The very first “fiber” was made in 1870 by the British physicist John Tyndal. In this experiment that he showed to the Royal Society he placed a powerful waterproof lamp inside a tank of water, which had closed pipes coming out the sides. When he opened up the pipes so water could flow, to the amazement of the crowd, the light totally internally reflected inside the beam of water as it fell to the ground.

One of the very first forms of optical communication was done Paul Revere in his famous Paul Revere’s ride. Here he used the well-known signal “one if by land, two if by sea.” Although primitive, this was still optical communication and we must give him credit for it. Another contender was Alexander Gram Bell and his photophone. With this device, one person would speak into a microphone causing a mirror to vibrate. Then sunlight would reflect off the vibrating m

Fiber optic cable is constructed with an industry standard with respect to that the cladding on all cable, whether single or multimode, must be 125 mm. This is done so the same tools can be used for both types of cables. Fiber cables are also bunched, much like their copper counterparts are. Individual cables are called simplex, double cables are called duplex, and four cables wrapped together are quadplex. Wires with more than four cables are also available. Some of the possible ones are groups of twelve, thirty-six, and forty-eight.

There are two types of attenuation: intrinsic and extrinsic. One of the two types of intrinsic attenuation is scattering, which makes up about 96% of the intrinsic. Rayleigh scattering in which light rays collide with atoms in the cable and scattering is a result causes this. This cannot be avoided. The second type of intrinsic attenuation is absorption. This constitutes about the other 4% of the intrinsic loss, but fortunately this type can go to zero if we can get the fiber pure enough. Therefore it is always a goal to make the purest fiber possible.

Since fiber is much better than copper, its beginning to have many applications. Telephone and cable television companies are both begging to use fiber. Lines connecting central offices in companies are often using fiber. Power companies use it for communication because of its lack of electrical interference. Computing is one of the other main uses. LAN’s usually have their backbones made of fiber.

In the summer of 1970, scientists at the Corning Glass Works developed a single mode fiber with a loss of 20 dB/km. This corresponds to over a 99% loss over 1 km, which may seem useless, but at the time it was a spectacular breakthrough. On October 30, 1986, a fiber across the English Channel became operational. In December 1988, the TAT-8, the first transatlantic fiber cable became fully functional. Currently, the standard losses of fiber are within 0.5 – 0.25 dB/km with a data transfer rate of 1 trillion bits per second.

The advantages of fiber over copper are great and many. The first and most obvious is fiber’s immense bandwidth capabilities. Fiber can carry 40,000 phone conversations and over 250 tele

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