A Brief History of Fiber-Optic Communications
Optical communication systems date back to the 1790s, to the optical semaphore telegraph invented by French inventor Claude Chappe. In 1880, Alexander Graham Bell patented an optical telephone system, which he called the Photophone. However, his earlier invention, the telephone, was more practical and took tangible shape. The Photophone remained an experimental invention and never materialized. During the 1920s, John Logie Baird in England and Clarence W. Hansell in the United States patented the idea of using arrays of hollow pipes or transparent rods to transmit images for television or facsimile systems. In 1954, Dutch scientist Abraham Van Heel and British scientist Harold H. Hopkins separately wrote papers on imaging bundles. Hopkins reported on imaging bundles of unclad fibers, whereas Van Heel reported on simple bundles of clad fibers. Van Heel covered a bare fiber with a transparent cladding of a lower refractive index. This protected the fiber reflection surface from ou...