Students in teacher David Killius’ fourth period advanced physics class at Theodore Roosevelt High School in Kent were visited Friday by a man who has already changed their lives in ways they might take for granted.
Peter Schultz was 28 in 1970 and a researcher at for Corning Inc., the glass company in Corning, N.Y., when he and two other researchers discovered the process to create fiber optic glass wire that would one day revolutionize communication technology. And with the help of a simple vacuum cleaner, no less.
On Friday, the 65-year-old inventor spent 45 minutes with Killius’ students explaining how he came to be a 1993 inductee into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, the holder of at least 26 patents for fiber optic glass wire and a successful consultant to the fiber optics and materials science industries with offices in New York and the Virgin Islands.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Schultz paid his way through Rutgers University in New Jersey by caddying at golf courses. The first member of his family to go to college, he received a National Science Foundation fellowship and had his doctorate in ceramic science by 1968.
The laser had been invented in the early 1960s, and researchers had discovered “you could get more information packed closer and closer together” using lasers to send it, Schultz said. But lasers were impractical means of sending information through the air and the process for manufacturing fiber optic wire resulted in impurities in the wire, no bigger or wider than a human hair.
Impurities would “absorb light,” and for “every 10 feet (of fiber optic wire) you’d need an amplifier. It just wasn’t practical,” Schultz said. So Corning was trying to figure out a process to create pure fiber optic cables.
Schultz and his colleagues discovered they could make pure glass “like you distill water.” Using silicon trichloride, and vaporizing it in a flame into silicon dioxide, they hooked up a vacuum cleaner — “We burned through a lot of those,” Schultz joked — to the opposite end of a glass tube and drew the glass vapors through it, where they stuck to the sides as “high purity glass particles.”
Coupled with a laser, the breakthrough made it possible to send laser signals through fiber optic wire “with the same transmission capabilities” of copper wire, using far less wire. More than 600 million miles of fiber optic line has been installed since 1987, with 100 million miles more expected to be installed in 2008 alone, Schultz said, and the level of impurities in modern fiber optic wire is now “less than one part per billion.”
And “the more (wire) you put in, the more it’s used. The more it’s used, the more you need to put in,” he said.
He also reminded the students that they would not have the Internet today were it not for personal computers, user-friendly software and fiber optics.
“These three things, developed parallel to each other, mean we can get any information we want, from anywhere in the world in an instant,” Schultz said.
Schultz was awarded the National Medal of Technology in 2001 by President Bill Clinton, the highest award for contributions to science given by the U.S. government. Killius said he thought Schultz made a connection with the advanced science students in the class, and Schultz said he hoped he had.
“If I can spark one of them …” he said.