Most long-distance phone calls today -- cell phones notwithstanding -- involve transmitting voice and data by means of fiber optics, or more simply, through a glass fiber. You can go so far as to say that without optical fiber communications, the Internet as we know it today could not exist.

We take it all for granted, but we owe much of this luxury, if you want to call it that, to Peter Schultz. As a young scientist at Corning in the early 1970s, he co-invented the world's first practical glass optical fiber for telecommunications, now used worldwide. Schultz’s accomplishment takes on greater significance when you consider the path he took. As a teenager, he had no clue about glass, ceramics, or fiber optics, and he was the first in his family to even go to college. A few short years later, though, he found himself equipped with a Ph.D. and in the heady company of scientists making technical history.

The journey begins when the Brooklyn, New York-born Schultz attended Rutgers University. “When I was a freshman in the general engineering program, they had an orientation where you had a chance to visit each of the engineering disciplines and hear what they could do,” he recalls. “One I went to was ceramics, thinking it was all about beer mugs and ash trays and sanitary ware. To my surprise, I learned about a lot of the things they were doing in the field of rocketry at the time, developing ceramic nose cones and rocket nozzles for missiles. It looked intriguing. So I picked that as my major starting in my sophomore year. The more I learned about it, the more Interested I was and kept going.”

Fate would play a prominent role, as Schultz went through the ROTC program at Rutgers, and the Vietnam War was at full tilt. He expected to go in the Army after he graduated, but when he went to boot camp between his junior and senior years, he learned he had high blood pressure, which exempted him from service. Instead of going to boot camp, he came back to Rutgers.

That summer would prove the turning point of his career. The ceramics department hired him as a technician, and he worked for two professors. They were melting different kinds of glass, so they taught him how to melt glass, formulate materials, and look at the properties. This would lead him to specialize in glass technology in his senior year, and in 1964, he received a B.S. degree in ceramic engineering.


One of the professors Schultz worked for that summer, C.J. Phillips, inspired Schultz and encouraged him to think about graduate school. Schultz also had a mentor in John Koenig, chair of the ceramics department at Rutgers. Koenig helped Schultz get a National Science Foundation Fellowship to continue his studies there. This unusual opportunity allowed Schultz to earn his Ph.D. without earning his master’s degree, as part of a crash three-year program.

Yet a further impetus came from a third person, Norbert Kreidl, who, with Phillips, served as thesis advisor to Schultz. “What a wonderful scientist and exciting kind of renaissance man. He took me under his wing,” as Schultz tells it. Kreidl had just left a career at Bausch and Lomb in optics. “He was the one that really turned me on to the whole thing.” He told Schultz he could be a scientist. “I really had no idea. I was thinking I’m pretty lucky to be an engineer.”

After getting his PhD., Kreidl encouraged Schultz to go to Corning because it was the Mecca of glass technology and manufacturing. After seven years of college, Schultz says, “I felt like I had been in academia enough. I thought it would be interesting to get experience in the industrial world. I could always go back to academia if I wanted.” At the ripe old age of 24, he went to Corning as a starting scientist in 1967 at an annual salary of $14,500.

Corning was making tons of money selling television picture tubes at the time. “They gave me an opportunity to do exploratory research,” Schultz relates. They were using flame hydrolysis to make fused silica for things like mirrors and windows, and they wanted Schultz to find more uses for it.

Then came the break that would change Schultz’s life. He was approached by two physicists from a different department, Bob Mauer and Don Keck, who knew the world was trying to use fiber optics for laser communications, as the laser had just been developed a few years earlier. “I started to dabble with it. Over a period of three years, I tried different approaches and different materials and ended up finding a way to do it,” Schultz recalls. He used vapor deposition to make a pure glass and could make it in the geometries needed for telecommunications. “To everybody’s surprise, it actually had the right transmission. Nobody thought you could reach the transmission levels needed for communications.”

In more technical terms, Schultz discovered that germania-doped fused silica could be made by an outside vapor deposition process, thereby avoiding vaporization. It eliminated the need for post-draw heat treatment to lower optical attenuation that plagued the manufacture of titania-doped fibers. This discovery led to the practical design and manufacture of both multimode and singlemode fibers. “It was a long shot. That was a eureka. It ended up taking the company into a whole new world several years later,” he says.

Schultz says the work environment at Corning allowed all this to happen. “I look back on those years and I think how fortunate I was. A lot of it is the luck of timing, being in the right place at the right time.” In 2000, he would receive the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton for his invention.

But several things happened that caused Schultz to leave Corning in 1984 at the age of 40. He says, simply, “I thought I’d like to do something else. I had been pigeonholed by Corning, in a sense, as a scientist and an inventor.” A friend who had worked as a scientist at Bell Labs left there to start his own company to make fiber for communications and asked Schultz to join him. Here, he would gain experience in running a company that would propel the second phase of his career.

After working at that company for a few years, Schultz was approached by Hiraeus Tenevo, a technical glass manufacturer specializing in fiber optics and semiconductors, to work for them. They were a large family-owned German company with a U.S. division that made glass, and they needed a president to run it. “This seemed like the right fit” because it was a bigger company, Schultz says, so he took the job.

Schultz says he felt comfortable running a large company. “It was a technology company, and the big strength I had was that I knew the technology. A guy like me could do it because we were selling to companies like Intel, Applied Materials, and AT&T. I had the credentials that I could be believed, so I was able to really build our company.” When he took over, it was a $50-million company, and when he retired, it stood at $800 million. “So it was a good run.”

With that experience under his belt, Schultz retired in 2001to start yet another phase of his career. “I thought, I’m done running a big company,” he recalls. Now 64, he lives in Essex, New York, a small town in the Adirondacks near Lake Champlain, and enjoys hiking the 46 peaks in the range that tower more than 4000 feet high. He also has a home in St. Thomas of the Virgin Islands, where he sails and hangs out with friends.

But Schultz does more than play in his “retirement,” he says. “When the word went out that I was retiring, I was amazed at the kinds of offers I started to get out of the blue.” He serves on the board of three companies and consults for companies that hear about him by word of mouth or through a Google search.

That’s not all. He started a company called BioSensor with several Russian scientists to develop a fiber optic sensor that would measure blood sugar in diabetics non-invasively. He also works with an engineer in Israel on this and has arranged $1.5 million in angel financing. The concept has been demonstrated in their lab, and clinical trials are in progress. “We’re getting closer. We’ve gotten some pretty interesting results lately,” he reports. This means occasional trips to Russia to evaluate prototypes. “It’s such a tough project, a tough problem. So many people have worked on it that I’m reluctant to say we have an answer until I see conclusive evidence.”

Having gone from young scientist to business executive to entrepreneur, while enjoying a few fun hobbies, Schultz now has what he considers an ideal situation. “I have a pretty full plate. And I like it.” The world enjoys using the optical fiber he invented, and we may see more significant developments from him before it’s all over.

Progressive Engineer
Editor: Tom Gibson
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©2006 Progressive Engineer