Advanced Optical Communication & Photonics

4th century BC

Ancient Greece used hydraulic telegraph semaphores for signalling at a distance

Hydraulic telegraph semaphores are recorded in Greece from the fourth century BC. They represent one of the earliest organised systems of visual communication over distance, establishing optical signalling as a practical capability millennia before electrical devices.

2nd century BC · over 2,000 years ago

China relayed military warnings along beacon tower chains

Garrisons along the northern frontier signalled troop movements and attacks using smoke by day and fire by night, passing a warning across vast distances far faster than any rider, an early state use of light as a communications medium.

1684 · 342 years ago

Robert Hooke outlined a design for visual telegraphy to the Royal Society

The British polymath Robert Hooke submitted a vivid and comprehensive outline of visual telegraphy to the Royal Society in 1684. His proposal foreshadowed the modern semaphore design that would be realised a century later.

1792 · around 230 years ago

France built the Chappe optical telegraph network

The French engineer Claude Chappe and his brothers opened the first working optical semaphore line in 1792, and the system grew to cover France with a network of 556 hilltop stations spanning some 4,800 kilometres. Chains of towers relayed coded messages by the positions of movable arms, letting the state pass messages across the country far faster than a horse could carry them, and the network carried military and national communications until the 1850s, demonstrating optical signalling at national scale.

19th century · 226 years ago

Maritime services adopted hand-held flag semaphore in place of mechanical shutter arms

During the nineteenth century semaphore signalling was widely taken up at sea, with hand-held flags replacing the mechanical arms used on land. This kept visual optical communication in routine operational use long after land-based networks declined.

1880 · 146 years ago

Optical semaphore systems were displaced by the electrical telegraph and went completely out of service

Popular from the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century, shutter semaphore networks could not compete with the electrical telegraph and ceased operation entirely by 1880. The retirement marked the end of mechanical visual telegraphy as a state communications capability.

February 1880 · 146 years ago

Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter invented the photophone, the first electrical optical communication device

Bell and his assistant Tainter invented the photophone on 19 February 1880 at Bell's laboratory in Washington, D.C. It was the earliest electrical device built to communicate using light, making it the direct ancestor of modern optical telecommunications.

21 June 1880 · 146 years ago

Alexander Graham Bell transmitted speech on a beam of light with the photophone

On 21 June 1880 Bell's assistant sent a wireless voice telephone message from the roof of the Franklin School to the window of Bell's laboratory in Washington, roughly 213 metres away. Sunlight reflected off a vibrating mirror carried the voice signal to the receiver, the first demonstration that speech could be carried a considerable distance on a beam of light and that light itself could be modulated to carry information.

December 1880 · 146 years ago

United States Patent Office issued the master patent for the photophone to Bell

U.S. patent 235,199, Apparatus for Signalling and Communicating, was granted in December 1880. The patent formalised the principles of optical signalling decades before they found practical application.

late 19th–early 20th century · 126 years ago

Armed forces deployed the heliograph for instantaneous long-distance optical signalling

The heliograph provided a simple but effective means of instantaneous optical communication over long distances in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It remained standard issue in the British and Australian armies until the 1960s and was used by the Pakistani army as late as 1975.

1960 · 66 years ago

Theodore Maiman built the first working laser

A ruby crystal device produced the first coherent, controllable beam of light, supplying the concentrated light source that every later optical communication system would depend on.

1966 · 60 years ago

Charles Kao proposed that glass fibre could carry telecommunications over long distances

Working at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories in England, the Shanghai-born engineer argued that impurities, not a fundamental physical limit, caused the high signal loss in existing glass fibre, opening the search for purer material.

• Charles Kao shared the Nobel Prize in Physics

1970 · 56 years ago

Corning Glass Works produced the first practical low-loss optical fibre

American researchers reduced signal loss in glass fibre below the threshold generally seen as necessary for practical telecommunications, turning optical fibre from a laboratory curiosity into an engineering prospect.

1979 · 47 years ago

Japan's Nippon Telegraph and Telephone produced fibre with loss close to the theoretical limit of glass

Researchers achieved attenuation near 0.2 decibels per kilometre at the 1.55-micron wavelength, a benchmark that shaped the wavelength choice for long-distance optical networks for decades afterward.

1980s · 46 years ago

Fibre-optic communication systems achieved popular worldwide usage

Fibre-optic communication systems, the practical successors to the photophone's principles, came into widespread global use from the 1980s. Their adoption transformed long-distance telecommunications capacity.

Early 2026 · 6 months ago

TSMC pushed its silicon photonics packaging platform toward production

The Taiwanese foundry advanced a packaging platform combining logic chips with optical engines in the same package, aimed at the optical interconnects that data centre and networking customers increasingly needed for faster, lower-power links.

Early 2026 · 6 months ago

China kept adding laser inter-satellite links to its broadband mega-constellations

Satellites launched for the Guowang and Qianfan constellations carried optical crosslinks intended to relay traffic directly between spacecraft rather than through ground stations alone, following an architecture Starlink had already put into service.

Spring 2026 · 4 months ago

Nvidia moved co-packaged silicon photonics toward volume shipment

Switch designs that integrate optical engines directly beside the switching silicon began reaching cloud providers, aimed at cutting the power and heat cost of moving data between the large processor clusters used to train artificial intelligence models.

Early 2025 · last year

Meta began building the Project Waterworth subsea cable system

The project was designed to run for tens of thousands of kilometres across the Atlantic, Indian Ocean and Pacific, linking the United States, India, Brazil and South Africa, and to avoid congested chokepoints such as the Red Sea and South China Sea.

Early 2025 · last year

Taiwan tightened protection of its subsea cables after repeated cuts

Following several incidents around the Matsu Islands linked to Chinese-owned vessels, authorities increased coastguard patrols, pursued prosecutions under revised law and examined satellite backup links to keep outlying islands connected if cables were cut again.

• Taiwan's coastguard gained new legal powers over suspect vessels

Mid-2025 · last year

Chinese cable builders kept winning contracts despite Western restrictions

Firms such as HMN Technologies continued to secure contracts for new systems across Asia and Africa, even as the United States and partners excluded Chinese-built cables from systems touching their own territory.

Mid-2025 · last year

India pressed to become a subsea cable hub

New landing stations in Mumbai and Chennai and simplified permitting supported a wave of new cable systems reaching India from Africa, the Gulf and Europe, as government and industry sought to reduce reliance on landing points elsewhere in Asia.

• An extension of the 2Africa cable system added further landing points in India

Late 2024 · 2 years ago

Australia, India, Japan and the United States launched a subsea cable resilience programme for the Indo-Pacific

The Quad grouping announced a Cable Connectivity and Resilience Programme intended to speed repairs, diversify suppliers and support Pacific island states that often depend on a single vulnerable cable for their only connection to the internet.

Late 2024 · 2 years ago

A suspected shadow-fleet tanker severed telecoms cables beneath the Baltic Sea

The C-Lion1 link and other cables between Finland, Estonia, Germany and Sweden were cut in a series of incidents that investigators linked to vessels dragging their anchors, pushing European governments to treat undersea infrastructure as a security priority.

• NATO launched the Baltic Sentry patrol mission

Late 2024 · 2 years ago

Japan brought its LUCAS laser relay terminal into operational use

The optical terminal, flown aboard the ALOS-4 earth observation satellite, relayed imagery to ground stations at rates well above conventional radio links, part of a national effort to build laser relay infrastructure in orbit.

2016 · 10 years ago

China used its Micius satellite for the first satellite-based quantum key distribution

The satellite distributed cryptographic keys secured by quantum physics between distant ground stations, demonstrating that light in orbit could carry not just data but communications resistant to interception.

1996 · 30 years ago

Ciena Corp commercially introduced dense wavelength-division multiplexing

Ciena Corp brought dense wavelength-division multiplexing to market in 1996, allowing many channels to share a single fibre. This is described as the real start of optical networking as a distinct capability.

1988 · 38 years ago

TAT-8 opened as the first transatlantic fibre-optic cable

A joint venture of American, British and French telecoms operators, the cable carried far more simultaneous calls than the copper and satellite links it supplemented, marking fibre's arrival on the busiest international route.

1987 · 39 years ago

The erbium-doped fibre amplifier was developed at the University of Southampton

The device boosted optical signals directly, without converting them to electricity first, and became the component that made affordable long-haul, multi-channel fibre networks possible worldwide.