City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

A Surprise from Britain
A CRITICAL INSIGHT 57
Another unsolved puzzle is Nature’s juxtaposition of van Heel’s paper with
one that Hopkins submitted six months later.
Harold Horace Hopkins was a young rising star in the little world of European
optics. Born December 6, 1918, in Leicester, England, the son of a
bakery worker, his quick intelligence earned him a university scholarship.
When World War II started shortly after his graduation in 1939, the government
sent Hopkins to work for an optics company, diverting his interests
from theoretical physics to optical design. During the war he earned a doctorate
from the University of London, and soon afterward he was named to
the faculty at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London.
Brilliant, well read, and strong-minded, Hopkins thrived in the rich intellectual
atmosphere of the postwar British capital. When he was a student in
the 1930s, ‘‘any physicist worth his salt was a member of the communist
party,’’ he recalled. 62 He left the party after the war, but his politics remained
leftist, and he avoided the entanglements of Cold War military work. He
earned accolades from the optical world by designing the first zoom lens that
worked as well as a standard fixed-focus lens. That was no mean feat because
the design required elaborate calculations at a time before electronic computers.
Hopkins also developed a taste for fine wines and London social life. 63 At
a 1951 dinner party, he met a physician who had just performed what Hopkins
called ‘‘a particularly distressing endoscopy using the old rigid type of
gastroscope.’’ When the physician learned that Hopkins specialized in optics,
he asked if more flexible instruments could be made to look into the stomach.
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Intrigued, Hopkins first thought of inserting a single glass fiber down the
throat, and moving it to look around the stomach. He soon realized that was
as impractical as mechanical television cameras that looked through holes in
moving disks; the physician could see only if there was a bright lamp in the
patient’s stomach. Then he decided to try a flexible bundle of fibers. He had
every reason to think the idea was new. Baird’s and Hansell’s patents and
Lamm’s paper were buried in dusty archives, and van Heel’s work initially
was classified. The major London newspapers ignored Møller Hansen, 65 although
Hopkins might have heard of his work through other channels.
To test his idea, Hopkins got glass fibers made for other purposes; they
were only 20 micrometers (0.8 thousandth of an inch) thick, so fine he could
hardly see them. His first experiments were the simple ones a curious child
will do with an optical fiber today. He made loops in the fiber and pointed
one end at a lamp while looking at the other end through a microscope. The
fiber tip was bright until he put his hand between the other end and the
lamp. The light was still visible after passing through 4 feet (1.2 meters) of
fiber. Delighted, Hopkins adjourned with friends to the local pub and celebrated
with several pints of beer. 66