City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

A good
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99 Percent Perspiration
The Birth of an Industry
(1954–1960)
The definition was good enough to read large print, but
the color was green, and light loss was so great as to make
long fiber bundles impractical. Nevertheless, it was flexible
and did transmit an image, and that was enough to set
one dreaming.
—Basil Hirschowitz, recalling his first look into a bundle
made by Hopkins and Kapany. 1
idea is not enough to launch a new technology, as the cases of
C. W. Hansell, Heinrich Lamm, and Holger Møller Hansen testify. It takes
a critical mass of credible evidence to get the idea rolling, careful engineering
and a technological infrastructure to make practical devices, and money and
marketing savvy to sell them.
The two Nature papers provided the critical mass of evidence, along with
an important new idea, the transparent cladding. Lamm had hit only the
easiest of targets, recording a jagged image of a bright light-bulb filament.
Hopkins and Kapany made a better bundle that showed the letters GLAS. 2
Lamm was a medical student writing in an obscure journal; van Heel and
Hopkins were prominent scientists writing in one of the world’s most widely
read journals. Moreover, 1954 was a better time to launch new ideas than
1930, when Europe and America were in economic crisis and the ugly tide
of Nazism was rising in Germany.
Yet the Nature papers represented only a first step. They didn’t mention
unpleasant realities such as the rapid degradation of transmission when bun-
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