Glass to the Rescue: Fiber Optics

Abstract

Ever since the rise of the telegraph in the nineteenth century, the demand for communication over distances has become greater and greater. Telegraph signals can be as slow as they like, but the user’s impatience caused them to be speeded up. Telephones needed fast signals—more bandwidth—and so on. Television required more than radio and so the need for ever more sophisticated means of communication became apparent as the twentieth century progressed. Developments in electronics kept pace until after the Second World War.

It is my firm belief that an almost ideal telecommunication network . . . going a long way toward eliminating the effects of mere distance altogether, can be made—but only, at least as now foreseeable, by optical means. I believe too that within and between the highly developed regions of the world such a technological revolution . . . will be demanded by the public by the start of the next century. It will be a real adventure, and lead too, to truly stimulating new challenges in human behaviour.

Alec Reeves, John Logie Baird Memorial Lecture, May 1969