City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

A CRITICAL INSIGHT 53
With Brouwer gone, van Heel turned fiber work over to two other students.
34 Meanwhile, a Dutch colleague who later that year would win the
Nobel Prize in physics, Fritz Zernicke, 35 returned from England with disturbing
news. Harold H. Hopkins, an optics specialist at Imperial College in London,
claimed he had invented a way to send images through bundles of glass fibers.
There’s nothing like competition to get scientists moving. Van Heel decided
to rush a paper into print to establish priority over Hopkins. 36 He must have
gotten approval from the Dutch National Defense Research Council. He also
air mailed a letter to O’Brien. 37 With transatlantic phone calls out of the
question, van Heel could only wait for a reply by air mail or telegram. He
didn’t know O’Brien had been distracted.
Major Distractions in America
If European culture marked Bram van Heel, American drive and restless energy
were the hallmarks of Brian O’Brien. Tall, thin, and bespectacled, O’Brien
was a master grantsman before the word was coined, who moved in the
highest circles of American government science. Born January 2, 1898, in
Denver, he grew up in Milwaukee, the son of a prominent mining engineer.
He attended Yale, receiving an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering
in 1918 and a doctorate in physics in 1922. He arrived at the University of
Rochester in 1930, initially specializing in vision. In 1938 the university
named him the first permanent director of what was then America’s only
institute of optics.
O’Brien made pioneering measurements of atmospheric ozone from highaltitude
manned balloons, sending one to a then-record height of 72,000 feet
(21.8 kilometers) in 1935. 38 He applied his engineering talent to an ingenious
system that enriched the vitamin D content of milk by flowing the liquid past
an ultraviolet lamp. World War II brought new challenges. O’Brien designed
an instrument that produced visible images from invisible infrared light, so
pilots and soldiers could see at night. He built another instrument that allowed
soldiers to spot bombers trying to hide their attack by flying out of the
sun. After the war, he built a camera that could record an image in one tenmillionth
of a second and used it to photograph the Able atom bomb test at
Bikini Atoll. 39
Intense, energetic, and adventuresome, O’Brien kept many irons in the
fire. His students recall his technological eloquence. He ‘‘had this wonderful
way with his hands. He would show you an instrument and caress it’’ as he
described its workings, says one. 40 His energy was remarkable; another recalls,
‘‘He never walked but he ran.’’ 41 The Saturday Evening Post, then one of
America’s biggest magazines, profiled him as a colorful wizard of optics who
delighted in flying military planes while testing his equipment. 42
Optical fibers were only one of many projects O’Brien juggled at the university
and in his home laboratory. Inspired by plastic illuminating rods 43 and
by his discovery of light guiding in the eye, 44 he concentrated on transmission