Fiber optics

-Karthik Gurumurthy

So, fiber optics is basically this super cool communication system where all your info – voice, pictures, data – travels as light beams. These light beams come from lasers or LEDs and zip through incredibly thin glass cables. (FYI, lasers shoot out these intense, focused beams of just one color, while LEDs are these semiconductor things that convert electricity into light.)

The way it works is pretty awesome. When light travels through these cables, it zigzags through the glass core in what they call “total internal reflection.” Then when the light bursts reach the receiving end, they get converted back to electrical signals and decoded. For phone calls, the signal becomes sound waves that sound like the person speaking. For other information, it gets printed or shown on screens.

These fiber-optic cables are completely blowing copper wires out of the water for telecommunications. They can handle a ridiculous amount of data – we’re talking thousands of phone calls or entire encyclopedias all at once. Get this – a single fiber-optic cable carries 65,000 times more information than copper wire! And they can send messages or images crystal clear for up to 13,000 miles without distortion or fading, which leaves copper wire in the dust. Plus, they don’t create static during thunderstorms like copper does.

Fiber optics have tons of other uses beyond just telecommunications – they’re in medical tools like endoscopes for looking inside your body, in airplane and spacecraft communication systems, computer networks, TV transmissions, and even automotive lighting.

The history of fiber optics is fascinating. People have been using light to communicate since ancient times – think Greeks and Romans signaling with torches on hills, or Paul Revere’s famous lantern signals. During WWII, ships used light signals to communicate without revealing their position to enemies.

Around 1880, Alexander Graham Bell (the telephone guy) tried using light to transmit voice with his “photophone” – a contraption with light, a horn, mirror, selenium crystal, and telephone receiver. It was a cool idea but only worked over short distances and the signal was super unclear.

Fiber optics really took off with two key inventions: the laser in 1960 and optical fiber in 1966. Lasers can transmit light in super short bursts, which is crucial for sending tons of data quickly. But laser beams in open air get scattered and blocked by weather, so they needed something to contain them. That’s where optical fiber comes in, developed by Charles Kao and George Hockham at Standard Telecommunications Laboratories in England.

The first fiber-optic telephone link was built in Suffolk, England in 1977, and by 1988, they laid the first underseas fiber-optic cable across the Atlantic Ocean floor that could handle 37,000 phone calls at once!

In recent decades, fiber-optic cables have been rapidly replacing copper wires. One huge advantage is size – a tiny 0.25-inch fiber-optic cable carries more information than a 3-inch bundle of copper wires. This space-saving is huge for underground cables and aircraft wiring. Using optical fibers instead of copper in airplanes can save up to 1,000 pounds, reducing fuel consumption.

Looking to the future, fiber optics could replace satellites for communications, especially cable TV. Fiber-optic cables have big advantages – they’re long-lasting, highly reliable with few transmission errors, need almost no maintenance, and aren’t affected by bad weather like satellite signals.

They’re also critical for HDTV, which requires twice the information of regular TV to get that movie-theater quality image. Fiber-optic cables can easily handle that massive data load.

Pretty incredible how tiny glass strands thinner than human hair are revolutionizing how we connect!