City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

APPENDIX B 271
January 1968: Donald Keck starts work for Maurer as the first fulltime
fiber developer at Corning.
August 1968: Dick Dyott of British Post Office picks up suggestion
for pulling clad optical fibers from molten glass in
a double crucible.
1968: Kao and M. W. Jones measure intrinsic loss of bulk
fused silica at 4 decibels per kilometer, the first evidence
of ultratransparent glass, prompting Bell
Labs to seriously consider fiber optics.
1969: Martin Chown of Standard Telecommunication Labs
demonstrates fiber-optic repeater at Physical Society
exhibition.
April 1970: STL demonstrates fiber-optic transmission at Physics
Exhibition in London.
Spring 1970: First continuous-wave room-temperature semiconductor
lasers made in early May by Zhores Alferov’s
group at the Ioffe Physical Institute in Leningrad
(now St. Petersburg) and on June 1 by
Mort Panish and Izuo Hayashi at Bell Labs.
June 30, 1970: AT&T introduces Picturephone in Pittsburgh. The
telephone monopoly plans to install millimeter
waveguides to provide the needed extra capacity.
Summer 1970: Maurer, Donald Keck, and Peter Schultz at Corning
make a single-mode fiber with loss of 16 decibels
per kilometer at 633 nanometers by doping titanium
into fiber core.
September 30, 1970: Maurer announces Corning’s fiber results at London
conference devoted mainly to progress in millimeter
waveguides.
November 1970: Measurements at British Post Office and STL confirm
Corning results.
Late Fall 1970: Charles Kao leaves STL to teach at Chinese University
of Hong Kong; Murray Ramsay heads STL fiber
group.
1970–1971: Dick Dyott at British Post Office and Felix Kapron of
Corning separately find pulse spreading is lowest
at 1.2 to 1.3 micrometers.
May 1971: Murray Ramsay of STL demonstrates digital video
transmission over fiber to Queen Elizabeth at
the Centenary of the Institution of Electrical Engineers.
October 13, 1971: Alec Reeves dies in London.
1971–1972: Unable to duplicate Corning’s low loss, Bell Labs, the
University of Southampton, and CSIRO in Australia
experiment with liquid-core fibers.