1820's:    Augustine-Jean Fresnel developed equations explaining the trapping of light inside a flat glass plate.

1870's:    Alexander Graham Bell had the idea of using visible light for communications. He developed an optical telephone he named the Photophone. It was used for very specialized types of communications such as signaling between ships but could not compete with his earlier invention of the telephone.

1900:   Max Planck introduced a new field of science; quantum physics. He mathematically demonstrated that matter radiates energy in discrete bundles which he named quanta.

1905:  Albert Einstein built on the research of Max Planck to show that light is made of packets, later referred to as photons. Einstein received a Nobel prize in 1921 for this breakthrough.

1920's:   John Logie Baird in England and Clarence W. Hansell in the United States patented the concept of using hollow pipes to transmit images for television and facsimile systems.

1930's:    Heinrich Lamm, a medical student in Munich Germany, reported the transmission of an image of a light bulb through a short bundle of uncladded fibers.

1960's:    Theodore Maiman invented the ruby laser. This first laser was bulky and fragile.
Charles Kao and George Hodkham at Standard Telecommunications Laboratories in England, in their landmark theoretical paper, postulated that the light loss in fiber could be dramatically reduced by using amplifiers at intervals to boost the signals.

1970's:     Scientists from Corning Glass Work prepared the first batch of optical fiber hundreds of yards long and were able to communicate over it with crystal clear clarity.
Simultaneously a group at Bell Labs developed a semiconductor laser that could operate at room temperature.

Early 1980's:  Fibers were produced that were so transparent that a signal could pass through 150 miles of fiber before becoming too weak to detect. The breakthrough came through the realization that pure silica glass fiber, devoid of all of metal impurities, could only be prepared directly from vapor components.
Small optical fiber networks were being installed. In early fiber optic systems, amplifiers were used to regenerate weak signals. Optical devices were used to detect incoming signals. and electronic circuitry converted and amplified the electrical current, then driving a new laser to recreate the optical signal.

1985:   S. B. Poole of England's University of Southampton discovered that by splicing a short strand of erbium-doped glass into the main fiber, the system would receive energy from an eternal source and act as a laser it its own right. By amplifying a weak optical signal with out electronic circuitry. This dramatically increased the carrying capacity (100 times) over systems utilizing electronic amplifiers.

1988:  First transatlantic fiber cable is laid with glass so transparent that amplifiers are only needed about every 40 miles.

1991:  Emmanuel Desurvire of Bell Labs and David Payne and P.J. Meers of England's University of Southampton, produce cable with transmitters built in to the fibers.

1996:  Fiber optic cable laid across the Pacific Ocean.