City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

292 NOTES TO PAGES 74–80
way taken from the side of the studio. It’s eerie to realize how many people saw
this window into future technology through morning-bleary eyes and immediately
forgot about it.
66. Working under Robert Hopkins, O’Brien’s successor at Rochester, Potter
analyzed fiber properties in detail and explained some previously puzzling features
of fiber transmission. Robert Joseph Potter, A Theoretical and Experimental Study of
Optical Fibers (University of Rochester, 1960).
67. Siegmund telephone interview, Aug. 1, 1996.
68. Hicks interview.
Chapter 7
1. Alec Harley Reeves, ‘‘Future prospects for optical communication,’’ John
Logie Baird Memorial Lecture, University of Strathclyde, May 30, 1969.
2. Many years were needed to perfect practical switches after Strowger applied
for a patent in 1889, but the simple and durable equipment remained in use for
decades. Peter Young, Power of Speech (George Allen & Unwin, London, 1983).
3. Irwin Lebow, Information Highways & Byways (IEEE Press, New York, 1995).
4. While testing his scheme, Bell heard audio tones that the current had carried
through the wires. As a teacher of the deaf, he realized that the wires which
could carry tones also could carry speech. Arthur C. Clarke, How the World Was
One: Beyond the Global Village (Bantam, New York, 1992, p. 112).
5. The modern telephone system carries only frequencies of 300 to 3000 hertz,
much smaller than the nominal range of human hearing from 20 to 20,000 hertz
but adequate for most people to understand conversations. The limit has been
retained from the early days of telephone electronics.
6. They also can be seen as particles, clumps of energy called ‘‘photons.’’
Sometimes they behave like waves, other times like particles.
7. The story of the optical telegraph is a fascinating example of the rise and
fall of a nineteenth-century technology, and reminds us how fast once-vital systems
can be forgotten. For a fascinating account, see Gerard J. Holzmann and
Björn Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks (IEEE Computer Society Press,
Los Alamitos, Calif., 1995).
8. Robert V. Bruce, Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude (Little
Brown and Co., Boston, 1973, p. 336).
9. He sketched an optical telephone in one of his copious notebooks but never
worked out the details of how one might operate. Neil Baldwin, ‘‘The laboratory
notebooks of Thomas Edison,’’ Scientific American, Oct. 1995, pp. 160–160C.
10. Bruce, Alexander Graham Bell (p. 337).
11. Alexander Graham Bell, ‘‘The photophone,’’ Scientific American, Supplement
246, Sept. 18, 1880, pp. 3921–3923.
12. Forgotten, that is, except by a few curious souls who thought the ‘‘photophone’’
Bell had sealed in the Smithsonian archives might be an early television.
They were disappointed when the box was opened after Bell’s death.
13. America and Britain tested systems during both world wars; Germany used
an infrared system during World War II. See N. C. Beese, ‘‘Light sources for optical
communication’’ (Infrared Physics 1, pp. 5–6 (1961)) for technical details.
14. Earlier transmitters had worked only sporadically or transmitted only telegraph
signals. H. D. Arnold and Lloyd Espenschied, ‘‘Transatlantic radio telephony,’’
Journal American Institute of Electrical Engineers, Aug. 1923, pp. 815–826.