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Kapany Optical Materials
OSA Historical Archives
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Brian
Narinder
O’Brien
O’Brien and Kapany
Your article titled “Presidents of the
Early 1950s” (OPN, December 2010)
and the related correspondence on Brian
O’Brien and Narinder Kapany (January
2011) were well done and informative.
;e January letter to the editor specu-
lates that there may have been tension
between O’Brien and Kapany. I knew
both of them, and I doubt there was a
conflict or even a relationship between
the two. At that time I was working on
my thesis on fiber optics at the Institute
of Optics at the University of Rochester;
my advisor was Robert E. Hopkins,
then director of the Institute.
O’Brien was interested in fiber optics
in the early 1950s, and then he became
consumed with his responsibilities at
American Optical and the challenge of
ToddAO—the project for which he was
recruited by Mike Todd to help replace
the wide-screen three-projector cinema
technology known as Cinerama with
a single projector. (Todd was a well-
known movie producer and the third
husband of actress Elizabeth Taylor.)
Probably the most important concept
that enabled useful fiber optical applica-
tions was the introduction of low index
glass cladding to protect the surface of
the core glass fiber while maintaining
the essential total internal reflection,
;e concept of cladding a glass fiber
is believed to have arisen in a conversa-
tion between Brian O’Brien and A.C.S.
van Heel. Van Heel had sent O’Brien a
copy of a paper, dated 12-6-53, that dealt
with cladding, stimulating O’Brien to file
a patent within a year. He filed his patent
on November 19, 1954, and it was issued
on March 4, 1958. ;en it came to light
that, in the Netherlands (where van Heel
was from), 12-6-53 meant June 12, 1953,
and not December 6, 1953, as O’Brien
had assumed. ;us, O’Brien’s patent
was rendered invalid. It is unfortunate
that O’Brien or his lawyers did not catch
this. I think that every fiber from every
fiber-optic manufacturer has been clad.
;e patent would have been extraordi-
narily valuable.
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Editor-in-Chief
David J. Hagan
CREOL, University of Central
Florida (USA)
Robert J. Potter
Irving, Texas, U.S.A.
RJPotter@RJPotter.com
Correction
On p. 50 of the March 2011 issue
of OPN, we incorrectly named an
individual in the photo on the top left
of the page. The picture shows Chris
Dainty awarding the best student
paper award to a graduate student at
Photonics 2010. The person receiving
the award is Somnath Gosh, not
Mohiudeen Azhar (although both won
awards for best student papers). We
apologize for the error.
Senior Associate Editors
Steven C. Moss
Aerospace Corporation (USA)
Takunori Taira
Institute for Molecular
Science (Japan)
www.opticsinfobase.org/omex
Please direct all correspondence to the Editor, Optics & Photonics News, The Optical
Society, 2010 Massachusetts Ave., N. W., Washington, D.C. 20036. E-mail: opn@osa.org.
