And Now, the Age of Light

A new era is dawning in the West, the era of light. Under city streets and beneath oceans, in commercial skyscrapers and recesses of the Pentagon, a host of new technologies based on lasers, ultrapure glass fibers and exotic new materials are challenging the wonders of conventional electronic gadgetry. In little more than a decade, these inventions have moved from laboratories to modern homes, offices and factories. With growing speed, the new technology promises to turn the electronic age into the age of optics, in which gadgetry built around beams of light becomes virtually indispensable. Says Robert Spinrad, director of systems technology at Xerox: “The optics boom is just starting to explode. Optics in the 21st century will be what electronics represents in the 20th century.” |

Spinrad’s estimate may be conservative. Corporations and national research organizations around the world are now spending billions of dollars to harness the new optical technology. The first fruits of their efforts are already apparent in such conveniences as fiber-optic telephone lines, laser printers, hot-selling compact disc players, credit cards bearing holograms, and laser price-tag scanners in supermarkets. Says Thomas Hartwick, head of TRW’s Electro-Optics Research Center, near Los Angeles: “Every area that light touches will see technology advance by several generations.”

The new optical technology is moving rapidly into place. Communications companies have started to lay new transoceanic cables that can compete handily with space satellites. Fiber-optic links are allowing far-flung corporations to install networks of private video hookups and connect office buildings into a new kind of “optical city.” Optical technology is providing sensitive nerve endings for devices like smoke detectors and blood analyzers. Meanwhile, scientists in the U.S., Western Europe and Japan are pushing hard toward a still much-in-the-future optical computer that uses photons rather than electrons for number-crunching efficiency. The massively powerful optical brain may be the only means to achieve the immense computing capacity needed for President Reagan’s proposed Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars.

“The race is on. No one wants to be left behind,” says Ben Zour, senior analyst for strategic information at Eastman Kodak. The list of contenders in the research-and-development scramble reads like a Who’s Who of U.S. high tech: Du Pont, IBM, 3M, Texas Instruments, NCR and GTE, among many others. AT&T is a giant in the field; its Bell Laboratories, with a research budget of some $2 billion annually, now conducts more research in optics than in its original core pursuit of electronics.

The optical competition is global. The U.S. spent at least $1 billion last year on optical research and development. But Japan spent roughly $3 billion, and is considered the international leader in most optic fields. Early breakthroughs in the optical-research battle have been scored in West Germany, Britain, France and Canada. The Soviet Union, according to a Central Intelligence Agency report, is conducting the largest optical computing research program of any nation, spending on that quest four to ten times as much as the U.S. “The importance to the U.S. economy of being competitive in world markets for optoelectronic products cannot be overemphasized,” declared the Commerce Department last year.

For the present, though, optics is still a fledgling commercial field. This year the industry is expected to bring in revenues of $10 billion from all its disparate enterprises. By comparison, the electronic industry anticipates about $200 billion in revenues. But optics is expected to grow at a pace of 30% to 50% annually for the next several years, reaching sales of more than $50 billion by 1990, in contrast to growth of just 5% to 10% annually for purely electronic products.

The basis of optical technology rests on the behavior of the infinitesimal packets of radiant energy known as photons. Unlike electrons, which are electrical charges that often interfere with one another as they travel along a medium like copper wire, photons can easily travel in parallel straight lines and even pass through one another undisturbed. Much more than other portions of the electromagnetic spectrum, like radio waves or electronic pulses, light is suited to carrying enormous numbers of precise digital signals at high speed over long distances. The means to exploit those characteristics began to emerge in the 1950s, when scientists developed the laser, a highly focused and amplified beam of light.

Since then the laser has been put to a number of other uses, notably as a cutting and fusing device in operations ranging from eye surgery to metal fabrication. But it is the laser’s data-carrying role that is currently turning the world of conventional electronics upside down. Transmission is accomplished principally by sending beams of voice and data signals via laser along hair-thin filaments of ultrapure glass fiber. One hair-thin strand of the medium can carry as many telephone conversations as 625 copper wires and with greater clarity.

To profit from that efficiency, telephone companies around the world are laying optical fiber cables as rapidly as possible. West Germany’s national telecommunications utility, for example, plans to install more than 500,000 miles of optical fibers between now and 1990 at a cost of $1.5 billion. The highly competitive U.S. long-distance carriers have equally ambitious plans. US Sprint, which is spending more than $2.5 billion on a 23,000-mile network, has TV commercials boasting the advantages of its grid. Consortiums of telephone companies plan to connect the U.S. and Europe with a 3,700 nautical- mile undersea fiber in 1987 that will permit 38,000 simultaneous phone calls or data transmissions, compared with just 9,000 for a conventional coaxial cable.

The advantages of fiber optics loom even larger for computer data and video signal transmission. The maximum carrying ability of ordinary copper cable is about 144,000 bits of data per sec. To deliver a perfect picture, a color-video signal requires about 90 million bits per sec. Optical fibers can handle that with several hundred million bits of capacity to spare. The enormous transmission capacity of optical fiber has encouraged corporations such as McDonald’s, Citicorp and Merrill Lynch to install private fiber-optic lines to conduct video conferences, connect computers or operate low-cost telephone networks.

Fiber-optic cables, hooked directly to consumers’ homes, will eventually provide reception of almost limitless numbers of cable-TV channels and other more exotic services. For example, a joint venture of French communications companies has broken new ground by stringing fiber-optic cables to the homes of 1,500 telephone customers in the southern town of Biarritz and setting up an experimental two-way video system in which customers see one another while they chat.

Another burgeoning area of optics is holography, the production of three- dimensional pictures using low-powered lasers. Credit-card companies now use complex holographic images on their wares to foil counterfeiters, and the U.S. Treasury has hired Xerox to figure out a way to put holograms on paper currency.

Light is about to assume tremendous importance as a data-storage tool. The most visible example of that capacity is the audio compact disc, introduced commercially in 1983. More than 50 million CDs and 1.8 million players will be sold this year, generating total revenues of more than $1 billion. CD sales have been increasing fourfold each year, helping to send LP record sales into decline. A CD stores music in digital form in some 15 billion microscopic pits on its aluminum surface. As the CD spins inside its player at up to 500 r.p.m., a laser scans the pits and beams their information to a computer chip for conversion into sound. The true significance of the optical disc lies in its data-storage capacity. A disc 4.7 in. in diameter can store the equivalent of 250,000 pages of typewritten information. So far, the CDs generally can be used only to retrieve data | imprinted on the disc at the factory. But CDs that consumers can record on should be widely available within a year or so. Both the IRS and the Library of Congress are looking into optical storage technology. By 1991 optics are expected to capture 20% of the $40 billion market for computer data-storage devices.

The most ambitious competition is the race to build the first optical computer, considered a practical impossibility only a few years ago. In theory, photons would race through such a machine with near perfect efficiency, which would make an optical computer 1,000 times as fast as the most advanced of modern electronic supercomputers. AT&T took a significant step toward that faraway goal in June by producing the first optical equivalent of a transistor. The Japanese, meanwhile, are developing a hybrid microchip that combines the most efficient aspects of electronics and optics. Declares Alan Huang, director of AT&T’s optical computing project: “If we let the Japanese win, we might as well throw in the towel as far as computing is concerned.”

Indeed, the optics race is liable to take on ever increasing urgency. The struggle for discovery, though, will probably be well worth the cost. Says Robert Lucky, executive director of communications sciences at Bell Labs: “There’s no telling where this technology is headed.” Actually, there is. The alluring glow of optics is pointed straight toward profit and increased productivity.