Victorian experiments and optical communications: Precursors of fiber-optic communications were invented a century ago, but no one at that time attempted to synthesize the fragmented knowledge

Sometimes ideas emerge long before their time and then lie dormant for many years until other developments make it possible to put the pieces together for a technological breakthrough - such as fiber-optic communications. Key elements of the concept of communicating via light were known in the late 1800s. Several Victorianera engineers and physicists found ways to guide light through transparent media, distribute light throughout buildings, transmit voices over beams of light, and make fine glass fibers. Yet most were striving for applications largely unrelated to optical communications, and nearly a century would elapse before their ways of manipulating light would be synthesized in the form of fiber-optic communications.