Glass has been drawn into fibres from as far back as Roman times, yet it was not until the 1790s that the Chappe brothers of France invented the first optical telegraph, a system comprised of lights mounted on towers in a series that operators could use to relay a message from one tower to the next.
Over the course of the following centuries great strides were made in optical science, resulting in the high-quality fibre cable used today in a variety of industries including data storage, telecommunication, medical, networking, military, industrial, and broadcast industries, all of which apply and use fibre optic technology in many critical applications.
To better understand how we came to rely so much on this essential material, let's take a look at the history that led to today's fibre optics technologies.
Physicists Daniel Collodon and Jacques Babinet demonstrated that light could be directed along jets of water for fountain displays in the 1840s. A British physicist, John Tyndall, demonstrated In 1854 that light could travel through a curved stream of water which proved that a light signal could be bent. He achieved this by rigging up a tank of water with a pipe that extended from one side. As water flowed from the pipe, he shone a light into the stream of water, and as the water fell an arc of light followed the water down.
Alexander Graham Bell patented an optical telephone system which assisted in the advancement of optical technology called the photophone in 1880, but it never came into style. French engineer Henry Saint-Rene created a system of bent glass rods for guiding light images in an early attempt at television in 1895, not knowing the technology would one day change the world!
In the 1920s the idea of using arrays of transparent rods to transmit images for television was patented by John Logie Baird. However, Heinrich Lamm was the first to transmit an image through a bundle of optical fibres in 1930.
In 1955 Abraham Van Heel and Harold H. Hopkins presented imaging bundles in the British journal Nature. Van Heel later produced a cladded fibre system that greatly reduced signal interference and crosstalk between fibres.
By the 1970s producing single-mode fibres with attenuation less than 20dB/km was achieved by scientists at Corning Glass Works.
Bell Laboratories developed a modified chemical vapour deposition process in 1973 that heats chemical vapours and oxygen to form ultra-transparent glass which can be mass-produced into low-loss optical fibre, the process that today remains the standard for manufacturing fibre-optic cable.
The first fibre-optic link was installed by the Dorset UK police in 1975. The first live telephone traffic through fibre optics occurred two years later in Long Beach, California. By the 1980s, telephone companies were using fibres extensively to redesign their communications infrastructures.
In 1986 Bell Laboratories optimized laser amplification technology resulting in the first transatlantic telephone cable in 1988.
Australia is a leader in the installation of fibre optic cabling for a better, faster future.
