City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

A CRITICAL INSIGHT 51
flexible array of transparent fibers to look into inaccessible places. He struggled
to draw his own glass fibers but found it too hard to keep their size
constant. He tested other glass and plastic fibers and found the best were
fibers made by a company called Extrusion to insulate undersea cables. However,
he had trouble bundling them together for image transmission.
He also had trouble finding the right coating material. Like van Heel,
Møller Hansen tried metal coatings, but the coated fibers didn’t transmit light.
He then tried coating fibers with materials having a lower refractive index.
There aren’t many solids, so he tried oils and got much better transmission.
Canada balsam oil worked, but he got the best results with margarine, which
he knew was impractical. 19
By 1951, he had made enough progress to seek a patent. His application 20
is short, but it shows he had thought carefully about making an instrument
to look inside the body. He realized illumination was needed, and suggested
delivering light through some fibers in the bundle. He also realized the need
to seal the ends against contamination.
Enthusiastic about his new idea, Møller Hansen talked to reporters. The
press loved him; bright, colorful, and outspoken, he still makes a good interview.
In May, the story hit some European newspapers; the following month,
the Los Angeles Times carried a Reuters report. 21 He had experimented mostly
with glass, but he envisioned making future fibers of clear plastics. A magazine
photographed him looking into a bundle inserted into his ear, 22 but
Møller Hansen says the photo was faked because that bundle could not transmit
an image. 23 He accumulated a fat file of Danish and German clippings.
That was the high point of his fiber-optic career. The Danish patent office
rejected Møller Hansen’s application after discovering the Hansell patent,
which anticipated most—but not all—of his claims. Møller Hansen should
have had a clear priority on the crucial idea of applying a low-index cladding
to the fiber. His wording was vague by modern standards, but at the time
O’Brien had made no move to publish or patent his idea. Unfortunately, neither
Møller Hansen nor the Danish patent office realized the importance of
the cladding, and his patent claims died.
With limited resources, Møller Hansen could not go much further. He
lacked the equipment to make good fibers and to investigate better cladding
materials. He couldn’t buy good fibers. He couldn’t convince British or Danish
companies that anyone wanted fiber-optic bundles to look inside the body.
Frustrated, in 1952 he turned to another idea he could better pursue in his
cluttered workshop—plastic-bubble ‘‘shock absorbers’’ for mailing envelopes.
He did patent that idea, but it didn’t make him rich. 24
An Urbane European Professor of Optics
Abraham Cornelis Sebastiaan van Heel was a cultured member of the European
professoriat, in marked contrast to the ingenious Danish farm boy. Born
in Java in 1899, when it was a Dutch colony, van Heel earned a doctorate