Timeline

Optical Communications and Networking Timeline

"History is the bag of tricks we play on the dead." -Voltaire

(Many pictures courtesy this great site: ucsb)

{If you'd rather see it front to back, as it were, try reverse chronological. --sorry, not yet}

Prehistory	Signal fires, smoke signals, mirrors/reflectors, polished surfaces, semaphores
early	Language, writing
c.340bce	Aristotle, properties and essences

13^th cent.	First ground glass lenses, Europe [1]
1610	Galileo telescopes, spacetime, speed of light, [1]
1621	Snell's Law
c.1667	Isaac Newton experiments, prisms, corpuscular theory, polarization, Opticks
	Huyghen's principle
c.1776	One if by land, and two if by sea. (Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride.") signals in the Old North Church, Boston.

1801	Thomas Young principal of superposition; 2-slit interference experiment establishing wave nature of light (Wave Theory)
1808-11	Malus, polarization by reflection. Brewster's angle [1]
	Laplace, D'Alembert: Light "piped" by flowing water
1820	Fresnel and Young -- transverse waves

c.1860	Fizeau/Foucault measure speed of light [1] [2]
	Aldiss lamp
	Joseph Fourier
	Rayleigh
1830s+	Michael Faraday experiments in electricity/magnetism
1830s	Samuel Morse, communication by wires carrying electricity[1]
1840	Fraunhofer diffraction [1]
c.1880	James Clerk Maxwell, Electromagnetic Theory [1][2]
	Ether, Ultraviolet catastrophe

1886	Michelson-Morley interferometer disproves 'ether drift' (or does it??)
c. 1895	Heinrich Hertz radio waves [1]
	Zeiss anti-reflective coating
1900	Max Planck, Blackbody Spectrum "quantization" [1]
1905	Albert Einstein Photoelectric Effect, rate equations, relativity , [1]
	Hale/Palomar telescopes, Hubble theory
	Neils Bohr (here with Sommerfeld) Shell model -- electronic energy levels,
	Spectroscopy Uhlenbeck, Kramers, and Goudsmit
	Bragg -- x-ray diffraction
	Guglielmo Marconi -- Transatlantic wireless
	Asdic/sonar
1926-7	Quantum Theory; Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, Schrodinger's equation, De Broglie "matter waves", Max Born "wavefunction"=probability amplitude
1927	Paul Adrien Marc Dirac, Relativistic Field Theories
	Fermi levels, Pauli exclusion principle, Rabi oscillations, Bloch matrix equations
1934	Normal French develops fiberoptic communications
	Television Filo Farnsworth, Zworykin ??
	WWII -- radar, bombsights, flashlamps, photos of nuclear explosions
	Julian Schwinger, Richard Feynmann, QED
	Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen thought experiment Everett's many worlds [complementarity 1]
	Whirlwind / ENIAC / UNIVAC
	Transistor Bardeen/Brittain/Shockley
?	Silicon/Germanium diodes as photodetectors
	LEDs
	Automatic door openers (photocell)
1956	Term "fiber optics" coined (re: glass-coated rods)
1959 1960	Maser -> Townes/Schawlow Theodore Maiman -- ruby laser
	Quantum Electronics -> gas laser
1960	Ali Javan (Bell Labs), first HeNe laser,the first laser to emit a steady beam.
	Laser surveying, cutting/drilling, materials research
	Bell's inequality
c.1965	Charles K. Kao (&Karbowiak), first optical fiber light waveguide Standard Telecommunications Laboratories
	First fiberoptic link demonstrated Bell Labs?? X MHz over N km.
1970	Mort Panish and Izuo Hayashi (Bell Labs) First CW semiconductor laser
c.1968	Laser bounced off moon
1972	Diode laser (STL), modulated at 1 GBit
60's-70's	Laser sensing -- LDV, atmospheric, IR analysis, ...
1973	MacChesney (Bell Labs), MCVD process
	Corning -- singlemode optical fiber
1976	LED/Multimode communication

	Transatlantic optical fiber
	Bell Labs hero experiments
	Artel Fiberway
1983	proNET counter-rotating ring optical networks 10 Mbps Multimode optics, fiber and through-air links
1985	proNET counter-rotating ring @80 Mbps
c.1988	ANSI X3T9.5 Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI), Counter-rotating rings, built-in management Electromechanical (relay-based) Optical Bypass Switches
	Fiber Channel, ESCON

	Singlemode laser, DFB, ... Bell Labs hero experiments
	CCC laser, Fabry-Perot etalon, Mach-Zehnder interferometer
	Dispersion-shifted optical fiber (null at ~1.5um), Corning(1^st?)
	First acousto-optic switch demonstrated
c.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
	BellCore MANs, self-healing rings è SONET/SDH standards "Synchronous Optical Network, Synchronous Digital Hierarchy" Optical Carrier (OC) levels (~45 to 9953 Mbits/s) Carrying of Plesiochronous Digital Hierarchy (PDH) Pointer processing, tributaries Rings with tributaries for managed, framed traffic.
	Alain Aspect experiments in non-local communication Quantum Teleportation
	ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) -- Cell Relay 53-byte cells for 'smooth mixing', low latency variance
c.1990	Erbium-doped Fiber Amplifier (EDFA) broadband amplification at 1.5m
c.1994	Ethernet 100Base-F (Fast Ethernet)
c.1992	MIT All-Optical Network (AON) Consortium
c.1996	Ethernet 1000Base-F (Gigabit Ethernet)
	Entangled photons research
	Praesodymium-doped Fiber Amplifier (at 1.3m )
1998	QoS: Cisco POSIP (Packets over optics) proposals to eliminate SONET layer; MPLS tag-switching
1998	DWDM: Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing
1999	Rise of optical startups, Metro and Core OADMs, OXCs, Amplifiers See www.lightreading.com, www.convergedigest.com
2000	"CWDM" Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing
	Startup, Merger/Acquisition fever
2001	Advent of tunable semiconductor lasers
	Telecom "bubble" bursts
2002	Telecom "nuclear winter" and consolidation