Simply melting sand, which is mostly silica, will make glass, but that gritty stuff won’t get the kind of optical purity needed to ping light around the globe. So Corning makes its own pure silica.

Enter “optical fiber.” In 1964, researcher Charles Kao (now Sir Kao), while a PhD student in Harlow, England, posited that glass—a later generation of the glass tubes that had been used to ...

3D printing 1,000 times smaller than a grain of sand Microscopic image of a printed glass demonstration structure on tip of optical fiber. Credit: Lee-Lun Lai, et al ...