City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics (review)

City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics. By Jeff Hecht. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xii+316. $29.95.

This book can surely stand as a model of what the Sloan Foundation intended for its Sloan Technology Series. It treats a complex and recently emerged technology in a manner understandable to an intelligent lay audience and in a style that is somewhat short of John Grisham but substantially above (say) my own sourcebook on submarine cables.

Stylistically, Jeff Hecht takes a relaxed first-person approach. More important, he focuses on people, injecting some measure of humanity into the story of this technology. His biographical sketches are uneven in depth, but they set an important tone. They remind us that scientific and technological activities are woven into lives that are also concerned with job security and illness and families; and that sometimes as important as scientific knowledge are personality traits and management style. Hecht explains basic concepts with graphs and sidebars, leaving aside the fine points of materials science and optical theory.

Paris, of course, is the "City of Light," as it has been known in a figurative sense since the eighteenth century. But, Hecht suggests, this was almost literally true at the Universal Exhibition of 1889, where jets of water were lit by internal reflection, a technique demonstrated by Daniel Colladon (who was present at the exhibition) a half century earlier. Then, after a brief historical chronology, Hecht moves to the last half of the twentieth century to cover an overlapping series of problems and solutions that led to the millions of miles of optical fibers now enveloping the globe. These include an understanding of internal refraction, development of low-loss glass, techniques of drawing fibers at first laboratory and then manufacturing scales, and the invention of the laser. They also include a willingness (at Corning) to commit substantial sums of money to a product for an industry that was not quite ready to make such a significant change.

One of the most interesting aspects of the story as Hecht tells it is the international cast of characters and institutions that were responsible for a technology with such globally important implications. It is a large group. Hecht lists more than 150 people in an appendix of dramatis personae, and there are few that could have been easily left out. Furthermore, their presence is itself an indication of how modern technological "breakthroughs" are usually the product of an intricate combination of incremental steps, taken in what often can seem random directions, made at disparate locations under a variety of motivations.

This is not the definitive book on the history of fiber optics, nor was it meant to be. Its purpose, as stated in an introductory passage from the Sloan Foundation, is "to present to the general reader the stories of the development of critical twentieth-century technologies." But for historians it is also an excellent platform on which to begin to construct more detailed accounts. Starting with virtually no prior historical literature, Hecht has built a framework with many suggestive opportunities for expansion and reexamination.

For sources Hecht depends heavily on interviews--some conducted in person, some by telephone, a few in depth, but most apparently confined to one or two specific points. Herein lies both one of the great strengths and one of the major weaknesses of the book. In being able to talk with involved parties the historian of recent events is tapping a resource that will be unavailable to successors, and Hecht uses his contacts to bring a sense of intimacy and authority to the work. But we all know that oral histories should be treated cautiously, as much as possible as complements to other sources of information. Too often such is not the case here, and one can only look forward to archival digging that will add paper substance to this oral construction. Furthermore, the contents of the full...