Sunday, October 19, 2008
History of Fiber Optics
Doctors Roth and Reuss, of Vienna, used bent glass rods to illuminate body cavities in 1888. French engineer Henry Saint-Rene designed a system of bent glass rods for guiding light images seven years later in an early attempt at television. In 1898, American David Smith applied for a patent on a dental illuminator using a curved glass rod.
In the 1920s, John Logie Baird patented the idea of using arrays of transparent rods to transmit images for television and Clarence W. Hansell did the same for facsimiles. Heinrich Lamm, however, was the first person to transmit an image through a bundle of optical fibers in 1930. It was an image of a light bulb filament. His intent was to look inside inaccessible parts of the body, but the rise of the Nazis forced Lamm, a Jew, to move to America and abandon his dream of becoming a professor of medicine. His effort to file a patent was denied because of Hansell's British patent.
Read interesting info here
