Special:Badtitle/NS90:Milestones-Nomination talk:First Optical Fiber Laser and Amplifier/influence of this amplifier on telecommunications

Link title At the time of the work by Elias Snitzer et al, the prospects of optical fibres for telecommunications were not foreseen - since that was not taken seriously until the work of Charles Kao. The subsequent need for and development of amplifiers for optical fibre communications (e.g. mainly the erbium doped amplifier) came some 20 years after Snitzer's work. Thus although work of D. Payne et al and others who did the initial development work on the Erbium-doped amplifier does credit Snitzer (as stated in the Nomination documents), it seems that this may have been a quite minor influence. Therefore, I suggest that the supporting documents for the Snitzer proposal should make this clearer than they seem to at present. E.g. I am suggesting that perhaps the Snitzer amplifier work did not really lead in a direct way to the amplifiers actually used in the telecom domain for optical fibre transmission.

Tony Davies 6 Aug 2012