FIBER OPTIC 101

In this new era, we need a technology to improve our life style. We have come out with a new idea than can make our life more efficient that is fiber optics. Fiber optic is the overlap of applied science and engineering concerned with the design and application of optical fibers. The introduction of fiber optic technology has had a dramatic effect on the Communications industry. Generally, this fiber optic is used for transfer data transmitted on a beam of light which is more effective than before.




Actually, the research of this fiber optics had been started along century ago. As far back as Roman times; glass has been drawn into fibers until the 1790s that the French Chappe brothers invented the first "optical telegraph." It was a system comprised of a series of lights mounted on towers where operators would relay a message from one tower to the next. In the 1840s, physicists Daniel Collodon and Jacques Babinet showed that light could be directed along jets of water for fountain displays. In 1854, John Tyndall, a British physicist, demonstrated that light could travel through a curved stream of water thereby proving that a light signal could be bent. In 1970, the goal of making single mode fibers with attenuation less then 20dB/km was reached by scientists at Corning Glass Works through doping silica glass with titanium. The first all-optic fiber cable, TPC-5, that uses optical amplifiers was laid across the Pacific Ocean in 1996. The following year the Fiber Optic Link around the Globe (FLAG) became the longest single-cable network in the world and provided the infrastructure for the next generation of Internet applications.

Today, a variety of industries including the medical, military, telecommunication, industrial, data storage, networking, and broadcast industries are able to apply and use fiber optic technology in a variety of applications.