Great Connections for Fall 2019

6 FALL 2019 It took many years, many scientists and many dollars to develop the technology that resulted in today’s fiber optics. Here are the milestones: 1840s: Swiss physicist Daniel Colladon discovered he could shine light along a water pipe. The water carried the light by internal reflection. 1870: An Irish physicist named John Tyndall demonstrated internal reflection at London’s Royal Society. He shone light into a jug of water. When he poured some of the water out from the jug, the light curved round following the water’s path. This idea of “bending light” is exactly what happens in fiber optics. Although Colladon is the true grandfather of fiber optics, Tyn- dall often earns the credit. 1930s: Heinrich Lamm andWalter Gerlach, two German students, tried to use light pipes to make a gastroscope—an instrument for looking inside someone’s stomach. 1950s: In England, Indian physicist Narinder Kapany and British physicist Harold Hopkins managed to send a simple picture down a light pipe made from thousands of glass fibers. After publishing many scientific papers, Kapany earned a reputation as the “father of fiber optics.” 1957: Three American scientists at the University of Michigan —Lawrence Curtiss, Basil Hirschowitz and Wilbur Peters— successfully used fiber-optic technology to make the world’s first gastroscope. 1960s: Chinese-born U.S. physicist Charles Kao and his col- league George Hockham realized that impure glass was no use for long-range fiber optics. Kao suggested that a fiber-optic cable made from very pure glass would be able to carry telephone sig- nals over much longer distances and was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for this ground-breaking discovery. Also during this decade, researchers at the Corning Glass Company made the first fiber-optic cable capable of carrying telephone signals. Circa 1970: Donald Keck and colleagues at Corning found ways to send signals much further (with less loss) prompting the devel- opment of the first low-loss optical fibers. 1977: The first fiber-optic telephone cable was laid between Long Beach and Artesia, California. 1988: The first transatlantic fiber-optic telephone cable, TAT8, was laid between the United States, France and the UK. 2018: TeleGeography, a telecommunications market research and consulting firm, reports there are around 450 fiber-optic subma- rine cables (carrying communications under the world’s oceans), stretching a total of 1.2 million km (0.7 million miles). The diverse fiber network of Great Plains Communica- tions is over 11,500 miles and growing with unique, redundant routes to increase uptime. To learn more, call 402-456-6467. Source: www.explainthatstuff.com/fiberoptics.html Travel Back Through Fiber-Optic History We’re shining the light on key discoveries and achievements