JOHN WILLIAMSON CORNING
RAISES A GLASS TO SUCCESS I n January 2017, Corning, the materials science and manufacturing company, was awarded a Technology & Engineering Emmy award from the US National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for its 1970 Corning
on projects whose success or failure rested on the ability to control a few ten- thousandths of decibels per kilometre. “The ability to view high-quality video at any time of the day, from almost any place on a variety of connected and mobile devices, is commonplace today. But it would not be possible without the widespread deployment of optical fibre,” said Corning Executive Vice President Clark Kinlin. “It’s impossible to imagine the television industry today without the virtually limitless bandwidth capability of optical fibre.” In practice, Corning’s low-loss fibre invention has had seminal implications for the communications sector in general, and for the optical communications industry in particular. From modest beginnings, optical communications has become a quotidian but remarkable and game-changing staple of the global
invention of low-loss optical fibre. The award honours breakthrough innovations that materially a ected television engineering. The company received the accolade in the category of Pioneering Invention and Deployment of Fiber Optic Cable at the 68th Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy awards in Las Vegas. CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE The original Corning achievement, led by scientists Drs Robert Maurer, Donald Keck, and Peter Schultz, concerned the development of the first low- loss fibre capable of maintaining the power of laser light signals
JOHN WILLIAMSON
Corning has built a reputation as a world leader in precision glass technologies, developing solutions for diverse applications from automotive to displays to communications – especially the optical fibre. Its decades of achievement have just been recognized with an “Emmy”. John Williamson investigates.
telecommunications transmission market.
over significant distances. This revolutionary development helped solve the problem network carriers
And the Emmy goes to… Corning for development of optical fibre.
then faced in handling the
Communications fibre deployment has mushroomed. One
growing volume of information with the
transmission limitations of copper infrastructure. According to John Igel, Vice President and General Manager, Corning Optical Fiber and Cable, at the beginning the aim was to try to get close to 10s of decibels of loss per kilometre. By 2015, Corning was working
estimate is that over 2 billion km of optical fibre have already been deployed worldwide.
Today, the market remains very robust: according to CRU’s “Optical Fibre and Cable Monitor”, published in November 2016, global optical cable demand reached
30
| ISSUE 8 | Q1 2017
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