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      • Alexander Graham Bell
      • Building the Network of Networks
  • Technology Timeline
    • 1800's
      • 1876: The Telephone
    • 1910's
      • 1915: First Transcontinental Telephone Call
      • 1916: Remembering Claude Shannon
      • 1917: The First Air-to-Ground and Ground-to-Air Radio Communications
    • 1920's
      • 1924: Fax Service
      • 1924: Electrical Sound Recording
      • 1926: Sound Motion Pictures
      • 1927: Negative Feedback
      • 1927: The Wave Nature of Matter
      • 1927: Long Distance TV Transmission
      • 1927: Transatlantic Phone Service
      • 1929: Broadband Coaxial Cable
      • 1929: The Artificial Larynx
    • 1930's
      • 1933: Stereo Recordings
      • 1933: Radio Astronomy
      • 1936: Synthetic Speech
      • 1939: The Digital Computer
      • 1939: High Frequency Radar
    • 1940's
      • 1940: Complex Number Generator
      • 1941: Touch Tone Telephones
      • 1946: First Mobile Telephone Call
      • 1947: The Transistor
      • 1948: Error Correction
      • 1948: Information Theory
    • 1950's
      • 1951: First Direct-Dial Transcontinental Telephone Call
      • 1951: Microwave Radio-Relay Skyway
      • 1954: The Solar Cell
      • 1956: Transoceanic Telephone Cables
      • 1958: The Laser
    • 1960's
      • 1960: Communications Satellites
      • 1962: Satellite Transmission
      • 1965: The Echo of the Big Bang
      • 1969: UNIX and the Internet
    • 1970's
      • 1970: Picturephone
      • 1976: Epitaxy Microchips
      • 1976: First Digital Electronic Switching
      • 1977: Fiber Optic Communication
    • 1980's
      • 1983: Cellular Phones
      • 1983: C++
      • 1989: HDTV
      • 1989: The Speech-Driven Robot
    • 1990's
      • 1992: The Instant Language Translator
      • 1992: Fault-Tolerance Software
      • 1993: The Computer Videophone
      • 1997: a2b Music
      • 1998: Phone Web
      • 1999: Quantum Computing
    • 2000's
      • 2000: Network Fraud Protection
      • 2001: How May I Help You?
      • 2001: Natural Voices
      • 2001: Next Gen Network Tools
      • 2002: Privacy Bird
      • 2002: CNI
      • 2003: Tomo-gravity
      • 2003: GS Tool
      • 2004: Maui
      • 2004: Internet Protect
      • 2005: Traffic Analysis Service (TAS)

1958: The Laser

Videos

  • The Plasma Fireball
    Quicktime: 1.2M / 2.7M
    AVI: 1.2M / 2.7M

Audio

  • Experimental Laser Phone Call
    AU:  296kk / AIF:296kk

Almost all modern communications, including everything from cable television to the Internet, are carried on digital pulses of focused, high-intensity light called the "laser." Beginning in the late 1950s, AT&T Labs worked extensively to develop the laser into a useful device. Photo: Laser.

The laser couldn't send information anywhere if there wasn't a communications system to carry it. So AT&T coupled the laser with transmission lines of hair-thin, super-transparent, ultra-strong glass fiber which today carry tens of billions of information bits every second.

Lasers and fiber optic cable have been used extensively in the United States since the early 1980s. Over the past decade, AT&T has installed undersea fiber optic cable connecting the United States to most of the industrialized nations of the world.

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