City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

200 CITY OF LIGHT
munications was a vital technology. When Chinese engineers arrived in Boston
to help Lasertron, government officials hit the ceiling and demanded the
Chinese be sent home ‘‘tomorrow.’’ 116 Hsieh and Nill argued, but in the end
Lasertron had to perfect manufacturing technology by itself. By the mid-
1980s, it reached 350 employees and $28 million in sales. The Chinese eventually
sold their stock back to the company, earning a healthy profit but not
access to the new technology. 117
Short of money to fund further development, Will Hicks sold 1984 Inc. to
Polaroid in 1982 for several million dollars. 118 Polaroid’s legendary founder
Edwin Land was gone, but parts of the company retained his innovative spirit
and bet on Hicks’s plans to send tens of thousands of high-definition television
channels through one single-mode fiber. Hicks persuaded Polaroid to hire Eli
Snitzer to run the group while he continued research, but he still didn’t fit
into a big company. Within a couple of years Hicks quit to return to running
his own tiny ventures. 119 In time, Polaroid abandoned the program, although
the technology was promising, because its tremendous capacity ‘‘was too far
ahead of the commercial needs.’’ 120
The Right Technology at the Right Time
Looking back, single-mode fiber was the right technology at the right time
for the telephone industry. The breakup of AT&T and the deregulation of longdistance
service changed the rules, ending the era when stodgy corporate
bureaucrats slowed technology to a glacial pace. The new carriers needed
new national networks; AT&T needed new transmission lines to compete.
The burst of orders tipped the balance decisively toward single-mode. In
five short years, fiber-optic communications had gone through three technological
generations. The consensus view of 1978 was obsolete in 1983.
Graded-index fiber left no room to grow; 121 single-mode left plenty of room
for expansion. As F. F. Roberts had planned to say in the valedictory he did
not live to deliver, the barriers to single-mode technology were conquered.
The Northeast Corridor system that the cautious bureaucracy of AT&T had
intended to blaze a path to the future instead became an evolutionary dead
end. Like the millimeter waveguide, it was soon forgotten, an eight-track tape
player in the attic of outdated technologies. The wild-eyed visionaries had
won.