This is Ozarks at Large. I'm Kyle Kellams.
This year's Robert D. Maurer Lecture, sponsored by the University of Arkansas Department of Physics, is deeply connected to the series namesake. Maurer, a University of Arkansas graduate, Donald Keck and Peter Schultz are co-inventors of low-loss fiber optic cable, an advancement that revolutionized telecommunications.
Donald Keck will speak tonight at 7:30 in Hillside Auditorium on the U of A campus as this year's Maurer Lecture. He says his talk, titled "Through a Glass Brightly: Reflections," will be a synopsis of his career, including a breakthrough the three men had together in 1970 at Corning Laboratories in New York.
"When we demonstrated that the impossible had been accomplished. And there's all sorts of stuff along the line that had to happen before we actually could say we had a business. It's amazing how big inventions take a lot of time to actually get into the marketplace. I hadn't realized that as a young student. We came into something fresh out of graduate school, and most people said it couldn't be done, and we didn't know it couldn't be done. So we did it.”
The breakthrough, to put it very simply, was discovering sound could be transmitted in the form of light along a fiber of silica glass.
Yesterday, Donald Keck and another visiting fiber optic visionary, Ming-Jun Li, sat down for a conversation in an office in the physics building on the University of Arkansas campus. The discussion took place just below a photograph of Keck, Maurer and Schultz taken soon after the announcement of their quantum leap.
Donald Keck says Maurer, the oldest of the three, was the leader of the project.
"And had the seminal idea to use a very difficult glass — fused silica — as the cornerstone of the fiber optics. He pointed a direction. And then Peter Schultz and I were about the same age, fresh out of graduate school, both of us. Peter was a glass chemist and was assigned to try and find other dopants that could be put into fused silica glass. And I was the project leader for Bob, trying to come up with the fiber and measuring the properties and the physics of the fiber. Pete and I worked very closely together, shared all sorts of data, met regularly. There was a good relationship between the two of us. And Bob was kind of the senior leader and we'd keep him informed as to what we were doing next."
This low-loss fiber optic technology ushered in the modern communications environment. Signals could now travel great distances without frequent and costly regeneration. This upgrade allowed for the eventual development of the internet, 5G and high-speed data transmission around the world. But all of that didn't develop immediately after discovery.
"We had our breakthrough in 1970 and proved that it was indeed possible. But the fiber initially had lots of problems. We had to do some treatments of the fiber to make it allow light to pass through it. It had some absorption problems. And we realized we had to make a change in glass composition. Pete was able to come up with a new dopant from the one that we'd been using, and that gave us something that was really manufacturable. And that took a couple of years after the 1970 demonstration. And then you faced the issue that you really haven't got all the tools that you need. You've got a transmission element, and copper wires were pretty standard — they had connectors, they had cables, all sorts of things that made them very practical. Those things had to be developed. Interestingly, in the early days when Corning tried to get development partners to help with cabling, the cable makers said, 'Well, there's no business there for us.' So we had to come up with some ways around it. It took about a 10-year period after that before all the bits and pieces were sufficiently practical — connector technology, the ability to take two pieces of glass about the size of a human hair and splice them together automatically out in the field. Little practical things that had to take place before it could possibly become a business. And the first thing everybody said was, 'Well, glass breaks. Why would we want to trust our telecommunication system to something that fragile?' Well, Bob heard that and did a study of strength of materials in fibers. After three years of work, he proved that in fact the fiber was stronger than a steel wire of the same size and could be put into the ground in wet environments and not break. All those things had to take place before people could really believe there was a commercial promise there."
Keck says the process to go from lab to commercial use was longer than he and Schultz, as recent graduate students, expected. But he also says there were plenty of moments along the way that kept spirits and curiosity thriving.
"The first glass we used had some titanium in it, and it turned dark as you made the fiber at high temperatures. So you had to heat-treat it. When you heat-treated it, it made the glass fragile. Peter came up with a Germania dopant — probably in '71 — and it turned out Germania is a nice glass former. There weren't any absorption bands or anything. And when we put the fiber in the furnace to heat it and stretch it into hair-thin strands, the light of the furnace was coming through the end of the fiber as we were winding it on the drum. We watched as it went round and round, meter after meter, for a full kilometer. And the light was still coming out of the fiber. We knew then we had a viable fiber. That was a revelation — a revolutionary moment along the way. The first cable: Corning had to make the first cable. The industry wouldn't help us. So that was an exciting thing."
Keck has that first cable with him — a piece of it — and will show it tonight during his talk.
It's difficult to firmly grasp how much of our contemporary lives — banking, communication, travel, health — rests on this discovery. Donald Keck says in the earliest days of the research at Corning, he and Peter Schultz did try to consider what their work might mean.
"We speculated on how this would ever come to the home. We were bordering on the telecommunications industry. Bell Labs was a monopoly. There was a $4 billion wire network out there. How are you going to get into that network and upset it? They aren't going to rip it out and put in something brand new. But we kept speculating on how much fiber you'd sell to get it into the home. So yeah, we had all sorts of fantasy moments, if you will, as we were doing our work, even before the breakthrough. But you try and figure out what might be if you were successful."
Donald Keck, co-inventor of low-loss fiber optic cable, will speak about his work with colleagues Peter Schultz and Robert D. Maurer at Corning tonight at 7:30 in Hillside Auditorium on the University of Arkansas campus. It's this year's Robert D. Maurer Lecture, sponsored by the University of Arkansas Physics Department. Donald Keck is an inductee in the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Another inductee, Ming-Jun Li, was also visiting campus this week to talk about his pioneering work in bend-insensitive optical fiber, and we'll hear from him on Thursday's edition of Ozarks at Large.
