Bell Labs optical fiber transmissivity chart

The 8-orders-of-magnitude improvement chart from Egyptian glass to modern optical fibers. Tom passes the fibers around.

[Tom shows optical fibers.] This is optical fibers. This was put together by Bell Labs 25 years ago — they showed the optical loss in decibels per kilometer. Egyptian glass was sort of green and smoky. Phoenicians did a better job by a couple orders of magnitude in transmissivity of light. Optical glass by the time of Leeuwenhoek — you could actually look through them and wear glasses. Then in the 1960s, glass fibers. We go here over eight orders of magnitude in transmissivity, and so now we can have light going down optical fibers most of the way across the ocean.