City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

THREE GENERATIONS IN FIVE YEARS 189
thought, each fiber could carry only a few signals. Only Hicks seriously
thought it might be possible for one fiber to carry tens, hundreds, or even
more separate wavelengths. Taking the idea a step farther, he envisioned that
a single optical amplifier, using the laser principle, might simultaneously boost
the strengths of the whole range of wavelengths passing through the fiber,
amplifying all the signals at once.
In his mind, Hicks put it all together, looking into the future and seeing
an all-optical network, carrying light signals all the way to homes without
bothering to change them back to electric currents. Fibers and optics would
go beyond being mere pipes to become part of the switches that routed calls
through the network. He talked some about his ideas, earning a reputation
as a wild-eyed visionary, but all that he wrote was patent applications. Then
in his early fifties, he was broke, but he talked Chuck Lucy out of a quartermillion
dollars from Corning. It wasn’t much to build a new technology, but
Hicks had cut his entrepreneurial teeth on a shoestring budget. He set up
shop in the loft of an old building in central Massachusetts, and with a couple
of helpers settled down to inventing a new fiber-optic network technology.
He whimsically called his company 1984 Inc., because it would have so much
transmission capacity that it could keep track of everybody all the time. 64
Fiber development accelerated with the opening of the new windows. Each
issue of Electronics Letters—the British journal that published the hottest developments—announced
new wonders. Corning and Bell Labs pushed loss in
their best laboratory fibers below 0.2 decibel per kilometer at 1.55 micrometers,
to about 0.16 decibel.
Semiconductor lasers advanced apace with fibers. Much to the surprise of
the establishment, long-wavelength lasers proved much more reliable than
gallium arsenide. As the trend became obvious, Martlesham Heath shifted all
its research from gallium arsenide to InGaAsP in a week. Initially frustrated
because they had been making progress in gallium arsenide, developers
changed their mind when they saw that the longer wavelengths did not trigger
the growth of fatal flaws. ‘‘The wind was behind us,’’ says Alan Steventon.
65
Valtec Rides a Dangerous Growth Wave
The revolution in telephone operations was more modest. Industry was trying
to do the logical, cautious thing, grow by making systems based on technology
that already worked, not the latest idea from the labs. That meant staying
with gallium-arsenide lasers and graded-index fibers.
There was no denying fiber optics after its successes in Chicago, Long
Beach, and Martlesham Heath. Valtec landed a contract to install a 4.2kilometer
(2.6-mile) system for Central Telephone in Las Vegas, which wanted
to show its fiber prowess when a big trade show came to town in December
1977. 66 Marshall Hudson, freshly hired away from Corning, taught the workmen
how to splice fibers and promised everyone who beat his target a six-