City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

300 NOTES TO PAGES 119–123
that provided an interface between phone lines (hooked to remote computers) and
home television screens. Videotex arrived at the same time as the personal computer,
which rendered it obsolete. Ironically, some features of the graphically oriented
World Wide Web clearly derive from videotex.
8. ‘‘It failed to take off so decisively,’’ recalls Roger Heckingbottom, interview,
Dec. 1, 1994.
9. Charles Kao, ‘‘Historical notes on optical fiber communications,’’ unpublished
manuscript, with notes.
10. Full name provided by Institution of Electrical Engineers, Archives
dept.
11. Don Williams (telephone interview, Sept. 9, 1994) said he ‘‘looked after
all sorts of odd topics.’’
12. Clive Day, interview, Dec. 1, 1994. The project was a novel scheme for
storing data at the sites of atomic dislocations in crystals.
13. Dyott, telephone interview, Jan. 23, 1995; Clive Day, interview, Dec. 1,
1994.
14. The Post Office lab took pride in beating the better-funded Bell Labs. The
property is called Faraday rotation, in which applying a magnetic field to a material
called a ferrite rotates the plane of polarization of the microwaves (information
provided by IEE Archives dept.).
15. Heckingbottom, interview.
16. Charles Sandbank telephone interview, Sept. 7, 1994.
17. Robert Maurer, interview, Mar. 7, 1995.
18. Williams telephone interview.
19. W. A. Gambling, ‘‘Optical fibres: the Southampton scene,’’ IEE Proceedings
133J No. 3, pp. 205–210 (June 1986).
20. Kao, ‘‘Historical notes’’ (p. 20).
21. Martin Chown, interview, Dec. 2, 1994, and telephone interview Nov. 15,
1994.
22. Eric Spitz, telephone interview, Feb. 14, 1996. Spitz thinks the visit came
in 1964 or 1965, but the involvement of Roberts indicates it could not have been
before 1966.
23. Shojiro Kawakami, ‘‘The early days of optical fiber communication research,’’
Optoelectronics—Devices and Technologies 1, No. 2, pp. 125–136 (Dec.
1986).
24. Miller’s idea was a theoretical extension of work on millimeter and confocal
waveguides, which also applied to fibers. From a theoretical standpoint, a
graded-index waveguide is merely the limiting case of infinitely thin lenses spaced
infinitesimally close together. Stewart E. Miller, US Patent 3,434,774, ‘‘Waveguide
for millimeter and optical waves,’’ filed Feb. 2, 1965, as division of application
filed Feb. 25, 1964; issued Mar. 25, 1969.
25. Kao, ‘‘Historical notes’’ (pp. 20–21).
26. Richard B. Dyott, ‘‘Some memories.’’
27. Heckingbottom, interview, Dec. 1, 1994.
28. Richard B. Dyott, ‘‘Some memories.’’
29. Ibid.
30. Dyott telephone interview, Jan. 23, 1995.
31. Chown interview; Laszlo Solymar, personal communication. The precise
chain of command at STL varied over the years when fibers were being developed,
and Reeves functioned more as a technical consultant than a line manager, es-