Bell had hoped to send signals through the air, but the atmosphere did not transmit light as reliability as wires carried electricity. In the following decades, light was used in a few special cases - such as signaling between ships - but for the most part the technology was unused.
In the intervening years, a new technology slowly took root that would ultimately solve the problem of optical transmission, although it was a long time before it was adapted for communications. It depended on the phenomenon of total internal reflection, which can confine light in a material surrounded by other materials with lower refractive index, such as glass in air. In the 1840s, Swiss physicist Daniel Collodon and French physicist Jacques Babinet showed that light could be guided along jets of water for fountain displays. British physicist John Tyndall popularized light guiding in a demonstration he first used in 1854, guiding light in a jet of water flowing from a tank. .
Optical fibers then went a step further. They are fundamentally translucent rods of glass or plastic stretched so they are long and flexible. During the 1920's, 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. However, the first person to demonstrate image transmission through a bundle of optical fibers was Heinrich Lamm, a medical student in Munich - he was attempting to look inside inaccessible parts of the body. Unfortunately, the rise of Nazism forced Lamm, a Jew, to end his experimentation and move to America.
Nothing more was reported on fiber bundles until 1954, when Abraham van Heel at the Technical University of Delft in Holland, and Harold H. Hopkins and Narinder Kapany of Imperial College in London separately announced imaging bundles. Neither van Heel nor Hopkins and Kapandy made bundles that could carry light far, but their work was still vital to the development of fiber optics.