City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

99 PERCENT PERSPIRATION 65
turned to South Carolina in 1950. When the CIA contacted him in 1954 he
was restless, unhappy with the conservative South, and fighting with the state
over taxes.
Hicks arrived at American Optical in September 1954. The first day,
O’Brien briefed him on fiber optics and gave him a couple of plastic-clad fibers
O’Brien had made in Rochester. O’Brien told Hicks that his assignment was
to make and clad fibers and assemble them into an image scrambler. The
busy O’Brien then sent Hicks off to work in a building separate from the main
research lab and had little more to do with the project.
In theory, Hicks reported to associate research director Steve MacNeille
and later to Walt Siegmund, a protégé of O’Brien’s from Rochester. In practice,
he was largely on his own while everyone else concentrated on Todd-
AO, an arrangement well matched to his independent nature. Not one to
merely follow the boss’s lead, Hicks began by convincing himself that lowindex
claddings were essential before the Michigan group reached the same
conclusion. Then he tackled scrambler development, a job much tougher than
merely demonstrating a crude imaging bundle because it essentially required
a whole new technology.
The security-conscious CIA used gastroscopes as a ‘‘cover’’ project to conceal
work on image scramblers. At a simple level, the two applications share
the need for fiber bundles that transmit intact images from end to end. To
make an encoder, you scramble the loose fibers in the middle, glue the mixed
region solid, then saw through it.
Look closely, however, and you find quite different requirements. A gastroscope
must be long, thin, and flexible to examine the stomach. A scrambler
should be at least a couple of inches across to encode pictures or signatures,
and short, fat, and rigid to handle easily. These differences are crucial and
lead to quite different devices. Whatever American Optical thought about the
potential of medical instruments, their customer was the CIA, and the spy
agency wanted image scramblers. Although both applications required fibers,
the overall goals were different, ultimately leading Hicks and American Optical
along a path different from the Michigan team.
Hicks first tried drawing fiber from a hole in the bottom of a platinum
crucible full of molten glass and then coating it with plastic. 17 The process
was quick and fairly easy, but plastic-clad fibers did not transmit light well.
When several months of refinements did not solve the problem, Hicks started
work on glass cladding, without completely abandoning plastic. 18 His first idea
was a logical extension of drawing fibers from a single crucible. He nested
two crucibles together, melting low-index glass in the outer one and a highindex
glass in the inner one. Then he pulled fibers through concentric holes
at the bottoms of the crucibles, so glass in the outer crucible formed a cladding
around a core of glass from the inner crucible. 19 The technique worked but
did not yield good fibers.
Hicks took a break in October to attend the Lake Placid meeting. He
met Peters and Curtiss and was impressed by the progress they were making
on a minimal budget. Their discussions led Hicks to visit Ann Arbor