City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

Chapter 1
Notes
1. Daniel Colladon, ‘‘On the reflections of a ray of light inside a parabolic liquid
stream,’’ Comptes Rendus 15, pp. 800–802 (Oct. 24, 1842), translated by Julian
A. Carey, Apr. 1, 1995.
2. The number keeps increasing and is likely to be outdated by the time you
read this. Phone companies do not yet need all that capacity. In practice, the
signals consist of bit streams sent simultaneously using different colors of light. A
single fiber can carry 1.6 trillion bits per second as 160 different wavelengths
each carrying 10 billion bits per second.
3. Tiles installed on the inbound side of the Kendall Square station, which
serves MIT, chronicle a century of inventions and the growth of MIT. The 2002
World Almanac says the same thing in its list of inventions.
Chapter 2
1. David Napoli, ‘‘The luminous fountains at the French Exposition,’’ Scientific
American, Dec. 14, 1889, pp. 376–377, translated from the French La Nature.
2. French embassy, in response to telephone query.
3. Napoli, ‘‘The luminous fountains.’’
4. This account draws heavily on unpublished research by Kaye Weedon, a
Norwegian engineer who collected information on Colladon’s and Babinet’s work
and gave several talks on the origins of fiber optics around 1970. Jeofry Courtney-
Pratt kindly gave me copies of Weedon’s unpublished manuscripts. Sadly, Weedon
died in 1992, shortly before I began research on this book.
5. Savart died Mar. 16, 1841, shortly before Colladon repeated his experiment.
‘‘Felix Savart’’ entry in Charles Coulston Gillespie, ed., Dictionary of Scientific Biography
(Vol. XII; Scribner’s, New York, 1976, pp. 129–130).
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