City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

by Jeff Hecht

City of Light tells the story of fiber optics, tracing its transformation from 19th-century parlor trick into the foundation of our global communications network. Written for a broad audience by a journalist who has covered the field for twenty years, the book is a lively account of both the people and the ideas behind this revolutionary technology.
The basic concept underlying fiber optics was first explored in the 1840s when researchers used jets of water to guide light in laboratory demonstrations. The idea caught the public eye decades later when it was used to create stunning illuminated fountains at many of the great Victorian exhibitions. The modern version of fiber optics--using flexible glass fibers to transmit light--was discovered independently five times through the first half of the century, and one of its first key applications was the endoscope, which for the first time allowed physicians to look inside the body without surgery. Endoscopes became practical in 1956 when a college undergraduate discovered how to make solid glass fibers with a glass cladding.
With the invention of the laser, researchers grew interested in optical communications. While Bell Labs and others tried to send laser beams through the atmosphere or hollow light pipes, a small group at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories looked at guiding light by transparent fibers. Led by Charles K. Kao, they proposed the idea of fiber-optic communications and demonstrated that contrary to what many researchers thought glass could be made clear enough to transmit light over great distances. Following these ideas, Corning Glass Works developed the first low-loss glass fibers in 1970.
From this point fiber-optic communications developed rapidly. The first experimental phone links were tested on live telephone traffic in 1977 and within half a dozen years long-distance companies were laying fiber cables for their national backbone systems. In 1988, the first transatlantic fiber-optic cable connected Europe with North America, and now fiber optics are the key element in global communications.
The story continues today as fiber optics spread through the communication grid that connects homes and offices, creating huge information pipelines and replacing copper wires. The book concludes with a look at some of the exciting potential developments of this technology.

Genres: Technology, Science, History, Physics, Nonfiction

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Jeff Hecht has written extensively about lasers, light and optics for a wide range of publications, including New Scientist magazine, Laser Focus World, Optics & Photonics News, High Technology, Technology Review, and Bulletin of the American Scientists.

Reviews

[Mike Parkes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never knew how interesting glass could be until I visited the Museum of Glass in Corning, New York a few years back. This book tells the story of the killer glass application of the later 20th and 21st centuries - fiber optics.

Fiber optics for communications couldn’t launch until a bunch of different technological improvements came together – materials science to make the fibers incredibly pure, almost lossless carriers of light (perfected at Corning!), the laser to serve as a signal source of coherent, rapidly pulsed light, and of course the transistor, essential to manage the switching and information processing, but more importantly to create the modern computing industry and the Internet that built up the demand for the enormous data transfer capabilities that these pipes of fiber provide!

This is a pure technology history book, and a very well-done one. It provides lots of great insights on all of the fields noted above, and on many other aspects of telecommunications. Only covers up to 1999 (the paperback version goes to 2004) but that’s far enough – fiber is a mature technology by book’s end.

[Kin Guan · Rating 4 out of 5]

"A good introductory read for people who yearns to learn how optical fibre came along."

Read as part of the research for the essay.

A better book than the other book I have read, with more focus on the development of the optical fibre technology. Jeff Hecht was a journalist who worked for scientific journals and magazines, hence I found his way of telling the history and stories nice and explanatory without going into too much technical jargons. The various stages of how to guide a beam of light in material were worth reading, for its relatively short history and some less known past of now ubiquitous status.

One of the things that could be improved is more explanations on how a light travels through a glass or water. By saying it works by "total internal reflection" without saying any context is the same as saying it works by magic. Well science does look like magic to some uninitiated, and "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", quoted from Sir Arthur C. Clarke. But I digress.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great overview of the history of fiber optics pre-1998, which is incidentally when I started in sales of data services over hybrid fiber-coax networks. The last two chapters concerning the "last mile" (fiber to the premises) and the current state of the field at the time of writing show that a lot of the supposedly failed experiments in FTTP were simply deployed twenty to thirty years before the consumer market was ready for them; Hecht describes the first video-on-demand system, launched in Japan in 1978(!) and also GTE's 1993 consumer tests of what appears to me to be a definite precursor to FIOS.

[Amirnader · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a nicely written account of the history of fiber optics technology, from its modest beginning to its glorious days of rapid growth and finally to its present day situation.
If you're working with fiber optics, this book provides you with a part of the history. I enjoyed reading this book a lot and recommend it to anybody with an interest in technology and specially to students and teachers of fiber optic courses.

[Pete · Rating 4 out of 5]

City of Light : The Story of Fiber Optics (2004) by Jeff Hecht is an excellent history of the development of fiber optics. Hecht is a journalist who has been writing about lasers, light and optics for decades. He knew or knows many of the people who feature in the story. Hecht went to Caltech and studied physics. He wrote ‘Understanding Fiber Optics’ which is a very widely read text book on fiber optics.

Fibre Optics are an incredibly important and yet neglected technology. They make the modern internet possible. Their development is a fascinating and important story. Anyone reading this review is almost certainly reading the result of bits sent over fiber optics at some point.

The book starts with the observation that light could be transmitted along water. Later fibers of glass were made and it was observed that light could also be transmitted along them. The book describes how this discovery led to scopes being made that could be used to examine the inside of throats and bowels. The importance of total internal reflection was shown.

Much of the book concentrates on the years from 1950 to 1975 where scientists and engineers at Bell Labs, Standard Communications Laboratories, the British Post Office Laboratories and Corning Glass carefully researched fiber optics. There Charles Kao, Alec Reeves and many others worked at investigating and improving aspects of fiber optics.

One of the really interesting aspects of the book is how optical fibers were not the main focus for optical communications research. Instead wave guides were seen as the most promising technology. It shows how hard it is to predict which technologies will work and which will fail.

Also crucial for the development of fiber optics was the development of semi-conductor lasers. The book also outlines their development. In a final chapter optical amplifiers for communications are also described.

The final parts of the book show the rapid growth of fiber optics. First they radically improved long-distance telephony. Then they became crucial to the development of the internet. There is a chapter of the fiber boom and bust of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

City of Light is an excellent book by a man who was ideal for writing it. It’s dry, but Hecht writes well and provides an excellent history of a technology that is now taken for granted.