Fiber Optics Physics and Technology
Telephone, telefax, email and internet -- the key ingredient of the inner workings is the conduit: the line which is designed to carry massive amounts of data at breakneck speed. In their data-carrying capacity optical fiber lines beat other technologies
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Fedor Mitschke
Fiber Optics Physics and Technology
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Prof. Dr. Fedor Mitschke Universit¨at Rostock Institut f¨ur Physik Universit¨atsplatz 3 18055 Rostock Germany [email protected]
ISBN 978-3-642-03702-3 e-ISBN 978-3-642-03703-0 DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-03703-0 Springer Heidelberg Dordrecht London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2009938485
c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilm or in any other way, and storage in data banks. Duplication of this publication or parts thereof is permitted only under the provisions of the German Copyright Law of September 9, 1965, in its current version, and permission for use must always be obtained from Springer. Violations are liable to prosecution under the German Copyright Law. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. Cover design: eStudio Calamar S.L. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
Absent a Telephone, a Bicyclist Had to Save the World On the height of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, no direct telecommunication line existed between the White House and the Kremlin. All messages going back and forth had to be sent through intermediaries. The world teetered on the brink of nuclear Armageddon when in the evening of October 23 President John F. Kennedy sent his brother, Robert Kennedy, over to the Soviet Embassy for a last-ditch effort to resolve the crisis peacefully. Robert presented a proposal how both sides could stand down without losing face. Right after the meeting, Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin hastened to write a report to Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow. A bicycle courier was called in to take this letter to a Western Union telegraph station, and Dobrynin personally instructed him to go straight to the station because the message was important – which was hardly an exaggeration. That man on the bicycle, in my view, has saved the world. Most likely, without even knowing. A year later, a direct telegraph line was installed which was popularly called the “red telephone.” (There never was an actual red telephone sitting in the Oval Office.) A lesson had been learned: Communication can be vital when it comes to solving conflicts. Today the situation is vastly different from what it was less than half a century ago. The world is knit together by a network of connections of economic, political, cultural, and other nature. That is only possible because virtually instantaneous long-distance communication at affordable cost has become ubiquitous. In earlier centuries, important news – like the outcome of a battle, say – often was re
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