At Corning’s Wilmington, North Carolina factory, high temperatures and intense chemistry turn silica into the backbone of the internet
Christopher PayneFiber optics helped bring this article to whatever device you’re reading it on. The tiny strands of ultra-clear glass play a crucial role in just about everything that happens on the web—from connecting massive data centers to deliveringduring the pandemic, those fast pipes are more essential than ever.
This year, the discovery that made all this speedy data-sharing possible turns 50. In 1970, a group of scientists working at glass manufacturer Corning came up a method to make pure silica glass, allowing signals—emails, websites,sessions—to traverse the 125 micron-thick strands as pulses of laser light with unprecedented efficiency.
For decades, the same Wilmington, North Carolina factory has churned out the fiber. The strands they produce bundle together into the wires that make up everything from trans-Atlantic undersea cables to the internet cord coming into your home.Simply melting sand, which is mostly silica, will make glass, but that gritty stuff won’t get the kind of optical purity needed to ping light around the globe. So Corning makes its own pure silica.
Corning refers to the cooking process as consolidation. While the blank entering the furnace at the left appears cloudy, the one emerging on the right is a solid, clear mass. The heat bonds the silica molecules tightly together, making the glass dense and free of impurities that might impede its ability to transmit light. Corning removes the ceramic rod originally used to collect the soot, and the hole it leaves behind closes up as the material melts.
To stretch the thick glass tubes into ultra-thin strands, the machinery on the right heats the cylinders to roughly 2,000 degrees Celsius. A thick gob forms as the substance melts and gravity pulls the substrate down several stories through a tube while sensors monitor its temperature. At the bottom, a machine—or, sometimes a human—snips off the gob to ready the fiber to be spun onto reels.The finished product gets sheathed in colored polymers before machines reel it onto coils.
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