City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

5
A Critical Insight
The Birth of the Clad Optical Fiber
(1950–1955)
Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent
perspiration.
—Thomas Alva Edison
Heinrich Lamm and C. W. Hansell lacked not merely resources but one
crucial bit of inspiration. They didn’t realize that light was leaking between
bare glass fibers where they touched each other. The solution was
disarmingly simple: cladding the light-carrying fiber with a transparent material
that had a lower refractive index. However, like most other critical
insights, it’s obvious only in hindsight. Two decades after Hansell and Lamm,
the idea sprouted separately in the fertile minds of two very different men.
One was an eminent professor, a maker and shaker in mid-century American
science. The other was a Danish inventor laboring in a small home workshop.
A Fateful Cocktail Discussion
Optics was a quiet backwater of physics in October 1951, 1 when two of the
biggest fish in that small pond shared cocktails in the large living room of a
stucco-tile house at the end of Harwood Lane in East Rochester, New York.
The host was Brian O’Brien, president of the Optical Society of America and
director of America’s leading school of optics at the University of Rochester.
His guest was Abraham van Heel, president of the International Commission
for Optics and professor of physics at the Technical University of Delft in the
Netherlands.
46