City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

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Figure 6-1: Larry Curtiss made a glass-clad fiber by melting a glass tube onto a
rod, heating the tip, and stretching a fiber from it.
In the summer of 1956, after finishing his sophomore year, Curtiss took
the problem to an informal committee of the physics faculty, a group of professors
who played bridge at lunch in the laboratory basement. They unanimously
agreed the best solution was to apply a transparent cladding of plastic
or lacquer, just as van Heel had suggested. Curtiss tried to convince Peters
and another professor that a glass cladding would be better, 14 but the older
men doubted it could be applied uniformly, and worried that the glass might
crack or craze.
Curtiss wondered if he could solve the problem by putting a tube of lowindex
glass around a rod of higher-index glass, melting them together, and
stretching the assembly into a fiber (figure 6-1). But he spent the rest of the
summer and the early fall making bare glass fibers and dipping them in plastic
and lacquer. That reduced crosstalk, but only at the cost of reducing light
transmission. Nonetheless, they made progress, assembling a three-foot bun-