City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

228 CITY OF LIGHT
it was time for him to move on to a new program, but he could see nothing
else as fascinating at Martlesham Heath. Instead, he accepted British Telecom’s
offer to establish a professorship for him at University College, London.
It was a plum position, leaving Midwinter ample room to pursue his own
interests.
Over the years, his interests have evolved. He studies optical switching
now, a complex and elegant technology, but confesses ‘‘the thrill of publishing
yet another paper wears off.’’ His new passion is guiding government policy
on engineering, where he hopes to make greater contributions than in the
laboratory. He showed me a miniature wooden coffin, a going-away present
from Martlesham Heath, which his former colleagues filled with ‘‘technologies
killed by fiber optics,’’ bulky metal cables and a long-vanished section of millimeter
waveguide. ‘‘It was a golden period,’’ he said nostalgically as we sat
in his office, seven floors above London on a rainy December Monday. 2
Don Keck’s office at Corning’s Sullivan Park Research Center is only on
the second floor, but it offers a commanding view of the Chemung River
valley. In nearly three decades, he’s climbed one floor up the glass-walled
tower and a few levels up the corporate ladder to director of optics and photonics
research. He thrives in the climate, like the plant that curls more than
halfway around the ceiling of his office. I asked if he was nostalgic for the
days of one breakthrough after another. ‘‘It’s not over, Jeff,’’ he replied, still
full of energy and enthusiasm in his mid-fifties. I had to agree as he listed an
impressive array of new optical wonders just presented at the Conference on
Optical Fiber Communications in California. 3
The Triumph of Fiber
British Telecom was the first phone company to commit to single-mode fiber,
but the British Isles are tiny compared to America. MCI’s decision to span the
continent with single-mode fiber opened the floodgates to success. Deregulation
of the long-distance telephone market created a tremendous demand for
long-haul transmission that millimeter waveguides could never have met.
Single-mode fibers were the right technology in the right place at the right
time to become the national backbone of big digital pipelines. Sprint made
fiber optics a household word by advertising that you could hear a pin drop
through digital fiber lines. AT&T shifted gears and started installing singlemode
fibers; smaller carriers followed.
The first breakup of AT&T on January 1, 1984, shook Bell Labs far more
than British Telecom’s split from the Post Office affected Martlesham Heath.
Stew Miller retired before the split of the labs where he had worked for 42
years. 4 One of his lieutenants, Jack Cook, started a company to make fiberoptic
connectors using a design licensed from AT&T. 5 Some fiber developers
went to Bellcore, the part of Bell Labs originally assigned to the seven regional
operating companies, and Miller followed as a consultant. The rest remained
with AT&T, most concentrating on long-distance, high-performance systems.