How do fibre optic cables work?

The Romans must have been particularly pleased with themselves the day they invented lead pipes around 2000 years ago. At last, they had an easy way to carry their water from one place to another. Imagine what they'd make of modern fiber-optic cables—"pipes" that can carry telephone calls and emails right around the world in a seventh of a second! So, "How do these fibre-optic cables work?". Let's explore!

Fibre optic cables are bundles of extremely pure glass threads that have been coated in two layers of reflective plastic, each of which is capable of transmitting messages modulated onto light waves. Fiber optics has several advantages over traditional metal communications lines: Fiber optic cables have a much greater bandwidth than metal cables.

Light travels down a fiber-optic cable by bouncing repeatedly off the walls.  Each tiny photon (particle of light) bounces down the pipe. Light travels through the glass strands, and continuously reflects off of the inside of the mirrored plastic coatings in a process known as total internal reflection. It's one of the things that keeps light inside the pipe. The other thing that keeps light in the pipe is the structure of the cable, which is made up of two separate parts. The main part of the cable—in the middle—is called the core and that's the bit the light travels through. Wrapped around the outside of the core is another layer of glass called the cladding. The cladding's job is to keep the light signals inside the core. It can do this because it is made of a different type of glass as compared to the core.

The development of flexible optical fibres has enabled light to be transmitted over long distances, and apparently around corners. Optical fibres are ideal for seeing into places that are not easily accessible. They are also used to carry coded light signals over very long distances, and so, are important to the modern communications industry. Optical fibres are rather like the nerves in our body. Both are very thin, and each contains many hundreds of individual fibres bundled together.

Each nerve fibre is designed so that the electrical signals they send to the brain cannot escape at all.

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