The drawing of glass into fine filaments is an ancient technology, older than the technology of glass blowing. Winding coarse glass fibers onto a clay mandrel was used as an early manufacturing route for a vessel. With the advent of glass blowing, similar fiber technologies were used to decorate goblets. In the 1700s, Réaumur recognized that glass could be finely spun into fiber that was sufficiently pliable to be woven into textiles. Napoleon's funeral coffin was decorated with glass fiber textiles. Fiber optic technology was developed in the early 1970's and is rapidly replacing traditional copper cable for transmitting information over hundreds to thousands of miles.
Rather than send data in the form of electrons, fiber optic technology uses photons, or light. Fiber optic cable is made of many thin strands of coated glass fibers. Each measures about eight microns - that's smaller than a strand of human hair. Digitized information is "coded," or placed on to light pulses for transmission. It travels along the glass fiber at the speed of light - 186,000 miles per second. When it reaches its destination, a decoder converts the light information into a picture, audio sound or written material in a form we can understand. Fiber optic cables now cross the world's oceans to connect many countries together. Whether you are in Mauritius, Australia or the United States, you are probably viewing Dive and Discover at the end of tiny, nearly continuous strands of glass that reach all the way from Woods Hole, Massachusetts to you. To make sure you receive all the information, the fibers are made of ultra-pure glass so that the light pulses are not distorted or weakened.
