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Circa 2500 B.C.—Earliest known glass [Hecht].
Roman Times—Glass is drawn into fibers [Hecht].
1713—Rene de Reaumur makes spun glass fibers [Hecht].
1790s—Claude Chappe invents 'optical telegraph' in France [Hecht].
1841—Daniel Colladon demonstrates light guiding in jet of water Geneva [Hecht].
1842—Jacques Babinet reports light guiding in water jets and bent glass rods Paris [Hecht].
1853—Paris Opera uses Colladon's water jet in the opera Faust [Hecht].
1854—John Tyndall demonstrates light guiding in water jets, duplicating but not acknowledging Colladon [Hecht].
1873—Jules de Brunfaut makes glass fibers that can be woven into cloth [Hecht].
1880—Alexander Graham Bell invents Photophone, Washington [Hecht].
1880—William Wheeler invents system of light pipes to illuminate homes from an electric arc lamp in basement, Concord, Mass. [Hecht].
1884—International Health Exhibition in South Kensington district of London has first fountains with illuminated water jets, designed by Sir Francis Bolton [Hecht].
1887—Charles Vernon Boys draws quartz fibers for mechanical measurements. Royal Jubilee Exhibition in Manchester has illuminated "Fairy Fountains" designed by W. and J. Galloway and Sons [Hecht].
1888—Illuminated fountains at Glasgow and Barcelona fairs. Dr. Roth and Prof. Reuss of Vienna use bent glass rods to illuminate body cavities [Hecht].
1889—Universal Exhibition in Paris shows refined illuminated fountains designed by G. Bechmann [Hecht].
1895—Henry C. Saint-Rene designs a system of bent glass rods for guiding light in an early television scheme (Crezancy, France) [Hecht].
1892—Herman Hammesfahr shows glass dress at Chicago World's Fair [Hecht].
April 25, 1898—David D. Smith of Indianapolis applies for patent on bent glass rod as a surgical lamp [Hecht].
2500 BC-1700s | 1841-1898 | 1905-1956 | 1965-1977 | 1983-1988 | 1990-1998 | Top
1905—Albert Einstein Photoelectric Effect, rate equations, relativity. Guglielmo Marconi -- Transatlantic wireless. [Hecht].
1920s—Bent glass rods used for microscope illumination [Hecht].
1934—Normal French develops fiberoptic communications [Infozoic].
1956—Term "fiber optics" coined (re: glass-coated rods) [Infozoic].
2500 BC-1700s | 1841-1898 | 1905-1956 | 1965-1977 | 1983-1988 | 1990-1998 | Top
1965??—Charles K. Kao (&Karbowiak), first optical fiber light waveguide Standard Telecommunications Laboratories. First optical link demonstrated, Bell Labs?? X MHz over N km [Infozoic].
1972—The first experimental Ethernet system, Alto Aloha Network, was developed by Metcalfe and his Xerox PARC colleagues. It was designed to interconnect the Xerox Alto, a personal workstation with a graphical user interface, and linked Altos to one another, and to servers and laser printers. The data transmission rate was 2.94 Mbps [Spurgeon].
1972—Network's Big Invention Year. Bob Metcalfe writes his dissertation on a reworked model of Alohanet which he calls EtherNet. Later, the name changes to Ethernet [3 Com].
1973—Metcalfe changed the name to "Ethernet" in 1973 to indicate that the system was capable of supporting any computer (not just Altos), and had evolved beyond the original Aloha system. "He chose to base the name on the word 'ether' as a way of describing an essential feature of the system: the physical medium (i.e., a cable) carries bits to all stations, much the same way that the old 'luminiferous ether' was once thought to propagate electromagnetic waves through space. Thus, Ethernet was born” [Spurgeon].
1973—MacChesney (Bell Labs), MCVD process Corning -- singlemode optical fiber [Infozoic].1976—LED/Multimode communication. Transatlantic optical fiber [Infozoic].
1977—Ethernet Is Patented #4063220 December 13, 1977 [3 Com].
2500 BC-1700s | 1841-1898 | 1905-1956 | 1965-1977 | 1983-1988 | 1990-1998 | Top
1983—proNET counter-rotating ring optical networks 10 Mbps [Infozoic].
1985—proNET counter-rotating ring @80 Mbps [Infozoic].
1988??—ANSI X3T9.5 Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI), Counter-rotating rings, electromechanical Optical Bypass Switches Fiber Channel, ESCON BellCore MANs, self-healing rings? Singlemode laser, DFB, ... Bell Labs hero experiments CCC laser, Fabry-Perot etalon, Mach-Zehnder interferometer Corning?, Dispersion-shifted optical fiber (null at 1.5um??) First acousto-optic switch demonstrated 1988?? Ethernet FOIRL (Fiberoptic Inter-repeater link) Ethernet 10Base-F Femtosecond pulse generated First Electro-optic switch demonstrated (Lithium Niobate devices) Soliton TDM Multimedia, digital video Hubble Space Telescope Frame Relay Alain Aspect experiments in non-local communication SONET standard (T1...??), Optical Carrier (OC) levels Rings with tributaries for managed, framed traffic. ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) -- Cell Relay 53-byte cells for 'smooth mixing', low latency variance [Infozoic].
2500 BC-1700s | 1841-1898 | 1905-1956 | 1965-1977 | 1983-1988 | 1990-1998 | Top
1990??—Erbium-doped Fiber Amplifier (EDFA), broadband amplification at 1.5m [Infozoic].
1992??—MIT All-Optical Network Consortium [Infozoic].
1994?—Ethernet 100Base-F (Fast Ethernet) [Infozoic].
1996??—Ethernet 1000Base-F (Gigabit Ethernet). Entangled photons research Praesodymium-doped Fiber Amplifier (at 1.3m ) [Infozoic].
1998—QoS: Cisco POSIP (Packets over optics) proposal to eliminate SONET layer??; MPLS tag-switching [Infozoic].
1998—DWDM: Ciena loses market value on Lucent pullout [Infozoic].
2500 BC-1700s | 1841-1898 | 1905-1956 | 1965-1977 | 1983-1988 | 1990-1998 | Top
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