November 2001
Drawing Optical Fibers
A college junior shed new light on a century-old problem.
By Technology Review
Today the optical fibers that carry phone calls and Internet traffic (as well as images of patients' interiors through endoscopes) seem to have been around forever. Indeed, the basic idea of using glass rods to guide light dates back at least to the 1840s. But the problem of making a glass surface smooth enough to transmit light took more than a century to solve. Ultimately, it was an undergraduate's weekend gamble that paid off.
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology