THREE GENERATIONS IN FIVE YEARS 181
with new fiber cables promised to multiply duct capacity, without digging up
a single downtown street.
AT&T refined its Atlanta system hardware, using fibers that were a little
clearer, lasers that were a little better, and connectors considerably improved.
23 Engineers set up test equipment at both ends and carefully measured
each of the 24 fibers after technicians threaded the thin cable through the
twists and turns of the buried ducts. Not a single fiber broke. On April 1,
1977, the system carried its first test signals, as Bell prepared to send regular
digitized phone service—including Picturephone and video signals—through
the cable starting on May 11. 24 Proud of getting the testbed up and running
less than six months after approval, AT&T officials geared up for a major
press announcement of the feat. Then they opened their papers to discover
that the nation’s second-largest phone company, General Telephone and Electronics,
had beat them to it.
GTE Steals a March in Long Beach
While AT&T coordinated its Chicago demonstration within its corporate bureaucracy,
the much smaller GTE Laboratories quietly laid its own plans just
off Route 128 west of Boston. They picked a 10-kilometer (6-mile) route
served by General Telephone of California between Long Beach and Artesia
and bought six-fiber cable from the General Cable Corp.
John Fulenwider, a top GTE research engineer, went along to test fiber
splicing in manholes and get the system running. The California phone company
sent a couple of Hollywood cameramen to film him. After water was
pumped from the manhole, the soft-spoken Fulenwider descended with his
splicing tools and microscope, dressed in a white lab coat. The cameramen
followed with their klieg lights and cameras, joking uneasily about their fate
if an earthquake hit while they were underground. They had never been
down a manhole before, and in the tight quarters one of them leaned a lamp
housing on a four-inch cable. He didn’t know that telephone companies pump
air through cables to keep water from seeping in and damaging the wires.
Nor did he know that his lamp housing grew hot enough to melt the plastic
jacket on the cable. The first thing he noticed was a loud ‘‘whoosh’’ as the
pressurized air escaped from the cable. Convinced the ‘‘big one’’ had struck,
the two dropped everything and scrambled out of the manhole. 25
That didn’t stop GTE from getting its system up and running on April 22. 26
It was not as ambitious as Bell’s; it used LED transmitters and carried only
6.3 million bits per second. But it was a first.
AT&T was not amused; Chicago was supposed to be the first. Press officers
scrambled to inform reporters that the Chicago system had carried its first
signals on April 1, but they had to admit that regular telephone traffic did
not start until six weeks later. GTE had won a race that Bell didn’t realize it
was running.