Our current age of technology is the result of many brilliant inventions and discovers, but it is our ability to transmit information and the media we use to do it, it that is perhaps most responsible for its evolution. Progressing from the copper wire of a century ago to today's fiber optic cable, our increasing ability to transmit more quickly and over longer distances has expanded the boundaries of our technological development in all areas.
Toady's low-loss glass fiber optic cables offer almost unlimited bandwidth and unique advantages over all previous developed transmission media. The basic point-to-point fiber optic transmission system consists of three basic elements: the fiber optic cable and the optical receiver and the fiber optic cable.
Optical communications date back two centuries to the opical telegraph that French engineer Claude Chappe invented the 1790s. His system was a series of semaphores mounted on towers, where human's operators relay messages from one tower to the other. It beat hand carried messages hands down, but by the mid-19th century was replaced by the electric telegraph, leaving a scattering of "Telegraph Hills" as it almost visible legacy. .
In the intervening years a new technology slowly took root that would untimely solve the problem of optical transmission, although it was a long time before it was adapted for communications. It depended on the phenomenon of total internal reflections, which can confine light in material surrounding by other materials with lower refractive index, such as glass in the air. In the mid 1840s, Swiss physicist Daniel Collodon and French physicist Jacques Babinet showed that light could be guided along jet of water for fountain display. British physicist John Tyndall popularized light guiding in a demonstration he first used in 1854, guiding light in a jet of water flowing from a tank. By the turn of the century, inventors realized that bent quartz rods could carry light, and patented them as dental illuminators.
