City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

44 CITY OF LIGHT
He hurried to the German patent office, where he was astounded to learn
that a British version of Hansell’s patent had just issued. 36 The disappointed
Lamm wrote to the British licensee, the Marconi Company, who told him
neither they nor Hansell ‘‘have tried to utilize this principle.’’ 37
Most students in his position would have given up, but not Heinrich
Lamm. He wrote a paper, which the journal Zeitschrift fur Instrumentenkunde
published in its October 1930 issue. It appears under Lamm’s name alone,
unusual at a time when European professors typically insisted they share
credit for student work. Indeed, Schindler thought Lamm’s experiment had
failed. 38
Lamm insisted ‘‘the experimental proof of the possibility to transmit images
through a flexible multi-fiber conductor of radiant energy ...justifies this
communication.’’ However, he knew he could go no further by himself, concluding:
‘‘I also hope that some optical firm possessed of more means, sources
of supply, and experience than I have, could be induced by this report to build
a serviceable flexible gastroscope.’’ 39
Two Decades of Stillness
Lamm’s hopes were in vain. His paper and Hansell’s patent sank without a
trace. Crucial pieces of the technological puzzle were still missing. Only a
feeble, fractured image had emerged from Lamm’s bundle. His glass fibers,
like Jenkins’s quartz rods, absorbed too much light, and although no one
realized it at the time, they didn’t confine light well either. Other technologies
seemed far more practical for looking inside the body, for television, and even
for displaying meter readings in more convenient locations.
The rise of Adolf Hitler brought trouble for Lamm, a Jew. 40 Survival became
more important than following up an old experiment. He and his physician
wife fled Germany after their residencies at the Jewish Hospital in Breslau
(now Wroclaw, Poland). They reached America in 1937, where an uncle got
Heinrich a job at a psychiatric hospital in Kansas City. 41 The next year, Lamm
traveled through Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma with a salesman friend,
seeking an exotic place to settle down as a surgeon. He found it in a town of
1500 in the southern tip of Texas, where the old town physician was retiring.
The town lacked a Jewish community, but the native prejudices didn’t include
antisemitism. 42 It was a welcome relief from Germany.
Lamm tinkered a bit, and his restless mind explored many areas, but
mostly he practiced medicine. He was an early and enthusiastic crusader for
automobile seat belts. 43 He put on weight and his wavy hair thinned, but he
retained his intelligence and passions, and kept a reprint of his paper from
Zeitschrift fur Instrumentenkunde.
The Radio Corporation of America had the resources Lamm lacked, but
the company filed Hansell’s patent and forgot it. No company can do everything.
Broadcast radio was a tremendous success; television was promising
but costly to develop. Fiber optics was but a footnote to the work at Rocky