Originally posted by Bob Down Under
Hi Spite

We are not saying humans are not capable of some of the above inventions/developments or the insight.

Lets just say some things were, how can I put it? as being presented to be studied and developed.

Forget witchcraft your way out there my friend and I will not even go there.

Tech thats been reversed/back engineered as they say, same thing different terminology, which has been going on with weapon tech since WWI

[edit on 9-1-2009 by Bob Down Under]

of optical transmission. It depended on the phenomenon of total
internal reflection, first demonstrated in 1841 by Daniel Colladon with his famous
luminous fountain experiment. Jacques Babinet, a French specialist in optics,
extended the principle to guiding light along bent glass rods and even suggested using
it as dental illuminators, an idea that would surface half a century later.
The use of glass dates back 4500 years to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. The
Egyptians made coarse fibres by 1600 BC, and fibres survive as decorations on

Egyptian pottery dating back to 1375 BC. In the Renaissance, Venetian glass makers
used glass fibres to decorate the surfaces of plain glass vessels. During the eighteenth
and nineteenth century, the use of glass fibres was mainly confined to woven fabrics.
Nobody paid much attention to the fabrics on display. However, researchers learnt
about the mechanics of glass fibres and the properties of molten glass. In time, that
would prove valuable knowledge for developers of optical fibres.
Optical fibres are essentially transparent rods of glass or plastic stretched so that they
are long and flexible. The first person to have demonstrated image transmission
through a bundle of optical fibres was Heinrich Lamm, a medical student in Munich.
His goal was to look inside inaccessible parts of the body, and in a 1930 paper, he
reported transmitting the image of a light bulb filament through a short bundle.
However, the unclad fibres transmitted images poorly, and the rise of the Nazis forced
Lamm, a Jew, to move to America and abandon his dreams of becoming a professor
of medicine.

In 1954, Abraham van Heel, Harold H. Hopkins and Narinder Kapany separately
announced imaging bundles in the prestigious British journal entitled Nature. Neither
van Heel nor Hopkins and Kapany made bundles that could carry light far, but their
reports sparked the fibre optics revolution. The crucial innovation was made by van
Heel, who covered a bare fibre with a transparent cladding of lower refractive index.
This protected the total-reflection surface from contamination, and greatly reduced
crosstalk between fibres.

By 1960, glass-clad fibres had an attenuation of about 1 dB/m, fine for medical
imaging, but far too high for communications.
Meanwhile, telecommunications engineers were seeking more transmission
bandwidth. Radio and microwave frequencies were heavily in use, so they looked
towards higher frequencies to carry loads they expected to continue increasing with
the growth of television and telephone traffic. Telephone companies thought video
telephones lurked just around the corner, and would escalate bandwidth demands even
further.

In 1966 Charles K. Kao concluded that the fundamental limit on glass attenuation is
below 20 dB/km, which would be practical for communications. The race was on to
find lowloss fibres suitable for optical communications.
It took four years to reach Kao's goal of 20 dB/km, and the route to success proved
different from what many had expected. Most of the researchers tried to purify the
compound glasses used for standard optics, which are easy to melt and draw into
fibres. At the Corning Glass Works (now Corning Inc.), Robert Maurer, Donald Keck
and Peter Schultz started with fused silica, a material that can be made extremely
pure, but has a high melting point and low refractive index. They made cylindrical
preforms by depositing purified materials from the vapour phase, adding carefully
controlled amounts of dopants to make the refractive index of the core slightly higher
than that of the cladding, without raising the attenuation dramatically. In September
1970, they announced that they had made single -mode fibres with an attenuation of
below 20 dB/km at 633 nm.

The Corning breakthrough was among the most dramatic of many developments that
opened the door to fibre optic communications.
During the 1970s researchers from mainly AT&T, GTE, Corning and Bell Systems
actively pursued various building blocks to complete the first commercial fibre optic
communication system. The main field of research focused on continuous -wave
room-temperature semiconductor lasers, low-loss fibres and fibre optic transmission
windows. By April 1977, the first fibre optic cables to be used for live traffic were
independently installed by GTE and AT&T. They operated at 6 Mb/s and 45 Mb/s
respectively.

The first-generation systems could transmit light several kilometres without repeaters,
but were loss limited by an attenuation of about 2 dB/km. A second generation soon
appeared, using InGaAsP lasers, which emitted at 1300 nm, where fibre attenuation
was as low as 0.5 dB/km, and pulse dispersion was somewhat lower than at 850 nm. A
new generation of single -mode systems was just beyond the horizon, to operate at
1550 nm with fibre loss at 0.2 dB/km, allowing even longer repeater spacings. ,


The fourth generation of lightwave systems makes use of optical amplification to
increase the repeater spacing and of WDM (wavelength-division multiplexing) to
increase the bit rate. The fourth-generation systems revolutionized optical
communications, making long-haul oceanic networks even more attainable.