City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

282 NOTES TO PAGES 23–27
37. It was known as Lucite in America and Perspex in England; its proper
name is polymethyl methacrylate. It also was used in tongue depressors. ‘‘Cold
light (Lucite) surgical instruments,’’ Scientific American, Feb. 1939, p. 99; see also
‘‘Piped light aids surgeons and dentists,’’ Popular Science, Mar. 1939, p. 108.
38. Dictionary of Scientific Biography (Vol. XIII, ‘‘John Tyndall,’’ pp. 521–524).
39. John Tyndall, notebook preserved at Royal Institution, London, dated Friday
evening, May 19, 1854.
40. John Tyndall, ‘‘On some phenomena connected with the motion of liquids,’’
Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain 1, pp. 446–448 (1854).
He says his demonstration repeats Savart’s work on fluid flow.
41. Faraday’s memory failed gradually, beginning around 1840; the problem
was episodic, so he was able to work much of the time but could not concentrate
at other times. He became quite senile before his death in 1868 and probably
suffered from what we now call Alzheimer’s disease. L. Pearce Williams, Michael
Faraday: A Biography (Basic Books, New York, 1965).
42. Colladon in Comptes Rendus says the water-jet apparatus was demonstrated
in London, probably in 1841, but does not say where or by whom. Faraday gave
two or three lectures at the Royal Institution in 1841, which was the worst year
of his first breakdown in health. His topics almost certainly did not include light
guiding. There is no evidence that either Colladon or de la Rive spoke at the Royal
Institution at the time, although they could have lectured elsewhere in London,
such as at the Adelaide Galleries or the London Institution. Faraday spent much
of his time that year in Switzerland away from other scientists, as he tried to
recover his faculties, but even if he did not see the demonstration, he must have
heard of it. (Frank James, Royal Institution, e-mail Sep. 14, 1998).
43. The mistaken crediting of Tyndall with first guiding light in a water jet is
a reminder of how easily and widely mistakes can spread. Tyndall’s original 1854
account (Tyndall, ‘‘On some phenomena’’) does not claim the idea of light guiding
is new, but also does not explicitly attribute it to someone else. He wound up
credited with the idea half a century after his death largely because he described
the experiment in one of his widely-circulated popular books, where it was rediscovered
in the 1950s (an American edition is John Tyndall, Light and Electricity,
Appleton & Co., New York, 1871, pp. 41–43). It was natural to credit the eminent
Tyndall with the discovery. The first publication I have found to credit Tyndall is
Narinder S. Kapany, ‘‘Fiber optics,’’ Scientific American 203 (5), 72–81, November
1960, and Kapany told me he found the reference (telephone interview, Feb. 13,
1996). Kapany’s thesis advisor Harold H. Hopkins may have played a role in
finding the Tyndall reference; he was well read and had a large library of old
science books. As fiber optics spread, most people—including myself—accepted
Tyndall as the originator of the idea. The Optical Society of America later named
its major fiber-optics award after Tyndall. The late Kaye Weedon uncovered Colladon’s
and Babinet’s 1842 reports in the late 1960s, but although he gave several
talks on their work, he never published an account, and few others took
notice.
Chapter 3
1. Charles Vernon Boys, ‘‘Quartz fibres,’’ Nature, July 11, 1889, pp. 247–251.
2. Oszkar Knapp, Glasfasern (Glass Fibers) (Akademiai Kaido, Budapest, 1966,
p. 9; translation by Max J. Riedl).