New York City underground copper wire capacity crisis

Late 1970s — no more room underground for copper telephone wire. Optical fiber resolved.

In the late 1970s, copper was starting to go through the roof. New York City didn't know what to do. They could not put more wires underground to carry telephone conversations or anything else. Copper just took up too much space. Because Corning finally perfected the optical fiber, now you could have ten million telephone calls on one wire. They were talking about the problem in the 1970s that copper pennies were going to be worth more than one cent, and people were going to start melting down all the pennies and selling it as a copper product. That's one of the reasons — what are our pennies made out of now? Zinc with a copper plating. It's not a thin copper plate, it's a fairly thick copper plate. Now inflation's come along and we're running into the problem that zinc is getting too expensive, and now they're saying do we really need pennies, we'll just go to nickel exchange.