Shadowing Practice: The Absurd Engineering Behind the Internet - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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In 1887 a young physics teacher attached a thin glass rod to the end of an arrow
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and loaded it into his homemade crossbow.
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He torched the rod's end until a molten glass bead roughly
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the size of a pin's head was barely hanging on and then he fired the arrow.
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Bright sunlight streaming into the room glinted off a tiny glass fiber.
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At its thinnest it was is less than a tenth of the diameter of a human hair.
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Now, legally, we cannot shoot a crossbow indoors.
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Luckily, I am pretty quick.
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Oh, God.
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That's cool.
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Look at that.
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Look how thin we got it.
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The physics teacher was using these fibers to measure very small forces, but in the decades that followed, other researchers found a different use for them, sending light signals.
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Glass fibers can carry light even through bends.
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Look, look, it's like that's 90 degrees.
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And during the 1960s, the telecoms industry was desperate for a better way to carry more information.
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As one American engineer said, it should be possible to transmit all of the conversations going
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on anywhere in the world simultaneously over a single thread of light.
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But these glass fibers were terrible.
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The light It faded so much that you couldn't decode a signal after just one kilometer.
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No one thought they'd be practical, except for one man.
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His own boss called his dream a wild goose chase.
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But if he was right, if he could prove that fiber optics were in fact viable, and if someone could then figure out how to make them at scale, well, eventually they could connect continents.
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How much is in this warehouse?
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There's millions of kilometers here that we're pushing through here every month.
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It's approximately three times as hot as the surface of the sun.
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That's crazy.
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And one day, it could build the internet.
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All that was unimaginable in the 1960s.
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But even then, telecom companies wanted a better communication system, just for phone calls.
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Between 1960 and 1973, the number of daily calls doubled in the US, from 285 million to 576 million.
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In that same time period, NASA sent people to the moon for a total cost of $26 billion,
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while AT &T had to spend nearly triple that amount just to install new telephone infrastructure.
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They just couldn't keep up with the demand.
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At the time, phone calls were mostly transmitted over copper wires.
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Now, imagine I'm trying to phone my buddy Gregor.
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Now, when I pick up, a constant current immediately flows through the wire to supply power to the phone.
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When I speak, my voice vibrates a tiny diaphragm in the mouthpiece that modulates the current.
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The louder I am, the bigger the current swing, and my voice's pitch changes how fast the current oscillates.
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At Gregor's end, that current reaches a speaker that turns it back into sound.
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Now, this works for one call on one line.
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But phone companies aren't gonna install wires between every single house.
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One cable needs to carry multiple calls.
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So phone companies figure out a neat little trick.
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Even though humans can hear frequencies up to 20 kilohertz, you really only need to hear the ones between 300 and 3 ,400 hertz to understand what someone's saying.
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So, phone companies drop frequencies above 4kHz, or anything outside the voice band.
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But if everyone used that 0 -4kHz band on the same line, well then all the conversations would be on top of each other, and you wouldn't be able to hear the person that you're talking to.
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Luckily, we can shift those electrical signals.
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So my conversation can use 0 -4kHz, while another person's can use 4 -8kHz.
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And so on, all the way down the same copper wire.
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At the other end, a filter separates out the different frequency bands, similar to how radio can tune in to one station.
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Then the signal is shifted back down to the 0 to 4 kHz range before it hits the speaker, so it sounds like a normal voice.
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But as phone companies started using higher and higher frequencies, they started running into problems.
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That oscillating current carrying the signal generates additional fields.
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A magnetic field, shown here in red, and little loops of current called eddy currents, which are shown here in blue.
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Now because of their shape, those loops resist changes to the current at the center of the wire, and they reinforce changes along the surface.
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But eddy currents get stronger the faster the signal changes, and if you want more calls, you need more bands, which use higher and higher frequencies,
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so soon the eddy currents are strong enough to cancel out the oscillation in the center of the wire.
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But if the signal can only travel along the wire's surface, it's limited to a smaller cross -section, so resistance goes up and higher frequency signals can't travel very far before they're absorbed.
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For a while, telephone companies were able to work around the high loss by boosting signals every few kilometers
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but past 65 megahertz well the high frequencies died off in less than two kilometers So, they were too impractical to use.
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And this trade -off between signal power and data rate was actually discovered back in 1948.
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The Shannon -Hartley theorem described the maximum capacity of a communication channel based on the signal power, noise, and bandwidth, or the difference between the highest and lowest frequencies.
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The best way to increase capacity is to increase the bandwidth.
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But they'd already reached the limit for copper.
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The telecoms industry didn't have another alternative.
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But then they saw the light visible light has frequencies in
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the hundreds of terahertz as one researcher for Bell Labs put it the possibility of extremely high frequencies
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and accordingly vastly wider bands of frequencies appeared as a fabulous El Dorado always beckoning us onward but
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if you're gonna use light there are two problems first there
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wasn't a strong enough light source to send a signal a
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light bulb couldn't produce enough power there just weren't any options and along
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There's a running joke that the laser was a solution looking for a problem, but that's not really true.
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It rejuvenated the interest in possible optical communications.
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As one Bell Labs engineer said, think of all this bandwidth!
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But they couldn't figure out the second problem.
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Glass is not as clear as it looks.
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Only a small amount of light actually makes it through.
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In fact, only a year after the laser's invention, a Bell Labs scientist started looking into fiber optics.
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His boss told him to check its loss, or how much a light signal weakens as it travels through the glass.
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Now, signal loss is measured with decibels, similar to how you measure audio volume.
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Both are on a logarithmic scale.
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But while volume uses sound pressure, loss uses signal power.
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His boss said it would only be worthwhile if the loss was less than 20 decibels a kilometer, so it was comparable to copper.
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But when he checked the loss for the best fibers, a thousand decibels a kilometer.
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To understand just how bad that was, imagine a leaky truck carrying sand over one kilometer.
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If the truck starts with 100 kilograms and it ends up with one, Well, that represents a loss of 20 decibels per kilometer, that's only 1 % of the signal left.
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It's what was happening with copper.
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Bad but still manageable.
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A loss of 1000 decibels a kilometer is like starting with the mass of the observable universe, and ending up with less than the mass of a single atom.
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To be practical, these fibers would need to improve by a factor of 10 to the 98th.
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It sounded impossible, it would have to be one of the most absurd engineering improvements in history.
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So Bell Labs gave up, and fiber optics might have died right there, if it wasn't for one man.
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Charles Cow.
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In 1960, he started working for an English telecoms lab that was looking for a way to communicate with higher frequencies, but not with fiber optics.
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Cow's boss said that it was a wild goose chase, and the rest of the lab agreed.
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But Cow kept coming back to it, asking, why is glass so lossy?
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And can we remove those factors, or are they intrinsic to the material?
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If it was the latter, then fiber would be dead in the water.
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But if not, then maybe it had a chance.
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So the question was, why was the loss so high?
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Well, you might think it's because light is exiting through the sides of this fiber.
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But glass is really good at trapping light, even through bends.
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Here's how.
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I've got a bucket of propylene glycol here, and a green laser.
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When I remove the tape...
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The laser bounces one, two, three times, and there are two things working together here that actually trap the light.
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See light travels slower in some materials than others, and it travels as a wave, shown here as a line of crests, with the beam always pointing perpendicular to that line.
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When the wave meets a boundary at an angle, one end of the crest crosses into the new material first, and it changes speed before the rest.
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If light travels slower in that new material, then that end drags behind, and the beam bends, or refracts, away from the boundary.
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How much it bends depends on the angle it hits the boundary, and on how much each material slows light down, which is described by their index of refraction.
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This relationship is defined by Snell's law.
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Now, if light is moving from a material with a higher index of refraction, into one with a lower index, like propylene glycol to air, well then one part of the wave crest speeds up,
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and the beam bends toward the boundary.
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But as you increase the angle of the light, the refracted beam gets closer and closer to the boundary, until it's running right along it.
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That's the critical angle.
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A little bit more, and all the light reflects back into the glycol.
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That's total internal reflection, and you get the exact critical angle by setting the angle of refraction to 90 degrees and then rearranging Snell's Law.
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The key of it is, the bigger the difference in index of refraction, the more powerful this effect is.
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If I have a really subtle difference between these two, then the amount of bending that takes place will be smaller.
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You can do the same demo with water, but propylene glycol works a bit better because it has a higher refractive index.
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1 .43 compared with 1 .33.
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See, once the liquid is low enough for the angle of the stream to be much sharper, the light breaks through the water stream but it stays trapped in the propylene glycol.
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And if you use something with an even higher refractive index, like the glass types Cal was investigating, well, then the critical angle decreases even more,
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which traps the light signals through even sharper turns.
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Okay, but the light has to move from a high refractive index to a low one, an air that works right up until something touches the glass.
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If you disturb that boundary, well, light can leak out the side.
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So about a decade before Cal, researchers realized that a fiber needed to have two types of glass.
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The middle, the core, has the higher refractive index, and around it goes a second glass, the cladding, with the lower refractive index.
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Together they keep the light trapped.
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Now the fiber could be touched, coated in plastic, buried in a cable, bent around things, and the light would still travel down the core and come out the other end.
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So Kao knew that if the high loss wasn't from light leaking out the sides, well it had to be from something else.
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He spoke with material scientists and glass experts, but no one seemed to know what was really causing it.
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He kept looking, and eventually he landed on two potential sources, scattering and absorption.
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If you shine light through a perfect crystal that's transparent, there's going to be a little bit of reflection, but almost all of the electromagnetic energy will keep going down in the same direction that it started.
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But glass isn't a crystalline solid.
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The basic building block is silica, or silicon dioxide, one silicon atom connected to four oxygen atoms in a tetrahedron, or pyramid shape.
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In the glass, the pyramids are connected at the corners, so every oxygen is shared with another silicon.
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That's why it's called silicon dioxide.
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For every two oxygens, there's one silicon atom.
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This is an amorphous solid.
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Unlike a crystal, its atoms have no long range order.
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Instead, its disordered, liquid -like structure locks in as it cools, with the exact arrangement depending on the glass type and cooling speed.
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For example, if you quench the glass really fast, the structure locks at a higher temperature.
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The final solid has lots of dense regions, which re -radiate more light than the sparse ones.
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The light scatters which weakens the signal.
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This is called Rayleigh scattering, and you can't get rid of it completely.
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But if you cool the glass slowly, those pyramids have more time to settle and pack together evenly.
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The structure locks in at a lower temperature, and light scatters less.
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But Kao needed to know the minimum scattering.
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Was it 10 decibels a kilometer?
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100?
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1000?
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He needed something concrete.
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Finally, he stumbled on a paper by Robert Maurer, a scientist from Korn and Glass, who measured the Rayleigh scattering across several glass types and cooling rates.
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Kao used his calculations to estimate that if the glass's structure was locked at 1000 degrees Celsius, its scattering loss would be around 1 decibel a kilometer.
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He was surprised.
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He expected scattering loss to increase with higher temperatures.
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That's what causes more density fluctuations.
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But a thousand degrees Celsius was pretty hot compared to other glass types.
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So then scattering couldn't be behind those crazy high losses.
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Absorption had to be the problem.
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But Kao didn't know what exactly was absorbing so much light.
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Was it the glass itself or something else?
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Well, absorption works like this.
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In a single atom, electrons sit at discrete energy levels, and they're usually some empty spaces in the upper ones.
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But pack atoms together into a solid, and those levels smear up, into wide bands separated by gaps.
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Now when light hits the surface, it can excite an electron to a higher band.
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But only if the photon has at least as much energy as this band gap.
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If it does, the photon is absorbed, and eventually it releases that energy as heat.
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In something like silicon, that band gap is very small.
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It's only around 1 .12 electron volts.
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Visible light is between 1 .63 to 3 .26.
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It's got plenty of energy, so it gets absorbed.
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That's why pure silicon looks opaque to us, but the silicon in glass is connected to oxygen atoms that pull more on the shared electrons.
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Now it takes a lot more energy to excite an electron.
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The band gap is much larger, around 9 electron volts.
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Visible light doesn't have enough energy, so it passes right through.
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And that's why glass looks clear to us.
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But most glass types aren't pure silica.
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The raw materials for glass—sand, soda, lime, and other ingredients—well, they contain impurities like trace metals,
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and these metals absorb far more light than silica did.
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One of the worst impurities in glass is iron.
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Inside the glass structure, iron atoms form positive ions that strongly absorb violet -bluish and infrared wavelengths.
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Of the visible light spectrum, impure glass doesn't absorb green light as much.
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And you can even see this in a regular glass plane.
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Looking at it from the edge, light travels down the entire width of the glass.
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So by the time it reaches your eye, only green light is left.
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So if you can see this attenuation after just a few centimeters, imagine a glass fiber trying to carry light for kilometers and kilometers.
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No wonder it at a crazy loss.
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Kao spoke with more experts, who estimated that without those metal ions, the loss would drop to around 20 decibels a kilometer, copperable to copper, just by removing impurities.
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It was all theoretical at this point, but it was enough for Kao.
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In 1966, his team published a paper on their theories, concluding with, The crucial material problem appears to be one which is difficult but not impossible.
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But nobody really paid attention to his paper because it really seemed impossible.
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A 10 to the 98 times improvement was unprecedented, and Kao didn't actually measure the loss in glass.
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He didn't have anything concrete, so he needed proof.
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Kao was trying to invent a new way to communicate, but even today, actually staying connected can be hard.
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In fact, we just traveled to Spain for the eclipse a few weeks ago, but with so many other projects going on, we still need to check in and set updates to the rest of the team.
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Not to mention my mom.
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We drove seven hours to Burgos, but the Wi -Fi when we got there was a little touch -and -go.
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We needed to have everything set before we arrived on site, so of course we used Salee, today's sponsor.
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I'm automatically connected right when I land ready to update my team access maps
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Again, just scan this QR code, use the code VERITASIUM, and get 15 % off, and you can stay connected.
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Now, let's go back to Cao.
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Cao needed to prove that his theoretical low -loss glass was really possible, so he decided to measure the purest glass anyone had ever made, fusilica.
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Now, the reason glass manufacturers had added all those extra ingredients
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was to bring sand's melting point down to around 1400 degrees Celsius.
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But fused silica was pure silicon dioxide, melted at over 2000 degrees Celsius, so it was a lot harder to make.
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And that meant that Cao couldn't get his hands on much of it.
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Measuring loss normally takes hundreds of meters of cable, if not kilometers, but he only had pieces less than 30 centimeters long.
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To measure the loss in something that small, he and his colleagues invented a new, very precise instrument.
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Cao spent the next three years working on it, but when he finally measured a sample, he found that fusilica had zero loss.
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That couldn't be right.
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In a panic, Cao ran his experiment again.
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It turned out that the loss was so low that it was within their margin of error, a mere plus or minus four decibels a kilometer.
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He spent months fine -tuning his equipment, And in 1969, he finally reported that fused silica had a loss of less than five decibels a kilometer.
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Now that got everyone's attention.
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One scientist at Bell Labs said, Now everyone was interested.
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Telecom labs around the planet rushed to fund fiber optics groups.
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But Cal had only worked with small samples.
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Nobody knew whether kilometers of low -loss fiber were even possible.
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The problem caught the attention of one Robert Maurer, Corning researcher and author of the scattering paper that Kao had referenced.
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To make a practical fiber, he saw three major problems to tackle.
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First, he needed to decide which glass to use.
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He could try purifying raw materials for normal glass, or he could try using fused silica, which Kao had already proven to be very pure.
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Most labs were avoiding fused silica because of how hard it was to work with.
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But luckily, Corning had a secret technique.
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Back in the 1930s, another Corning scientist had ran silicon tetrachloride gas through an oxygen flame.
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In the heat, water vapor from the flame would break silicon tetrachloride into hydrogen chloride gas and silicon dioxide.
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The latter would then start clicking together in a fine glassy silica powder.
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Then the powder would be pressed into shape and melted to make few silica.
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Corning was one of the few companies in the world using this technique, called flame hydrolysis, to make ultra -pure glass.
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So they had the supply, but there was a bigger problem with fused silica.
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it has a refractive index of 1 .46
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which is the lowest of any glass
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but for total internal reflection to work the core needs to have a higher refractive index than the cladding so
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if mauer wanted to use a few silica core well then
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finding another glass with a lower refractive index for the cladding well that'd be a nightmare it simply didn't exist
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so everyone abandoned few silica except for mauer he said i
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had no reason to think few silica was any better But nobody else was working on it.
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If you do something that's different from what everybody else is doing, you've got two advantages.
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One is you may succeed where they fail, of course, but even if you fail you will gather information that they don't gather.
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All the other labs were thinking of using a fused silica core.
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After all, that's where the light travels.
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But Maurer decided to use fused silica for the cladding.
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Then he could easily raise the refractive index of the core by adding some impurities, or dopants.
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The only glass that we had with a slightly higher index than fused silica was this titanium -doped glass.
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But that would mean adding titanium right where light needed to travel.
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Kau worked hard to prove that glass could be pure enough.
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All the other labs were trying to get rid of impurities, and Maurer wanted to add some back in.
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But he wasn't completely crazy.
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Like silicon, the titanium in glass can easily share electrons with four oxygen atoms, forming the same pyramid shape so it wouldn't disrupt the overall glass structure too much.
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Now that he had the composition, Mauer needed to tackle that second problem.
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How do you make a tiny fiber with that perfect core and cladding cross -section?
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To help, he hired two more scientists.
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Peter Schultz, a ceramics engineer, and Donald Keck, a physicist.
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Each time you find a problem you put a development team on it and strike it down and make it happen.
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To understand their technique, I went to the Bay Area Glass Institute for some hands -on demos.
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Here, our instructor Aaron is taking a colored rod of glass and then dipping it in a bowl of clear molten glass.
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In fiber optics, this large cylinder is called a preform.
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We have two colors of glass here.
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We have a color core and a clear outside.
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If you want your inner rod to, say, be a quarter of the diameter of your outer one, you just set that in the preform
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and then all the length along your pole the cross -section is going to be identical.
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And this is pretty similar to how hard candies with patterns are made.
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This sugar is an amorphous solid, just like glass.
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So the process is the same, just at a lower temperature.
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But there is one problem with this method.
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Resting glass on a surface like this introduces a ton of stress and impurities.
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But when I try and suspend it in the air, well it sags.
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But yeah, from all that movement it did create stress, so now it's a curved piece of of glass.
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Thankfully there's another option.
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Now gravity is pulling our glass for us and the surface tension is keeping it together.
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So now we get a much more straight and consistent fiber.
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That's awesome.
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With their drawing technique sorted the cording team could tackle the final problem.
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How do you actually make the preform?
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Well instead of starting with a core and adding the cladding, Schultz and Keck decided to start from the cladding and work in.
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They used the flame hydrolysis technique to make titanium -doped silica powder, or soot as they called it.
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Next, they took a pure fused silica tube and tried spreading soot down the inside.
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If they could get an even layer, well then they could melt and collapse the tube into a solid rod, a perfect preform.
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But the soot collected at one end no matter how they sprayed it.
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So one of the technicians grabbed a vacuum cleaner from the corner of the room, They held it up to the backside of this tube,
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and it sucked a stream of titanium -doped silica glass down through the center of the tube,
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coated it just like we'd hoped it would." Vacuum did not survive that experiment.
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But they tinkered with a new setup until they got the gas flow just right.
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All through the summer of 1969, their furnace burned hotter than Hades.
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They drew kilometers of fiber from preform after preform, testing various compositions.
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But none of it was good enough.
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Titanium was breaking down in the high heat and absorbing too much light.
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They ran the finished fibers through a second heat treatment in an oxygen environment before they finally started seeing results.
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A year later, on July 22nd of 1970, a preform slipped against the furnace wall after Keck only got a few meters of fiber.
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The preform was ruined, but he decided to test the short fiber anyway after its heat treatment.
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When I slid it across and the laser light hit the core of the fiber, all of a sudden I had another beam coming back in my face.
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The core was brightly lit and it took a while to realize
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that the light was going all the way to the other end of the fiber
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and reflecting off the far end
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and coming back into my eye the loss was 17 decibels
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a kilometer the only word i could come up with for this auspicious moment in history was whoopee
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so that's what's in my lab notebook whoopee
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but the fiber was much shorter than usual only 29 meters to their typical 200.
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he added a careful must remeasure in his notebook team quickly remade the preform
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but it took almost a month to get 210 meters of
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finished fiber it was finally done by late afternoon of friday august 21st it was a gorgeous summer day
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and almost everyone left early but keck didn't want to wait the fiber was
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so fragile small temperature changes might break it over the weekend it would break
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if you looked at it crossways so alone in the lab he anxiously measured the loss 16 .9 decibels per kilometer.
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I said QED, Quad Edge, Erat Demonstratum.
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There's no, no Eureka.
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Maur published their results that fall.
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As Schultz described it, no one believed it.
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The telephone companies all demanded to see the fibers firsthand, so Maur hand -carried a spool of fiber to all the big telephone laboratories.
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He would literally guard to make sure that they They didn't snip pieces off and keep them.
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For two years, they refined their methods.
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And to make the fibers stronger, they switched to a germanium doping.
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Like titanium, it easily swaps with silicon while still raising the refractive index.
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But unlike titanium, germanium fibers didn't break down in the heat, so they could skip the second heat treatment.
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When they drew their first germanium fiber, the end lit up with the light from the furnace.
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Even when it reached the bottom and wound up around a large drum, the fiber stayed bright.
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And we kept winding and winding and winding, thinking the light was going to go out.
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And it never went out.
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The loss was only four decibels per kilometer with excellent strength.
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Keck considers that the very first truly practical low -loss fiber.
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By 1977, AT &T trialed a fiber system underneath Chicago.
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Two years later, a fiber team from Japan was able to get a loss of just 0 .2 decibels a kilometer, the standard up to today.
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Fiber networks continued to grow, with the first transatlantic fiber optic cable installed by 1988, and it transmitted those phone calls differently than in copper.
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The audio wave was split up, or sampled into discrete values, and then converted into binary to get a long string of ones and zeros.
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Then a laser flashed on for one and off for zero, 280 million times a second.
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These pulses of light traveled down the fiber, but that wasn't all.
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Multiple conversations could now be weaved together.
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One bit from one conversation, then from another, and so on, slotting in together like a zipper.
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As long as the receiver knew the timing of each conversation, and the sampling rate, well they could reconstruct the original waves.
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So this first intercontinental cable could carry 40 ,000 simultaneous calls, 10 times more than the previous copper version.
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This insane capacity opened up a whole new world, and with digital signals, people realized that they weren't limited to phone calls.
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It was easier than ever to send text, images, videos, all building up to the internet.
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And since then, demand has only increased.
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This reel right here?
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Yeah.
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50 .477 meters, kilometers, so 50 kilometers, so it's about 30 miles.
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That's crazy.
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Like how much is in this warehouse?
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There's millions of kilometers here that we're pushing through here every month.
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To see how modern fibers are made, we visited Prismian's North Carolina factory.
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It all starts with the preform.
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Each pass at this microwave source ignites a mixture of gases into a plasma
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which deposits a thin layer of glass on the inside of the tube.
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And you see when it turns purple, that's when we're making a plasma with that gas.
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So how thick are these deposition layers?
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How many times are you doing this?
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How thick are you building this?
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Thousands of passes.
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Thousands of passes.
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Several thousand times it's doing this.
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Every time we make it go back and forth, we could change the composition of that if we wanted to.
363
After all the inner layers are done, the tube has a thicker wall, but there's still a gap down the middle.
364
So we want to collapse that channel upon itself.
365
So what we do is we heat it up, we have a furnace that goes back and forth, and just by a surface tension, it collapses upon itself.
366
Now they need to add more silicon on the outside to get the preform to the right proportions.
367
The core is very small, just 7 .2 % of the total diameter.
368
And you have a several thousand C plume of plasma right there.
369
There's grains of silica that's flowing into that plume and effectively melting it and spraying it onto that rod.
370
Wow.
371
That plasma torch is approximately three times as hot as the surface of the tunnel.
372
Plasma always blows my mind.
373
This is absurd.
374
Once the preform's done, it goes to the top of the draw tower, seven stories up, to start making fiber.
375
really looks like some sort of steampunk thing you know all these coils and this hot glass going down
376
the bottom of the preform is tapered to a point and heated to over 2 000 degrees celsius
377
it's like there's some heat coming off this the end of
378
the taper slowly drops down to the floor below we call it a gob
379
but it looks like a teardrop the fiber is a little thick
380
so it'll thinned down to the final 125 microns before it passes to the next level.
381
It's like a little flashlight coming out there.
382
I didn't expect it to be so violent.
383
If the drawing, like the pull down to that final diameter happens in such a short amount of time, In a few meters, let's call it.
384
A few meters?
385
Then why do you need six more floors?
386
You've got to cool the glass before you can apply the coating.
387
And if you cool the glass too quickly, it'll have residual stress and then have optical loss, attenuation.
388
Once the fibers are cool enough, they are dipped in two protective plastic coatings.
389
At the bottom of the draw tower, the fiber is wound onto massive spools, each capable of carrying hundreds of kilometers at over 50 meters a second.
390
Next, the finished fiber is tested for loss in strength.
391
Fiber is stronger than a steel wire of the same thickness.
392
I guess if I try to do it like...
393
If you just try to do it like that, it's really hard to break.
394
First of all, it just slides down my hand.
395
And that's a glass fiber with two coatings down.
396
Ah, it's just hurting my hand.
397
Oh my God.
398
Yeah, not easy.
399
Definitely not easy.
400
Ow!
401
But it's weak to sharp turns.
402
Tying in a lot.
403
But after testing, fiber is bundled and wrapped into thicker cables so that it's harder for them to knot and break.
404
These cables will join the more than 8 billion kilometers of fiber already installed, that carry information around the world, powering the internet and letting you watch this video.
405
But some experts argue that even with fiber, the internet would not be possible without another key invention.
406
The amplifier.
407
That's what boosts signals across long stretches, and it revolutionized fiber capacity on land and sea.
408
So if you'd like to see a video about submarine cables and fiber amplifiers, well, let us know in the comments.
409
As for Cao, his dream went further than he ever thought.
410
When he received the Nobel Prize in 2009 for his work, he said the information revolution that started in the 1990s could not have happened without optical fibers.
411
It is beyond the dreams the first serious concept of optical communication in 1966 when even one gigahertz was only a hope.
412
For me one of the things I kept on coming back to in this story is
413
that Cal was not a material scientist.
414
He was an electrical engineer and it was only
415
because he was an outsider that he was able to ask the questions that nobody was asking.
416
He was able to push the status quo.
417
But he was not the only one.
418
Maurer's team were also working with a very unintuitive idea, that by making something seemingly worse, they actually were making it better.
419
As Kao said, who knows what other forward thinkers will dream of in the future.
420
Granted, he was talking about bandwidth, but I think it applies anywhere where people are able to question why things are the way they are, whether that's really the limit.
421
One last thing.
422
These videos are only possible because of the incredible work done by our team behind the scenes.
423
We have world -class editors, animators, researchers, and writers that make these videos possible.
424
We'd love to shine more of a light on their work, so we organized a Q &A with the writer of today's video, Sully.
425
She discusses the fascinating things she learned while researching this topic
426
and things that didn't make the cut but that are really interesting.
427
So if you want to learn more about that, you can sign up for our newsletter in the description and you can find our Q &A right there.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “The Absurd Engineering Behind the Internet”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: glass, fiber, loss, kilometer, Kao. This video has 386 sentences and 6190 words to shadow. The speech runs for 34:25. The speaker talks fast, about 180 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. Only 78% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| fiber noun | /ˈfaɪ.bɚ/ | A single elongated piece of a given material, roughly round in cross-section, often twisted with other fibers to form thread. |
| fuse noun | /fjuːz/ | A wick or cord used to convey flame to gunpowder, a bomb, or similar explosive. |
| silicon noun | /ˈsɪləˌkɑn/ | A nonmetallic element (symbol Si) with an atomic number of 14 and atomic weight of 28.0855. |
| frequency noun | /ˈfɹiːkwənsi/ | The rate of occurrence of anything; the relationship between incidence and time period. |
| atom noun | /ˈætəm/ | The smallest possible amount of matter which still retains its identity as a chemical element, now known to consist of a nucleus surrounded by electrons. |
| lab noun | /læːb/ | A Labrador retriever. |
| angle noun | /ˈæŋ.ɡəl/ | A figure formed by two rays which start from a common point (a plane angle) or by three planes that intersect (a solid angle). |
| copper noun | /ˈkɒpə/ | A reddish-brown metallic chemical element (symbol Cu) with the atomic number 29; also, the metal made up of this element. |
| absorb verb | /æbˈsɔɹb/ | To include so that it no longer has separate existence; to overwhelm; to cause to disappear as if by swallowing up; to incorporate; to assimilate; to take in… |
| wire noun | /ˈwaɪɚ/ | Metal formed into a thin, even thread, now usually by being drawn through a hole in a steel die. |
| laser noun | /ˈleɪzɚ/ | A device that produces a monochromatic, coherent beam of light. |
| meter noun | /ˈmitəɹ/ | A device that measures things. |
| clad verb | /klæd/ | To cover with a cladding or another material (for example, insulation). |
| titanium noun | /taɪˈteɪni.əm/ | A chemical element (symbol Ti), atomic number 22; it is a strong, corrosion-resistant transition metal, used to make light alloys for aircraft etc. |
| tube noun | /tuːb/ | Anything that is hollow and cylindrical in shape. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. | |
| get off verb | To move from being on top of (something) to not being on top of it. | |
| go back verb | To return to a place or state after having been there at a previous time. | |
| push through verb | To force (legislation or a plan) to be passed or agreed to or a decision to be reached. | |
| break through verb | To gain popularity. | |
| come down verb | To descend, fall down, collapse. | |
| come off verb | To become detached. | |
| come out verb | /ˌkʌm ˈaʊt/ | To be discovered; to be revealed. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- How do you actually make the preform?
- I didn't expect it to be so violent.
- Then why do you need six more floors?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | if you fail you will gather |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is shifted · are shown · was actually discovered |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | currents, which are · down, which is · one which is |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 63 contractions and reduced forms, such as didn't, couldn't, wasn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: thick /θɪk/, bandwidth /ˈbændwɪdθ/, thin /ˈθɪn/, gather /ˈɡæðɚ/, theoretical /ˌθi.əˈɹɛt.ɪ.kəl/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: sharp /ʃɑɹp/, reflection /ɹɪˈflɛkʃən/, absorption /æbˈsɔɹp.ʃn̩/, composition /ˌkɑm.pəˈzɪʃ.ən/, shine /ʃaɪn/
- Long words — get the stress right: titanium /taɪˈteɪni.əm/, diameter /daɪˈæmɪdɚ/, electrical /ɪˈlɛktɹɪkəl/, experiment /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/, composition /ˌkɑm.pəˈzɪʃ.ən/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like fiber, fuse, silicon.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.