City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

54 CITY OF LIGHT
in single fibers. He drew glass fibers about the same diameter as cells in the
eye and had a student dip them in liquids to study light guiding. He coated
fibers with instrument lacquers, which dried to a clear plastic with lower
refractive index than glass. 45 After talking with van Heel, O’Brien told his
military and security contacts about the possibilities of fiber-optic imaging
and encoding.
Impatience came with O’Brien’s driving energy. He liked to explore new
ideas and develop new instruments, but he rarely got around to writing papers
about them and couldn’t be bothered with details. A thick layer of papers
covered his desk. 46 The head of Rochester’s physics department praised
O’Brien’s intelligence, but told the Post: ‘‘He won’t fill out expense accounts.
His reports get in late or not at all. He never gets around to answering his
mail.’’ 47
Growing restless at Rochester, O’Brien was open to an offer from American
Optical Company, then one of the country’s three largest optics companies.
He agreed to join the century-old maker of spectacles and microscopes as a
vice president and head of a new research division at its headquarters in
Southbridge, Massachusetts, in early 1953, after Rochester completed a fundraising
drive. Well versed in patent law, O’Brien retained rights to inventions
in progress, including optical fibers. However, before he got to Southbridge,
O’Brien met an unexpected distraction—the flamboyant promoter Mike Todd,
best remembered today as Elizabeth Taylor’s third husband. 48 The impresario
needed an expert on the ‘‘optical dodge.’’ 49
Born Avrom Hirsch Goldbogen in 1907, Todd had ‘‘the soul of a carnival
pitchman and the ambition of a Napoleon’’ in the words of a contemporary
writer. 50 His formal education stopped when he was caught running a schoolyard
crap game and expelled from the sixth grade, but he was bright and
energetic. A born salesman, he made and lost fortunes, produced Broadway
musicals, and had ties to Hollywood.
In 1950, Todd decided the future of motion pictures lay in wide-screen
pictures that put the audience into the action. The idea dated back to the
1920s, but in the 1950s the movies needed a new gimmick to compete with
television. The industry also needed to solve an old optical problem—the distortion
inevitable when projecting a small image onto a big screen. Todd
found a little company called Cinerama that used three cameras and three
projectors to fill a huge screen that wrapped partway around the audience to
cover the whole field of vision. Cinerama was broke, but Todd became a
partner and almost single-handedly revived it. He raised money, sent crews
around the world to film a documentary, and booked theaters around the
country. Audiences flocked to This Is Cinerama after its September 1952 opening.
51
However, by then Todd had been eased out after clashing with the other
owners. He also saw Cinerama’s limitations. Its three projectors left two seams
in the picture, and occupied valuable theater space. A complete installation
cost $75,000, 52 big money then, so only 17 theaters around the world showed