Manual Fibra Optica

Fiber Optics
Fedor Mitschke
Fiber Optics
Physics and Technology
123
Prof. Dr. Fedor Mitschke
Universit¨at Rostock
Institut f¨ur Physik
Universit¨atsplatz 3
18055 Rostock
Germany
fedor.mitschke@uni-rostock.de
ISBN 978-3-642-03702-3 e-ISBN 978-3-642-03703-0
DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-03703-0
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Absent a Telephone,
a Bicyclist Had to Save
the World
On the height of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, no direct telecommunication
line existed between theWhite House and the Kremlin. All messages going
back and forth had to be sent through intermediaries. The world teetered on
the brink of nuclear Armageddon when in the evening of October 23 President
John F. Kennedy sent his brother, Robert Kennedy, over to the Soviet Embassy
for a last-ditch effort to resolve the crisis peacefully. Robert presented a proposal
how both sides could stand downwithout losing face. Right after the meeting,
Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin hastened to write a report to Nikita Khrushchev
in Moscow. A bicycle courier was called in to take this letter to a Western Union
telegraph station, and Dobrynin personally instructed him to go straight to the
station because the message was important – which was hardly an exaggeration.
That man on the bicycle, in myview, has saved the world. Most likely,
without even knowing.
A year later, a direct telegraph line was installed which was popularly called
the “red telephone.” (There never was an actual red telephone sitting in the
Oval Office.) A lesson had been learned: Communication can be vital when it
comes to solving conflicts.
Today the situation is vastly different from what it was less than half acentury
ago. The world is knit together by a network of connections of economic,
political, cultural, and other nature. That is only possible because virtually
instantaneous long-distance communication at affordable cost has become ubiquitous.
In earlier centuries, important news – like the outcome of a battle, say –
often was received only several weeks later. Today we are not the least bitastonished
when we watch unfolding events in the remotest corner of the planet
in real time, living color, and stereophonic sound.
The biggest machine on earth is the international telephone network. It
allows you to call this minute, on a lark, your neighbor, your friend in New
Zealand, or the Department of Sanitation in Tokyo. And we got used to it!
Behind the scenes, of course, there is asubstantial investment in technology
going into this, and more effort is required to keep up with society’s ever-rising
demands. Consider international calls: For some time satellites seemed to be
the most efficient and elegant means. Just a decade or two later, they were
no more up to the growing task, and a new, earthbound technology took over:
optical fiber transmission.
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VI Absent a...