City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

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bottom. Curtiss built a system that measured fiber diameter as it was drawn,
without touching the glass. They controlled the rate of fiber drawing by hand,
averaging about five miles (eight kilometers) an hour. Like Hopkins and Kapany,
they made bundles with ends aligned in the same position by looping
the fibers, fixing one part of the loop in place, and then cutting carefully
through the fixed spot. They needed 25 miles (40 kilometers) of good fiber to
make a single bundle of 40,000 fibers. 22 The freshly drawn fibers were only
about 0.04 millimeter thick, so thin that plastic had to be coated on top of
their glass cladding before they could be handled. Hirschowitz and Peters paid
the physics shop $800 to $900 to build a machine to wind fiber off the
oatmeal boxes into bundles, but almost everything else was homemade.
Unlike O’Brien, Hirschowitz wasted no time filing for patents; his first application,
covering the gastroscope, was filed December 28, 1956, with rights
shared with Peters and Curtiss. 23 Curtiss applied for a patent on glass-clad
fibers on May 6, 1957, assigning part interests to Hirschowitz and Peters. 24
The glass-clad fiber was the last piece needed to build a gastroscope. Hirschowitz
knew exactly what he wanted, and it took the three men just two
months to assemble the first working model. The tip that went inside the
stomach included a little illuminating lamp and optics to collect and focus
light onto the end of the bundle in the stomach. Hirschowitz himself swallowed
it first. 25 A few days later, February 18, 1957, he tested it on his first
patient, a small woman who had an ulcer. The instrument went down successfully,
and the moment seemed triumphant—until Marvin Pollard arrived.
Academia has its pecking orders, and Marvin Pollard had thought he was
at the top. He had not been deeply involved in development; Curtiss hadn’t
realized he was involved at all until Pollard invited him to a reception. However,
as the senior researcher, Pollard wanted to try the new instrument first.
Furious that Hirschowitz hadn’t waited for him, he confiscated the new endoscope
and locked it in his safe, so no one else could use it. 26 Tensions
between Pollard and Hirschowitz escalated rapidly when Pollard demanded a
share of patent rights. 27 He never got them, but he later blocked Hirschowitz
from getting a permanent job at Michigan. 28
Curtiss, who had thought the project was over, had to make a second
gastroscope 5/16 inch (0.8 centimeter) thick and a meter long for Hirschowitz
to show at a meeting of the American Gastroscopic Society in Colorado
Springs. 29 A May snowstorm disrupted transportation, so fewer than 40 people
attended his 10-minute talk, but those who attended were impressed.
Kapany was there and claimed Bausch and Lomb had almost completed an
instrument, but it never appeared. 30 Rudolf Schindler, by then a grand old
man of gastroscopy, recalled that Heinrich Lamm had the same idea but
thought Lamm had failed to assemble a bundle of fibers. 31 A few people asked
for a demonstration, so Hirschowitz took them to the nearest phone booth
and showed them fine print in the telephone directory.
The whole project cost about $5500 over two years, nearly $4000 of
which went to pay Curtiss. American Optical, the CIA, and Bausch & Lomb
probably spent far more.