City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

REFLECTIONS ON THE CITY OF LIGHT 231
offered no compelling attraction until the 1.3-micrometer window opened.
Long-wavelength lasers looked like they should be more difficult to make than
gallium arsenide lasers. Even the blind insistence that air had to be a better
transmission medium than glass was logical given the state of knowledge in
1966. Most errors stemmed more from ignorance than from stupidity.
The understanding of glass and optics circa 1950 was sufficient to allow
the development of fiber bundles for imaging. Communication fiber optics
required pushing beyond that knowledge frontier into the unexplored territory
of ultratransparent materials. The breakthroughs came when people like Kao
asked the right questions and teams like Bob Maurer, Don Keck, and Peter
Schultz used their collective expertise to steer the right course across new
terrain. They took risks, evaluated their course, then corrected their direction
to aim at the most promising areas. Corning’s first low-loss fiber would have
been merely an interesting data point if taken by itself. Corning’s true success
came from expanding on that work, replacing the troublesome titanium dopant
with germanium to make a lower-loss, more durable fiber. They might
never have reached that end point without seeing promising results in their
earlier experiments with titanium.
Research is full of false starts and experiments that don’t work. It wouldn’t
be research if everything worked; you hope to learn from experiments. It’s
nice if the experiments confirm your ideas, but if not, you try to learn from
your mistakes. Even when Maurer thought the odds were against success, he
hoped to learn something useful.
In many ways, Bell Labs was a surprising also-ran, a world-class laboratory
that scored few conceptual breakthroughs and spent untold millions chasing
dead ends. Bell suffered from being fat and happy and too quick to reject
outside ideas in favor of its own. The labs were slow to recognize problems
in its favorite ideas, notably the gas-lens optical waveguide and graded-index
fibers, but that is not surprising. One of the hardest jobs for research managers
is to kill their own faltering projects before they grow into money pits consuming
departmental budgets. It is harder to explain why the Bell environment
only rarely sparked the creativity that ignited new ideas at Standard
Telecommunication Labs, British Post Office/British Telecom, Corning, Lincoln
Lab, and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone. Had the prestigious lab become
stuck in the mud?
Nonetheless, Bell doggedly stayed in the fiber-optic race, often finishing a
respectable second and sometimes winning. Large and talented teams relentlessly
beat problems to death. Zhores Alferov’s Russian group was only weeks
ahead of Mort Panish and Izuo Hayashi at Bell in making the first roomtemperature
semiconductor laser, and the Russians lacked the resources to
overcome the tough problem of laser reliability. It was the Bell Labs team led
by Barney DeLoach that had the skills and resources to make million-hour
lasers. Bell engineers did a superb job in designing and building the crucial
Atlanta and Chicago systems, which decisively made the case for fiber optics.
Peter Runge’s group succeeded in the singular challenge of adapting fiber
technology to the difficult world of submarine cables. Today the labs, now