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The rise of light

Conference Paper · August 2015

DOI: 10.1109/HISTELCON.2015.7307311

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The Rise of Light
Massimo Guarnieri, Member, IEEE
Abstract—This article is inspired by the celebration of the year
light in 2015 and regards the long lasting relationship between
man and light. Man started using light in prehistoric times and
the oldest traces of scientific investigations on light date back to
ancient China and Greece. While the long march of science led to
the modern theories of light Maxwell, Einstien and quantum
electrodynamics, light technologies have developed providing
more and more differentiated applications. Since long ago we
have used various forms of artificial light that have profoundly
impacted in our working systems and life. More recently we have
learned to use the light in a large family of technologies, include
photography, cinema and television, and also the technological
domain of optoelectronics, that regards the management,
processing and transmission of information, which so deeply
characterize our society.
Index Terms—CD, compact disc, electric lighting, fiber optics,
holography, ICT, information and communication technology,
laser, LED, light, lighting, optoelectronics, photocell,
photography,
I. INTRODUCTION
2015 has been appointed the International Year of
Light and Light-based Technologies by the
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) [1]. Even if this comes 150 years
after the publication of A Dynamical Theory of the
Electromagnetic Field in 1865 by James Clerk Maxwell,
UNESCO had not in mind the groundbreaking work of
Maxwell of the electromagnetic waves and light. Instead, they
has looked one thousand years back in history, to a time when
Muslim science peaked, a time when the seeds of the modern
knowledge on light were laid by Iraqi polymath and
philosopher ‫أبو علي الحسن بن الحسن بن الھيثم‬, (Ibn al-Haytham,
Latinized as Alhazen, 965–1039). In fact, al-Haytham, besides
studying astronomy, mathematics and meteorology, and
exploring the scientific method six centuries before Galileo
Galilei, developed seminal researches on optics and vision.
His over 200 books (partially survived) include a treatise on
optics, namely the seven volumes ‫( كتاب المناظر‬Kitab al-
Manazir, i.e. Book of Optics), written between 1011 and 1021
[2]. This book set the transition between ancient and modern
optics and light science.
This article tracks the history of the relationship between
man and light. It describes how the knowledge on light
Submitted 0n August 04, 2015.
This work was supported by the University of Padua, Italy, within its 2015
institutional research program.
Massimo Guarnieri is with the Department of Industrial Engineering,
University of Padua, Italy (e-mail: Massimo.guarnieri@unipd.it).
1
developed in time since ancient times, taking account of the
early light technologies, up to the modern theories stemmed
by the quantum revolution of the twentieth century (Section
II). It then deals with a fundamental use of light throughout all
mankind history, lighting (Section III) with special emphasis
to electric lighting (Section IV). Finally it outlines the
technologies of light which have flourished in more recent
times, those related to information and optoelectronics, which
so deeply characterize the society in which we live (section
V).
II. THE LONG PATH TOWARD MODERN THEORIES
A. Light and vision in the ancient world
The very first man who wrote on light, as far as we know,
was the Chinese scholar and philosopher Mozi (
, Mo Tzu,
ca. 470 BC – ca. 391 BCE) who reported on the camera
obscura (Latin for dark chamber) affirming that light travels
along straight lines [3]. Almost at the same time, in the fourth
century BCE, Greek philosophers Empedocles and Plato (but
possibly also the Pythagoreans in the fifth century BCE),
argued on light, investigating not its nature, but rather the
nature of vision [4]. They supported the emission theory,
which assumed that vision gushes from the rays emitted by
eyes. The first systematic investigation on light, based on this
conjecture, was reported in Ὀπτικά (Optica, i.e. Optics)
written by mathematician Euclid in the third century BCE [5].
The opposing intromission theory, that vision is produced by
rays hitting the eyes, was proposed by Aristotle (fourth
century BCE) and claimed later by the Roman scholar
Lucretius (first century BCE). Aristotle, as other Greek and
Roman scholars, knew the principle of the camera oscura that
he used in sun-eclipse observations. Aeneas Tacticus, a
contemporary of Aristotle, writing on the art of war, described
a vision-related system for military communications, the so-
called hydraulic telegraph, for transmitting pre-defined
messages at a distance. Another light technology known since
that time consisted of burning mirrors (typically made of
bronze). They are traditional attributed to Archimedes, who is
supposed to have used them to destroy the Roman triremes
during the siege of Syracuse (Sicily) in 214–212 BCE (Fig. 1),
but actually they were known in earlier times, e.g. by
Theophrastus some 90 years before [6].
The invention of transparent glass by glassblowing in
Roman Syria around 20 BCE was a major technological
breakthrough that quickly spread across the empire, providing
a new cheap material flanking terracotta for the production of
housewares [7]. But it also drew the attention of Greek-Roman
scholars who started experimenting with the optical effects
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Fig. 1. Artist’s view of Archimedes of Syracuse (Sicily) operating his
burning mirrors against Roman triremes during the siege of his city laid by
consul Marcus Claudius Marcellus, at the time of the Second Punic War
(214–2 BCE).
that such glass could provide. In the first century AD, both
Pliny the Elder (23–79) and Seneca the Younger (3 BCE–65)
described the magnifying effect of a glass globe filled with
water, Strabo (63 BCE–24) studied the refraction of sunlight
produced by atmospheric water vapor, and Heron of
Alexandria (c.10–c.70) developed his reflection laws. One
century later Claudius Ptolemy (90–168) provided a deeper
analysis on reflection and refraction, correctly measuring the
refraction angle of light in passing from air to water, which he
reported in Οπτικὴ πραγματεία (Optikè pragmateía, i.e.
Optics’ questions, now known as Ptolemy’s Optics) [8]. He
was also the first to describe the persistence of vision, an
effect at the basis of the perception of motion exploited by the
cinema eighteenth centuries later. However, at the time of
Ptolemy optical technology was still too rudimentary to
provide any practical instrument, and astronomical analyses
still relied on naked-eye observations. So did Ptolemy himself
when he elaborated his eponymous geocentric cosmological
model that he described in the Μαθηματικὴ Σύνταξις
(Mathēmatikē Syntaxis, i.e. Mathematical Treatise, later
renamed Ἡ Μεγάλη Σύνταξις – Megálē Syntaxis, i.e. The
Great Treatise –, which eventually became the Almagest, from
Arabic ‫ – المجسطي‬al-majisṭī). This theory remained
uncontested for more than 1200 years, until Copernican
Revolution. Together with the physician Claudius Galenus
(129–216), Ptolemy sustained the emission theory of vision,
and the authoritativeness of these two prominent scholars
maintained this belief for almost a thousand years.
B. Al-Haytham’s contribution and legacy
Building on classic theories, al-Haytham provided a major
step ahead, boosting optics into a modern science at the
beginning of the eleventh century AD. He demonstrated that
light travels along straight lines, studied reflection and
refraction in depth and proposed an advanced model of vision,
based on perpendicularly incident rays. To support such
investigations, he built a pinhole camera obscura, explaining
its operation, and he ground lenses and curved mirrors, the
2
very early ones of which we have notice. He geometrically
resolved the so-called Alhazen’s problem (“given a light
source and a spherical mirror, find the point on the mirror
where the light will be reflected to the eye of an observer” – it
was originally proposed as a geometry problem by Ptolemy in
150 AD and the analytical solution of the corresponding
fourth-degree equation was found only in 1997 by P. M.
Neumann [9]). Al-Haytham’s book inspired later Islamic
scientists, and, after a Latin translation of the twelfth century,
it was influential to Western science, too. Building on it, the
German Dominican friar Theodoric of Freiberg (c.1250–
c.1310), around 1300, executed very early optics experiments
in Europe, with glass globes filled with water which simulated
water droplets suspended in the air, after which he could
correctly attribute the shape and colors of the rainbow to the
refraction of sunlight in raindrops [10]. Similar results were
achieved at the same time by Persian Kamāl al-Dīn al-Fārisī
(1267–1319). Al-Haytham’s book also promoted the invention
of eyeglasses for presbyopia, made with convex lenses, in
northern Italy around 1290 (Fig. 2). At the beginning of the
fourteenth century, when European medieval technology was
emerging and Venice was taking the leadership of
glassblowing, within the city-state the production of such
glasses was perfected and developed [11], producing a main
social impact because they allowed the extension of
productive life of elder people. In the same century Venice
started producing the early European glass mirrors and
transparent glass windows. Eyeglasses with concave lenses,
for myopia, were introduced in the fifteenth century by the
German clergyman and scientist Nikolaus von Kues Krebs
(Nicholas of Cusa, 1401-1464), one of the major scholars of
the time.
Over the centuries, al-Haytham’s book inspired the
investigations on vision and on the camera obscura of
scholars as English Roger Bacon (c.1214–1292), Italian
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), German Albrecht Dürer
Fig. 2: First depiction of glasses, representing Cardinal Hugh of Provence.
Detail of the portrait fresco by Tommaso da Modena in the Dominican
Chapter of the church of St. Nicholas in Treviso (Italy), 1352.
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Fig. 3. The camera obscura sketched by Leonardo da Vinci in Codex
Atlanticus (1515), preserved in Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan (Italy).
(1471–1528), Dutch Gemma Frisius (1508–1555) (Fig. 3). In
the fifteenth century, the masters of Italian Renaissance
Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446), Leon Battista Alberti (1404
–1472) and Piero della Francesca (1415–1492) studied vision
on scientific basis, defining the laws of perspective which
allow the two-dimensional representation of a three-
dimensional space. It was instrumental not only to figurative
art, but also to the technical representation of machines. A
major step haead came from Italian polymath Giambattista
della Porta (1535–1615), who built the first camera obscura
provided with a biconvex lens in place of the pinhole. Della
Porta’s book Magia Naturalis (Natural Magic, 1558) made
popular this device that became a common tool of many artists
for achieving precise pictorial compositions. Most likely they
included Dutch master Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675) (Fig.
4) and Italian Giovanni Antonio Canal (Canaletto, 1697–
1768), just to name only two.
C. Enlightened by the Scientific Revolution
Al-Haytham’s Book of Optics had a much deeper influence
Fig. 4. Officer and Laughing Girl by Johannes Vermeer (ca 1660). Art critics
have argued that the exceptional accuracy of proportions has been achieved
with the camera obscura.
3
Fig. 5. Cover page of Ibn al-Haytham’s Book of Optics. First printed edition,
by Friedrich Risner (1572).
on Western science and technology after the widespread
diffusion of its printed edition, published by the German
mathematician Friedrich Risner (c.1533–1580) in 1572 (Fig.
5) [12]. It was the time of the Scientific Revolution, and
researches on optics had a major boost in a sort of
international effort. Scientists like Johannes Kepler (1571–
1630) of Germany, René Descartes (1596–1650) of France,
Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) of the Netherlands, and
Johann Zahn (1641–1707) of Germany studied the printed
edition of al-Haytham’s book. At that time the telescope and
the microscope were invented, resorting to proper
combinations of lenses, and early theories on the nature light
were proposed. It was by using one of those early telescopes
that Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) revolutionized astronomy
starting in 1609 [13]. And it was thanks to those early
microscopes that the way was paved to the investigation of the
extremely small world. After experiments with prisms, Isaac
Newton (1642–1727) discovered the spectrum of sunlight in
1666 and developed a corpuscular theory of light that gained
wide acceptance. After investigating the chromatic aberration
of lenses, he invented the reflecting telescope (1668), first
reporting his results in 1672, and finally publishing them in
Opticks in 1704 [14]. Building on Galileo’s discovery of
Jupiter’s satellites (the Galilean Moons), Danish astronomer
Ole Christensen Rømer (1644–1710) in 1676 discovered that
the speed of light is finite, by observing the apparently
different durations of the eclipses of Io, Jupiter’s inner
satellite, depending on the earth’s position along its
revolutionary motion around the Sun [15]. Opposing
Newton’s theory of light, in 1678 Christiaan Huygens (1629–
1695) began to develop the first wave theory on the
propagation of light (conjecturing longitudinal elastic waves)
and, working on Rømer’s data, estimated its speed at 212,000
km/s [16]. It was an astonishing result not fully accepted for
some fifty years. And it was also a fairly good estimation, if
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we consider the instrumentation then available. However, as
early as 1727 the English Astronomer Royal James Bradley
1693–1762) used stellar aberration to deduce a much better
value of the speed of light at 304,000 km/s [17]. In 1801, light
interference observed by Thomas Young (1773–1829)
vindicated Huygens’ wave theory and Newton’s corpuscular
theory was put aside [18]. A few years later, in 1809, Jean-
Baptiste Delambre (1749–1822), the French astronomer who
had measured the Earth’s meridian for defining the meter,
resorted to astronomical measurements to achieve an even
better value of the speed of light at 300,000 km/s.
D. Nineteenth century: blossoming of modern science
The technological and scientific advancements of the
nineteenth century opened the way to terrestrial measurement
of the speed of light. Armand-Hippolyte-Louis Fizeau (1819–
1896) was a fine experimenter who, in 1849, developed an
optomechanical method consisting of a toothed wheel and a
mirror placed 8.633 km apart from it. He sent a beam of light
through the gap between the wheel teeth and increased the
wheel rotation speed until he could see the light through the
next gap position. Fizeau could thus calculate a speed of light
of 313,300 km/s. The following year, he also measured the
speed of light in water, with a similar device. Another French
physicist, Jean Bernard Léon Foucault (1819–1868), in 1862,
used the rotating mirror, still an optomechanical method, to
obtain 298,000 km/s [19].
At the same time, the research on electromagnetic theory
advanced. In 1856, German physicist Wilhelm Eduard Weber
(1804–1891) discovered that the ratio between the values of
the unit of the electrical charge in the electromagnetic and
electrostatic systems, the two measurement systems then used
(corresponding to 1/√ε0μ0 in the not-yet born International
System of Units) was close to the speed of light measured by
Fizeau seven years earlier. The following year, another
Fig. 6. Cover page of James C. Maxwell’s A Treatise on Electricity and
Magnetism, published in 1873.
4
German, Gustav Robert Kirchhoff (1824–1887), deduced the
second-order partial differential equation of the
electromagnetic propagation in a telegraph line (the
telegrapher equation, indeed already obtained in 1854 by
William Thomson while laying the submarine telegraph cables
[20]), and computed that in a non-dissipative line an electrical
signal propagates at the speed of light. These results were the
basis of James Clerk Maxwell’s (1831–1879) analyses. With
the aim of mathematizing Faraday’s lines of force, in 1862 he
started developing his groundbreaking theory, and arrived at
publishing A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field
in 1865 [21]. In it, he introduced a truly original concept, the
displacement current, in order to provide soundness to
Ampere’s law in dynamic conditions. He then combined it
with Faraday’s law of induction, deducing that they merge
into wave equations travelling at the same speed as light. Two
years later, Danish physicist Ludvig Valentin Lorenz (1829–
1891) obtained similar deductions and consistent results.
Maxwell reordered and completed his model in his
masterpiece A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism,
published in 1873 (Fig. 6) [22]. His achievements were so
advanced that at the beginning most physicists rejected them,
regarding his theory as mere freak mathematical occurrence.
But there was a handful of enthusiastic young pioneers who
were fascinated by the waves of Maxwell, who were later
dubbed the Maxwellians: George Francis FitzGerald (1851–
1901), Oliver Lodge (1851–1901), Oliver Heaviside (1850–
1925) and, above all, Heinrich Hertz (1857–1894). In 1887,
Hertz performed one of the most celebrated experiments in the
history of physics: Resorting to an oscillating circuit
(conceived by FitzGerald) that included a high-frequency (50
MHz) oscillator-transmitter, he demonstrated with great
accuracy and beyond any reasonable doubt the existence of
electromagnetic waves, as predicted by Maxwell [23].
Unfortunately the Scot could not enjoy his triumph: he had
passed away eight years before.
E. Twentieth century: quantum revolution
Maxwell and Hertz’s achievements paved the way to new
scientific and technological developments, starting with
wireless transmission, which appeared just eight years later,
and also triggered new researches in physics, thus pushing
science into the twentieth century revolution. Five years after
Max Planck’s (1858–1947) breakthrough of the energy
quanta, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) came out with his annus
mirabilis in 1905, in which he published his celebrated four
papers in Annalen der Physik, each a milestone in theoretical
physics, including the special relativity and E = mc2. In the
first of them, Über einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des
Lichtes betreffenden heuristischen Gesichtspunkt (On a
Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and
Transformation of Light [24]), Einstein, justifying Planck’s
results, deduced that light consists of discrete quantized
packets of energy and enunciated the law of the photoelectric
effect. Also this theory was initially hardly accepted, until
Robert Millikan’s (1868–1953) experimental confirmation, in
1914 [25]. Ultimately Einstein won the 1921 Nobel Prize in
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physics in 1921 for the photoelectric effect and Millikan the
1923 Nobel Prize for its experimental demonstration (and for
his work on the elementary charge). It is interesting to note
that Heinrich Hertz had already observed the photoelectric
effect in 1887, but he missed to continue researching in this
direction and moved to electromagnetic waves. The name
photon for this quantum was accepted after that Arthur
Compton (1892–1962) used it in 1928. A further major step
ahead in theoretical physics came in 1948, when Sin-Itiro
Tomonaga (1906–1979), Julian S. Schwinger (1918–1994)
and Richard P. Feynman (1918–1988) came out with their
independent but consistent models of quantum
electrodynamics, that describs in quantum form the
electromagnetic interactions between subatomic electrons and
photons (i.e. between matter and light) [27]. For their work
they shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in physics.
III. LIGHT FOR LIGHTING
A. Illuminating the darkness
Long before the development of the first investigations on
light, man had learned how to manage it to improve his life.
Far back in the Stone Age, 1.5–0.5 million years ago, Homo
erectus, an ancient progenitor of modern man, was able to
conserve fire and use it in some ways, including protection
from cold and predators and lighting the darkness of the night,
thus promoting socialization among the individuals gathered
around it [28]. Around 100–50 thousands years ago, Homo
sapiens was able of starting fire at will. Much later, the light
of oil lamps and candles illuminated dwellings and palaces of
ancient and classical civilizations, allowing a much richer
social life after dusk [29]. For thousands of years the only
sources for lighting the dark of night remained bonfires,
candles and lamps fed with fuels such as olive oil, seed oil,
beeswax and animal oil (with possibly the only exception of
natural gas, carried indoor through bamboo piping, in
restricted areas of China about 1,700 years ago [30]). Whale
oil became a lucrative fuel from the 16th century, after
ruthless whaling was started in the northern Atlantic by
European nations, often in harsh competition [31].
B. Gas lighting
At the end of the eighteenth century, when the industrial
revolution was booming, coal gas, a by-product of coke
manufacturing, opened the door to the development of
industrial lighting technology. The first experimental gas-light
plant, installed by professor Jean-Pierre Minkelers (1748–
1824) in his laboratory at the Collège du Faucon of the
University of Leuven in 1784, was followed by
experimentations with wood gas by Philippe Lebon (1767–
1804) in France between 1792 and 1801, but his
demonstrations did not capture the attention of the
revolutionary government, which was more interested in
warfare technologies. One of these was the optical telegraph
invented by Claude Chappe (1763–1805) in 1792, that
consisted of arrays of towers each receiving and retransmitting
the message by means of a signaling device dubbed
5
Fig. 7. A satirical cartoon showing passengers marveling at the early public
gas lighting in London (1807), attests the sensation produced by the system.
semaphore (from the Greek roots σῆμα – sema, i.e. sign – and
φωρος – phoros, i.e. bearer). It was the first practical
telecommunication system of modern times and a strategic
advantage for revolutionary France.
William Murdoch (1754–1839) brought the idea of gas light
to England and used coke gas in 1792 to light his house and in
1802, together with Samuel Clegg (1781–1861), the Boulton-
Watt foundry where they worked. Two years later, Fredrick
Winsor, a German-born Englishman (originally Winzer,
1763–1830) installed in the Lyceum Theatre, London, the first
gas lighting of a public building [32]. The system became
public in 1807, with the plant installed in Pall Mall, central
London, by Winsor (Fig. 7). The first commercial lighting
network was installed in London by the company of Winsor
and Clegg in 1814. Designed on the model of water supply, it
featured a centralized large-scale coal-gas generator and pipe
distribution to the consumers, and soon piping spread to 42
km. In a matter of a few decades, commercial and public gas
lighting boomed in many cities in Europe (France, Belgium,
Germany, Russia, ...) and America, because of its lower cost
compared to oil lamps and candles. The savings was about
75% and, even if lamps could provide a feeble light (15
candles or less), they made the city streets much safer at night
and allowed nightlife and social and cultural events to
flourish. The economic impact consisted of much longer work
hours in offices and factories in wintertime, resulting in
increased production. On the other hand, in spite of various
technological improvements, some risks of explosion (due to
the piping technology of the time) and of toxicity from
combustion products in indoor use persisted. Gas grids were
highly profitable in densely populated areas where many
consumers could be supplied with relatively short piping. In
rural areas and small towns, oil lamps and more expensive
candles, remained the only viable sources of light, and whale
oil was still vital in illuminating those dwellings and
workshops.
C. Kerosene
Following the invention of the processes to derive kerosene
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Fig. 8. Oil derricks in the Baku field (Azerbaijan) drilled by Branobel, the
Company of the Nobel brothers (end of the nineteenth century). The
extension suggests the size of the economic enterprise, devoted to the
production of kerosene for lighting.
from petroleum in 1853–1855 and early successful drillings in
the period 1846–1859 in several areas (Baku in Azerbaijan,
Galicia in Poland, Hannover in Germany, Ontario in Canada,
France, Romania, Titusville in Pennsylvania, …), the industry
of crude-oil extraction quickly grew [33]. By 1874,
Pennsylvanian production alone had reached 10 million of
360-pound barrels, yet the main world producer was the area
of Baku. It was at that time, in 1870, that John Davison
Rockefeller (1839–1937) and partners founded Standard Oil.
Thanks to the rapidly expanding market and unconventional
management methods, in a matter of few years he became the
richest man in the world. Of course, he was not the only one.
Also the Nobel brothers, who drilled in Baku and produced
kerosene by continuous cracking with their Branobel
Company, amassed a fortune (Fig. 8). This success came from
substituting whale oil with cheaper kerosene for lighting, not
from gasoline that was then too dangerous a by-product and
was usually released in rivers. In fact, there was yet almost no
demand for it since the internal combustion engine had not yet
come to industrial reality.
IV. ELECTRIC LIGHTING
A. Arc lighting
If coal gas and kerosene, the lighting fuel which first
emerged the 19th century, stemmed from chemistry, it was
electricity, the other technology that characterized the second
industrial revolution, that attacked their domain in the third
quarter of the century. The possibility of producing light by a
persistent electric arc was an immediate outcome of the
invention of the electrochemical cell by Italian Alessandro
Volta (1745–1827) in 1800 [34,35]. In fact, Russian physicist
Vasilij Vladimirovič Petrov (1761–1834) produced the first
persistent arc in 1802 by means of the largest battery then
existing, made of 4,200 cells, and the celebrated English
chemist Humphry Davy (1778–1829) gave its first public
demonstration in 1809 with a huge stack of 2,000 cells that
6
Fig. 9. Arc lamp with gears for automatic carbon regulation (ca 1860) and
much simpler Yablochkov candle (1876).
could produce a 10-cm arc. But it took some decades to
develop a viable technology. An arc lamp consisted of two
carbon electrodes aligned and put in touch to establish the
electric current and then detached at a proper distance to
create the arc. A very intense light was obtained, together with
a strong heat that caused the erosion of the two electrodes. The
consequent increase in the gap distance had to be gradually
compensated for in order to avoid stretching and extinguishing
the arc. In 1845, the Englishman Thomas Wright patented the
fist arc lamp provided with a gear for the automatic regulation
of the distance between carbons (Fig. 9). Improved models
were developed by William Staite in the UK in 1846–1853,
V.E.M. Serrin in France in 1858, Charles F. Brush (1849–
1929) in the US in 1877, and František Křižík (1847–1941) in
Bohemia in 1881, among others. In 1846, the Opera theatre in
Paris was the first public building equipped with electric
lighting from arc lamps, which were powered by a battery of
360 relatively cheap zinc-carbon cells, the model invented by
the great German chemist Robert Bunsen (1811–1899) in
1841. However, the high level of power needed by arc lamps
made their supply with disposable electrochemical cells very
too expensive. Use prospects changed after the mid of the
century, when effective electromechanical generators came
available [36]. In 1858, Frederick Hale Holmes (1830–1875)
put into service the first electric lighthouse at South Foreland,
near Dover (UK) on the suggestion of Michael Faraday. Its arc
lamp was powered by a 36-magnet generator capable of 1.5
kW at 600 rpm (derived from an early Alliance alternator)
powered by a steam engine and equipped with a rectifier
device. Though not completely reliable and poorly efficient, it
was one of the first electromechanical generators capable of
practical operation supplying a relatively high power. On this
model, several other lighthouses were electrified.
In the 1870s, companies such as Siemens (Germany, 1867),
Gramme (France, 1869) and Brush (US, 1878) started
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Fig. 10. The sensational lighting of Avenue de l’Opéra in Paris by means of
Yablochkov candles (1878).
producing more efficient dynamos, capable of supplying
cheap electric power. France was the first nation to take the
path, in 1875, when a factory in Mulhouse (Alsace) was
illuminated with four Serrin arc lamps powered by four
Gramme dynamos and a chocolate factory in Noisiel-sur-
Marne was provided with a similar equipment [37]. Other
French factories soon followed, while the Gare du Nord and
the Grands Magasins in Paris were the first public buildings
illuminated with arc lamps powered by Gramme dynamos. In
1876, while arc light was booming, Pawel Yablochkov
Nikolayevich (1847–1894), a Russian telegraph engineer just
arrived in Paris, developed an arc lamp that operated at low
current (about 9 amps, half that of previous models), the
Yablochkov candle [38]. Its design featured two parallel
electrodes set side by side, so as to maintain their distance
while consuming, with no need of an automatic adjustment
(Fig. 9). In order to improve its performance, Gramme
developed an efficient alternator in 1878, whose alternating
current ensured the equal consumption of the two carbon
electrodes. The same year, the Grands Magasins du Louvre in
Paris was supplied with eight Yablochkov candles powered by
a Gramme alternator and similar systems were implemented in
Avenue de l’Opéra and the Place de l’Opéra on the occasion
of the Paris Exposition of 1878 (Fig. 10). Simple and
economical to produce, the Yablochkov candle was the first
arc lamp to be widely used in Europe. It brought electric
lighting to the general public and increased the demand for
electromechanical generators. In Britain, arc lamps based on
French technology began to spread in 1878. Systems with
Yablochkov candles were placed in service in London’s West
India Dock, Billingsgate Market, Holburn Viaduct and the
Thames Embankment. The first electric street lighting system
was put into service in Godalming (UK) by Siemens in 1881.
It was powered by a generator driven by a water wheel and
was soon replicated in Brighton (UK). The first American arc-
light system was installed in the Wanamaker department store,
Philadelphia, in 1878 by Charles Francis Brush (1849–1929),
who had started to develop his system from European
technology (devices of Gramme, Pacinotti and Yablochkov).
One year later, the same Brush put into operation in San
7
Francisco the first commercial system that sold electric
lighting from arc lamps to several customers, and, by 1881,
the main US cities (New York, Boston, Philadelphia,
Baltimore, Montreal, Buffalo, San Francisco, Cleveland, …)
were equipped with public lighting systems with arc lamps,
supplied mainly by Brush [39]. In subsequent years, arc-light
installations spread in Europe and in America. In order to
exploit the blooming market, the American Electric Company
was founded by British-born American electrician Elihu
Thomson (1853–1937) and Edward J. Houston (1847-1914) in
1880 (Thomson-Huston Electric Company from 1883).
B. Incandescent bulbs
Nevertheless, arc lamps were prone to a major limitation.
Their harsh light was successful in the open air (parks,
squares, streets, …) and in large buildings (mills, factories,
large stores, churches, hotels, depots, stations, …), but
completely unsuitable for offices and dwellings, where they
were unable to menace gas light. A potential solution for such
uses was supposed to stem from the effect experimented by
Humphry Davy in 1801, namely the incandescence produced
by the electric current flowing in a platinum strip, another
early outcome of the electrochemical cell. But all attempts to
produce a practical incandescent lamp, including the first
patent registered by Irish politician Frederick De Moleyns
(1804–1854) in 1841, remained frustrated for several years.
The filaments quickly caught fire causing a very short duration
of the lamps. Technology develops through combinations and
occasional mutations, introduced by stochastic external
factors, in a process that resembles biological evolution [40],
and this is what happened with incandescent lighting. In this
case, the evolutionary factor consisted of the mercurial air
pump invented by German chemist Hermann Sprengel (1834–
1906) in 1865, a simple and robust device capable of reducing
the pressure in a chamber to one millionth of an atmosphere,
thus eliminating almost all the oxygen responsible for the
combustion, from the glass bulbs where filaments were
housed. The search for good bulbs gained new impetus and,
by the late 1870s, early successes occurred. Englishman
Joseph Wilson Swan (1828–1914), who had been researching
incandescent lighting since 1848, made a viable bulb with a
carbon filament capable of several hours of operation for the
first time in 1878. Soon after, another Englishman, St. George
Lane-Fox (1856–1932), and Hiram S. Maxim (1840–1916), an
American who lived in the UK from 1881, also produced their
owns bulbs. And so did Thomas A. Edison (1847–1931), of
course, who tested an incredible number of filaments in his
Menlo Park Laboratory (more than 6,000, including beard
hairs), arriving to produce a bulb lasting 14 hours before
burning in 1879 and a much more durable model (1,200 h)
based on a carbonized bamboo fiber in 1880 (Fig. 11). The
bulbs of these four inventors were presented and compared at
the 1881 International Exhibition of Electricity in Paris. More
bulbs were developed in the following years, including the
very efficient and durable carbon/platinum bulb made by
Italian Alessandro Cruto (1847–1908) in 1880. Soon, in 1878–
1879, Swan used his bulbs to light his house in Gateshead-on-
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Fig. 11. A series of Edison’s early incandescent bulbs (ca 1890).

Tyne and the residence of Lord Armstrong, a wealthy

industrialist of Northumberland, powering it with the first Fig. 12. The unforgettable night skiline of New York with the twin towers,
British hydro-generator, and installed other plants soon after. adorned with countless lights (ca. 2000).
In 1881, 1,194 Swan’s lamps made the Savoy Theatre in
Arturo Malignani (1865–1939), that allowed obtaining
London the first public building with incandescent lighting.
economic bulbs lasting 800 hours. Major advancements to
Likewise, Edison used his own bulbs to light the residence on
incandescent light came with the tungsten filament bulb, first
5th Avenue, New York City, of John Pierpont Morgan, who
patented in 1904 by Hungarian Sándor Just (1874–1937) and
was enthusiastically ready to back Edison’s enterprise. We
Croatian Franjo Hanaman (1878–1941) and marketed by a
now tend to forget all other inventors and deem Edison as the
Hungarian company that same year. A similar filament was
sole inventor of the incandescent bulb. The reason is that he
obtained by William David Coolidge (1873–1975) in 1907
made a decisive step ahead. At that time, each electric lighting
[43], whereas the inert-gas bulb (nitrogen first, argon later)
plant, whether public or private, had its own generator and
was invented by Irwing Langmuir (1881–1957) in 1913. Both
whoever wanted the electric lighting had to buy his own
these American engineers worked at GE and their innovations
power station. Edison had in mind to attack the market of gas
ensured a dramatic increase in incandescent bulb efficiency
light, and, in order to succeed, he conceived of selling bulbs
and its definitive supremacy over gas light (with a net
and power, not power stations on a large scale (indeed
advantage for GE). Langmuir, left free to follow his interests
preceded by the 1879 Brush’s plant in San Francisco) [41].
in GE laboratory after that achievement, developed
Thus, after founding the Edison Electric Illuminating
fundamental research on surface chemistry, which owned him
Company backed by Morgan and other major Wall Street
the 1932 Nobel Prize in chemistry [44].
financiers in 1880, he invented the commercial distribution of
In the same decades, new electric lamps were born [45].
electricity from a centralized 110-V dc power station and
Peter Cooper Hewitt (1861–1921), another American
presented it at the 1881 Paris Exhibition. The idea was a
engineer, invented the mercury vapor lamp in 1901, which
tremendous success, starting with the early plants of Holborn
was widely exploited for industrial illumination, and French
Viaduct, London, (including 2,000 lamps) and Pearl Street,
chemist George Claude (1870–1960) created the neon
New York, (supplying 80 customers) of 1882. Edison stopped
fluorescent lamp in 1909. Neon signs soon became extremely
the litigation with Swan on invention priority, preferring to set
popular, particularly in the US, making Claude a wealthy man.
a commercial agreement with him for market exploitation in
An important patent on the illuminating fluorescent lamp was
1883 (indeed, not his only litigation regarding the
registered in Germany by Edmund Germer (1901–1987) in
incandescent bulb). The 1886–1891 War of Currents against
1926, and GE acquired its rights in 1939, when production
Westinghouse’s ac system was much harsher [42]. The latter
was started by some companies. In 1927, Hungarian physicist
was initially also intended for lighting and was extended to
and engineer Dénes Gabor (later a British citizen, 1900–1979),
power uses after commercial models of Tesla’s induction
at Siemens and Halske, serendipitously invented the high-
motor became available in 1891. Thanks to voltage changes
pressure mercury-vapor lamp, which, perfected by some
provided by transformers, it had the fundamental advantages
companies, in a few years spread in street lighting due to its
of much longer line extensions and more flexible operation
high efficiency, in spite of its low chromatic behavior. At that
than Edison’s dc system. When Edison’s competitor was
time, electrification had reached rural areas in Europe and in
prevailing, the wizard’s business talent came out with another
North America, allowing the definitive substitution of
masterstroke; he merged his electric company with Thomson-
kerosene lamps with electric light (Fig. 12).
Houston Electric Company, which was already producing ac
systems, creating the General Electric Company (GE). With
V. LIGHT-BASED INFORMATION
the same spirit, in 1898, he acquired rights on a highly
efficient evacuation method for mass production by mean of The advancement of science during the nineteenth century
the so-called getters, patented in 1896 by Italian inventor opened the door to light technologies, related to information
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Fig. 13. Daguerreotype of Louis Daguerre shot in 1844 by Jean-Baptiste
Sabatier-Blot.
instead of power, and also this evolution involved both
chemistry and electromagnetism.
A. Photography
The possibility of recording images created with the camera
obscura became viable when the developments of chemistry
provided certain photosensitive salts, notably thanks to
English polymath John Herschel (1792-1871). The first
photographic image was obtained in 1822 by Joseph Niépce
(Nicephore, 1765-1833) who in 1829 created a company with
another Frenchman, Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre (1787-
1851) [46]. The latter in 1831 produced a more advanced
photographic emulsion, based on iodized silver, and then
developed a final treatment with sodium chloride (1837) and
with sodium thiosulfate (1839) to fix the image. He thus
created a photography suitable for practical use that was
dubbed daguerreotype (Fig. 13). The word photography was
coined about at the same time, from the Greek roots φωτός
(photos, i.e. light), and γραφή (graphé, i.e. writing). The image
was produced on a glass plate where the photosensitive
emulsion was laid so that each image was unique, as in the
case of painted pictures. The first rudimentary emulsions
required very long exposures, even hours, and the quality of
the black-and-white images was poor, still they constituted a
revolutionary way of representing reality. In fact, the
daguerreotype was successfully presented at a joint meeting of
the Académie des Science and the Académie des Beaux-Arts
in France in 1839 and hailed as a sensational achievement. In
England Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) carried out similar
research, introducing the negative emulsion with the positive
printing that allowed producing multiple copies [47]. As a new
and powerful technology for representing the observable
reality, photography furthered a critical revision in visual arts,
directing them towards new forms of expression capable of
9
representing what was not transferable to photographic
images, which eventually evolved into revolutionary art
movements like impressionism, expressionism, cubism. In
1888, George Eastman (1854-1932) founded the Eastman
Kodak Company in the US for producing cameras and the
following year he patented the first photographic film, made
of a thin ribbon of celluloid (circa 0.2 mm) coated with a
photographic emulsion, which allowed to shot several images
in sequence, avoiding awkward glass plates. The photographic
film pushed photography into maturity and shortly thereafter
was used in the early movies, furthering the birth of cinema,
the most important visual art of the twentieth century, form the
cultural, social and economic point of view. At the end of the
nineteenth century emulsions required exposure as short as a
thousandth of a second, allowing snapshots and reportage
pictures. In 1900 the Kodak Brownie camera was marketed at
just one dollar ($28 of today). These products, which secured
the company a long monopolistic position, made photography
a mass product for leisure.
B. Photosensors
The electricity-related uses of light in information
processing and transmission started appearing at the turn of
the 20th century and eventually resulted in the technological
domain of photonics, namely photocells, LEDs, lasers, and
fiber optics. Nevertheless, the interaction between light end
electricity was discovered in the first decades the 19th century,
when electrochemistry was a frontier field, with many
scientists engaged in developing more and more advanced
cells [48]. Among them, French father and son Antoine-César
(1788–1878) and Alexandre-Edmond (1820–1891) Becquerel,
in 1839 were the first persons who observed electrochemical
effects produced by light in electrolytic solutions. The
discovery remained a mere curiosity until 1876, when British
William Grylls Adams (1836–1915) discovered that selenium
generates electricity when exposed to light. It was the first
solid material recognized to have photovoltaic properties and,
as such, it opened the door to unexpected technological
developments.
A few years after Adams’ discovery, in 1880, Alexander
Graham Bell (1847–1922), assisted by Charles Sumner
Tainter (1854–1940), used the light-sensitive property of
selenium to transmit sound over a beam of light, with what he
called the photophone, but with poor practical results in spite
of the four patents registered (Fig. 14) [49]. In 1883, American
Charles Edgar Fritts (1850–1903) covered a layer of selenium
covered with a thin film of gold, making the first solar cell that
reached the poor efficiency of less than 1% [50]. Useless for
power applications, it was regarded with indifference in
America, but in Europe its potential was acknowledge by the
father of German Elektrotechnik Werner von Siemens. One
year later, a young German engineering student, Paul Gottlieb
Nipkow (1860–1940), patented the Elektrisches Telescope,
namely the first rudimentary television system. It was based
on a rotating disc provided with a spiraling series of holes
(Nipkow disk), for scanning the images and on a selenium
photo-transducer for converting the light of the image slices
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Fig. 14. A. G. Bell’s photophone used the light-sensitive property of
selenium to transmit sound over a beam of light (1880).
into electrical signals [51]. It paved the way to the
development of the electromechanical television, pioneered by
Scottish John Logie Baird (1888–1946) about forty years later.
In 1888 Wilhelm Hallwachs (1859–1922), a young German
physicist assistant of Hertz, discovered that ultraviolet light
can produce a stronger photoelectric effect on conductors and
specifically on selenium (Hallwachs Effekt). It was after
results like these that a young Einstein was attracted to
investigate light quanta some years later. Among the several
physicists who researched on the photoelectric effects,
Germans Julius Elster (1854-1920) and Hans Friedrich Geitel
(1855-1923) observed in 1893 the resistance of a junction
varying with incident light, for which they are credited with
the invention of a viable photocell [52]. Families of photocells
have been produced since some decades later, exploiting the
photovoltaic and photoconductive properties of selenium,
notably light meters for cameras such as the high-level Super
Kodak Six-20 of 1938, that sold for $225 ($3,794 of today,
Fig. 15).
In the first decades of the 20th century, R&D on the electric
Fig. 15. The automatic Super Kodak Six-20 incorporated a selenium light
meter (1938).
10
Fig. 16. A 1950 model of the iconoscope, used in the electronic television for
converting images into electrical signals, invented by V. K. Zworykin in
1923.
effects of light started being used for signal production, and it
had a major boost from the development of television. The
first iconoscope, i.e. the electronic transducer of images into
electrical signals, was invented by Russian-born American
Vladimir K. Zworykin (1888–1982) in 1923 and eventually
led to RCA electronic television, about a decade later (Fig. 16)
[51]. The image dissector, an alternative video camera tube,
was conceived by German Max Dieckmann (1882–1960) and
Rudolf Hell (1901–2002) in 1925 and built by American Philo
Taylor Farnsworth (1906–1971) in 1927. Following his
interests on such tubes, Zworykin led a research team at RCA
(Albert Rose, Paul Weimer and Harold Law) to develop the
orthicon in 1939. It was an improved electronic tube that used
a photoemissive board for transducing images into electrical
signals. During World War Two, it was kept secret and used in
experimental bomb-guiding systems, but in peacetime it was
released for commercial use and replaced the iconoscope in
television cameras, because of its better sensitivity, which
allowed shooting in low lighting conditions.
In that same span of years, a different use of the
photoconductive properties of selenium was envisaged in the
US by Chester F. Carlson (1906–1968), with the invention of
the electrophotography, i.e. the dry copy process, in 1938, but
its development was very slow, not just because of war [53].
Only in 1959, building on Carlson’s idea, Haloid-Xerox (a
small company that eventually become Xerox Corporation)
produced Xerox 914 (from Greek ξερός – xeros – i.e. dry), the
first commercial dry copier.
The CCD (charge-coupled device), capable of converting
images into digital values instead of analog signals, was
invented at Bell Labs in 1969 by Willard Boyle (1924–2011)
and George Smith (1930), who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in
physics for this achievement [54]. In 1972 Michael Francis
Tompsett of Bell Labs designed and built the first ever video
camera with a solid-state CCD sensor and in 1975 Steven
Sasson (1950) of Kodak made the first digital still camera by
using a Fairchild 100 × 100 CCD. For a tragic twist of fate, it
was the digital camera born in Kodak to bring almost to the
bankruptcy the giant of photographic films. CCD are now
main components in countless professional and leisure digital
cameras and are also used in highly advanced astronomical
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instruments, as the Hubble Space Telescope and the Sloan
Digital Sky Survey.
C. LEDs
Photonics and optoelectronics do not consist only of
transducing light into electronic signals, but also of
generating, managing, and transmitting light-carried
information. The technologies upon which this is done are also
LEDs, lasers, and fiber optics.
LEDs have a much longer story than one can think, since
their principle was discovered by one of the wireless pioneers
in the early 20th century, British “captain” Herny J. Round
(1881–1966), an affiliate of Guglielmo Marconi, who in 1907
observed the electroluminescence of a silicon-carbide junction
[55]. The first theoretical interpretation was developed in 1922
by Russian Oleg V. Losev (1903–1942), who registered ten
patents on it [56]. Olev was an ingenious inventor who
anticipated solid-state electronics by two decades with his
devices. But his work went unnoticed in the Western world
and was forgotten after his death, occurred during the Battle of
Stalingrad. Several years later, American James R. Biard
(1931) and Nick Holonyak (1928) went in the same direction,
with much more success, thanks to different social, political
and economical circumstances. The former, a researcher at
Texas Instruments Inc., developed the first diode emitting
infrared (invisible) light in 1962. The latter, while working at
GE Research laboratory in that same year, made a diode
capable of emitting visible light, namely the first LED (light
emitting diode) suitable for practical use [57]. This was a red
LED and the yellow one was developed ten years later by M.
George Craford (1938), a former Holonyak’s co-worker. The
first high-brightness, high-efficiency LED, suitable for optical
fiber, was developed by Thomas P. Pearsall in 1976. Since
then, LEDs have gained an extraordinary success in a wide
range of applications from fiber optic transmitters, to signal
lights in electronic equipment and also as very efficient source
of white artificial lighting capable of replacing the glorious
incandescent bulb, in the last decade.
D. Lasers
The origin of laser dates back to 1952-3, when three
physicists, Charles H. Townes (1915–2015, he passed away in
January this year) of Columbia University in the US and
Nikolay G. Basov (1922–2001) and Alexander M. Prokhorov
(1916–2002) of Lebedev Physical Institute in the USSR,
independently contributed to the principle and construction of
the maser (microwaves amplification by stimulated emission
of radiations), which uses molecular activity (particularly of
ammonia) to amplify and emit microwaves exempt from noise
(because it works at temperatures close to absolute zero) [58].
These three scientists shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in physics
for that achievement (it was assigned after that the first lasers
were built). The idea of a maser working at visible frequencies
was proposed by Townes himself in 1958, but the step ahead
was done in 1960 by Theodore H. Maiman (1927–2007), an
American engineer working at Hughes Aircraft Company,
who succeeded in building the first commercial laser (light
11
Fig. 17. T. H. Maiman with the main components of the first laser built
around an artificial ruby crystal (1960).
amplification by stimulated emission of radiations), based on a
crystal of ruby and able of producing highly concentrated
beams of monochromatic light (Fig. 17) [59]. Amazingly, he
resorted to a simpler technology than maser. Two years later
Robert N. Hall (1919) of GE Research Laboratory
demonstrated the first semiconductor laser, in which the active
medium is a p-n junction instead of a crystal [60]. Simple,
reliable and much cheaper than Maiman’s device, it has found
wide use in an incredible number of applications (readers and
writers for optical discs, laser printers, optical fibers, industrial
processes, scanners, readers of bar codes, pointers, ...) as well
as in scientific research, astronomy, medical treatment,
security, military devices, etc. Laser’s fundamental role in
basic research systems is recent story. The first laser printer,
much faster than dot-matrix models, was developed by Gary
K. Starkweather (1938) at Xerox PARC in 1972 and in 1985
Canon put on the market the first laser copier.
E. Optical discs
The first optical disc, written and read by lasers for storing
analog video and audio contents, was produced in 1972, from
ideas independently conceived by American inventors David
Paul Gregg (1923–2001) and James Russel (1931) some years
before. It was put on the market as LaserDisc (with a diameter
of 30 cm) and other formats by MCA (USA), Philips (NL),
and Pioneer (J) in 1978-80 but it could never gain widespread
use (except in Southeast Asia), in spite of its superior audio
and video quality, because of its high costs. Philips and Sony
jointly complemented its technologies and concepts with
digital coding/decoding and digital processing of audio
signals, thus developing the compact disc (CD), with a
capacity of 700 MB in a diameter of 12 cm that since has
become a standard [61]. It was launched in 1982 for digital
audio recording, making rapidly obsolete the glorious vinyl
record. A further three years later, in 1985, Microsoft
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developed it into the CD-ROM, a device capable of storing repeaters every 100 km. Starting in 1992, a new revolution
digital data with a capacity much greater than magnetic disks. came with forth generation, based on optical amplification and
Developed into a number of subsequent formats (CD-R, CD- wavelength-division multiplexing, which allowed to double
RW, …) it revolutionized the market for removable storage performance every 6 months [65]. Today typical transmission
media and pushed computers into multimedia. 200 billion CDs speeds range between 10–40 Gbit/s and fibers capable of
had been sold worldwide by 2007. The video compact disc speeds greater by 1–2 orders of magnitude have been
(VCD, 800 MB), presented in 1993 by Philips, Sony, JVC and experimented since 2013. Optical fibers capable of such
Matsushita, was the first format for videos and quickly performance fed by laser sources and needing few repeaters
evolved into the DVD, jointly produced by Philips, Sony, located at a great distance have made possible broadband
Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995 [62]. With a capacity of 4.7 communication networks, supplanting telecommunication
GB, it can store an entire movie with many extra media, but it over copper wires, and much satellite communication. They
was superseded by the Blu-ray (12 cm, 25–50 GB), appeared allow advanced every-day internet services, such as video-on-
on the market in 2003 and capable of storing high definition demand, largely contributing to the creation of present
movies and videos. information society [66]. More progresses can come from the
new frontier of optical solitons, that is being explored since
F. Fiber optics
the early 1990s. In 1993 Masataka Nakawawa of Japanese
The canalization of light along a guide relies on the NTT transmitted a soliton in a 180⋅106-km optical fiber and
cancellation of refraction when a given angle of incidence is Linn Mollernauer of Bell Labs, transmitted 10 Gbit/s in a
exceeded, so that rays are only reflected by the walls of the 20,000-km fiber using a soliton [67].
guide, remaining confined inside it. Although this possibility
had been demonstrated in 1840, it took more than eighty years G. Holography
for developing the first pioneering applications. Thin glass Holography is a still different light technology. It produces
fibers capable of transmitting light with low attenuation (about photographic recording of a light field and displays a fully
1 db/m) were studied from 1952 by various researchers three-dimensional image, without the use of lenses. It was
including British physicist Harold H. Hopkins (1918–1994) invented in 1947 by Dénes Gabor (1900–1979, already cited
and Indian Narinder Singh Kapany (1926), a student at here for the high-pressure mercury-vapor lamp), who was then
Imperial College London, who coined the name “fiber optics” a researcher at British Thomson-Houston and won the 1971
in 1955 [8]. The first applications, with fibers as long as some Nobel Prize in physics for the invention of holography [68].
tens of centimeters, regarded optical reading and medical This technology has since found application in art (with early
endoscopy, initially for diagnostics. In fact, the first semi- exhibitions in 1968–70 and artworks by artists such as
flexible optical fiber was patented by Basil Hirschowitz Salvator Dalí), data storage (in holographic memories, which
(1925–2013) and co-workers at the University of Michigan store high-density data inside crystals or photopolymers),
and used in gastroscopy in 1956, while the first laparoscopic interferometry (for example in fluid flow analysis), sensors
surgeries where performed in the years 1975–1981 by J. C. and biosensors, security (in currencies, credit cards, passports,
Tarasconi in Brasil and Kurt Semm (1927–2003) in Germany.
The use of optical fibres in data transmission at a distance
was first envisaged by Japanese Jun-ichi Nishizawa (1926) in
1963 and the first of such fibers was realized by Manfred
Börner (1929–1996) in the Telefunken laboratories in 1965
[64]. One year later, Sino-British-American Charles Kuen Kao
(1933) with George A. Hockham (1938–2013) in the UK
defined the principles for attaining the very low attenuation
(below 20 db/km) needed for long distance communication.
Kao received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for such
achievements. That performance was reached and exceeded in
1970 by a research team of American glass maker Corning
Glass Works, who achieved 17 db/km and a few years later 4
db/km. Progress were astonishing in the following years, with
0.2 dB/km achieved in 1986. The first long (10 km) fiber-optic
communication line was tested in Long Beach, California in
April 1977 by General Telephone and Electronics (GTE), for
telephonic service, preceding AT&T by less than a month. It
operated at 6 Mbit/s, with signals generated by laser diodes
[9]. By 1987 fiber-optic lines operated at 1.7 Gbit/s, with
repeaters every 50 km. One year later the first transatlantic Fig. 18. Steve Jobs presenting an advanced holographic touch screen in 2011.
cable, a second-generation optical fiber, went into operation.
Third generation, in the late 1980s, operated at 2.5 Gbit/s with
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ID cards, …), and other fields (Fig. 18) [69].
H. From information to power
Some new power technologies have stemmed form light-
information technologies. Light-converters suitable for power
applications were developed after signal transducers, starting
with the pioneering work at Bell Labs of Russell Ohl (1898–
1987) in 1941 [70] and, more prominently, of Gerald L.
Pearson (1905–1987) in 1954, whose team, working under
William Shockley, developed the first photovoltaic cells
capable of generating appreciable levels of electricity [71].
Although initially the efficiency was very low (4.5%–6%), the
following improvements allowed producing the models used
by NASA to power satellites (since Vanguard in 1958 and
Explorer 6 in 1959) and interplanetary probes and they are still
now the main power source for such applications due to their
superior power-to-weight ratio. The initial space applications
drove the development of solar cells with higher efficiencies
and lower costs, thus paving the way to one of the most
important present-day renewable power sources, PV
conversion. Solar cell development, as well as lasers and
LEDs, have greatly benefitted of the theoretical researches on
heterostructures pioneered by Russian Zhores I. Alferov
(1930) and German-born American Herbert Kroemer (1928),
who were awarded the 2000 Nobel Prize in physics for these
studies [72]. Similarly to photocells, lasers have also been
developed into power applications, in industry, e.g. for
robotized precision cutting [73], and medicine, starting with
the first surgical laser developed at Bell Labs in 1967 [74].
VI. CONCLUSION
Our knowledge and the use we do of light have greatly
evolved in time, with a tremendous boost in the last two
centuries and this presentation has highlighted how light has
risen to a high importance in our life and society. If ancient
men managed it to light their dwellings at night, we have
learned how to use it to deeply improve our living habits and
work conditions. A real information revolution stemmed from
light in the last decades, involving so different technological
fields which form the optoelectronics and photonics domains.
We now use widely its applications for leisure and
entertainment in our free time, often without realizing that we
are making use of light. We are in a great debt to the scientists
and technicians who have promoted this evolution, some of
which have passes away in very recent times.
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Hydrogen Joint Technology Initiative (FCH JTI). He is a columnist and
Massimo Guarnieri (M’12) was born near editorial board member of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Magazine.
Venice, Italy, in 1955. He graduated with
honors in electrical engineering at Padua in
1979, received the diploma degree in Plasma
and Thermonuclear Fusion Research in 1982
and the PhD in electrical science in Rome in
1987. He became an ICS Member in 2008, an
IEEE Member in 2012 and a ECS Member in
2014. In 1982 he joined the CNR (Italian
National Council of Researches) and in 1983
the University of Padua, where he is full professor of electrical engineering
since 2000. Initially he centered his work on the analysis and design of large
electromagnetic devices for the thermonuclear fusion research experiments
Eta-Beta II and RFX. For the latter he worked in and eventually led the
Magnetic System Group, which designed the device’s major inductor systems
(diameter up to 8 m, 50 kA, 200 kV). He later centered his interests in the area
of numerical computation for electromagnetic and coupled problems. Since
ten years ago he is involved in the analysis, optimization and design of fuel
cells and electrochemical storage devices, including modeling and parameters
identification. He is also widely interested in history of technology and
science. His scientific production of nearly 200 items (nearly 100 indexed by
Scopus) includes papers in journals and in conference proceedings and several
textbooks. He chairs the Education & Profession Group of the AEIT-ASTRI
Italian Electrical Engineers Institution. He is the official representative of the
University of Padua in N.ERGHY, the European Union association
representing the universities and research institution in the Fuel Cell and

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