The head of Corning Glass Works research at the time, William Armistead, was skeptical. Nevertheless, he approved funding for Robert Maurer, a physicist, as well as colleagues Pete Schultz, a senior chemist, and Donald Keck, an engineer and physicist, to work on the problem.
And they did, without a customer in sight. Maurer and his team knew that the glass would have to have a clear core surrounded by a skin—called cladding, and also made of glass—so that the cladding could reflect laser light back into the core and keep it traveling along its path.
For four years, he and his team at Corning kept experimenting with different chemical compositions of the core to create the greatest possible clarity. Failure followed failure.
fiber optic salary
One Friday evening in August 1970, Donald Keck was alone in the Corning R&D lab, testing one last piece of fiber before the weekend. In their book The Silent War, Ira Magaziner and Mark Patinkin tell the story of Keck bending over his microscope and lining up the laser, watching as the narrow beam of light got closer and closer to the core.
Suddenly, Keck was hit right in the eye by a bright beam of light. The fiber had transmitted light without losing more than a tiny amount of the beam’s strength. “Eureka,” Keck wrote in the lab notebook that day. It would be 10 more years before Corning found a customer for its optical fiber.
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