In 1880, Alexander Graham Bell invented the "optical telephone".

In 1887, British scientist Charles Vernon Boys pulled the first optical fiber in his laboratory.

In 1938, Owens Illinois Glass Company of the United States and Nitto Textile Company of Japan began to produce long glass fibers.

In 1951, optical physicist Brian O'Brian proposed the concept of cladding.

In 1956, a student at the University of Michigan made the first glass-clad optical fiber by melting a low-index glass tube onto a high-index glass rod.

In 1960, Theodore Maiman showed the first laser. This sparked interest in optical communications, and lasers looked promising as a way to solve the problem of transmission bandwidth, and many labs started experiments.

In 1966, British-Chinese scholar Gao Kun pointed out the possibility and technical approach of using optical fiber for information transmission, and laid the foundation for modern optical communication - optical fiber communication.

In 1970, Corning Corporation of the United States successfully developed a silica fiber with a loss of 20dB/km.

In 1973, Bell Laboratories in the United States made even greater achievements, and the optical fiber loss was reduced to 2.5dB/km.

In 1976, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) reduced fiber loss to 0.47 dB/km (wavelength 1.2 μm).