Creative Tension

Even when his bosses didn't think it was worth pursuing, and even when antimony-silicate glass proved difficult to make into fiber, Ellison persevered. Corning's culture encourages people to champion their ideas; at least formally, scientists are "required" to spend 10% of their time pursuing slightly crazy ideas. (Most Corning R&D employees chuckle at the thought of having half a day a week free for unhurried exploration.) There's even a Corning phrase for the experiments such projects involve: "Friday afternoon experiments," things done in the last couple of hours of the workweek.

One whole genomics-technology business is being built on an idea that at one point was killed by the head of research, but which was pursued nonetheless through Friday afternoon experiments. And antimony-silicate glass could prove vital in the frenzied world of optical networking. "Corning has had three inventions that totally changed the world," says Ellison, who, like most of his colleagues, is acutely tuned to Corning's history. "How many companies have done that?

"Here, people say, 'We could revolutionize the world if we did this.' They don't say, 'We could make $100 million if we did this.' "

Equally important is the fact that Corning has 149 years of experience turning ideas into manufacturable products. "We know how to make it happen," says Ellison.

Indeed, Corning's manufacturing mastery is as vital to its success as its R&D is, and it inspires a certain awe and humility among the company's scientists.

Nick Borrelli is a colleague of Ellison as well as a fellow in Echeverr?a's group. Fellow is the highest scientific rank there is at Corning. Borrelli has a career of five-dozen patents and a record of inventions that has made the company tens of millions of dollars, and is himself pursuing such arcane notions as the ultimate optical fiber: one not with a glass core, but with a hollow core, so that light can streak along in a vacuum.

"We know how to handle glass at Corning like no one in history," says Borrelli. "I'm not smart enough to have an idea that Corning is not smart enough to be able to make."

Miracles of Glass (II)

A single piece of optical fiber -- pulled glass -- is about the size of a strand of hair. Information flows through the piece of glass thread in a simple way -- as digital Morse code: flashes of light and no light.

The light is sent into the fiber with a tiny laser, whose important parts are each the size of a grain of rice. The laser pulses away, sending coded information into the fiber.

So far, this is not really any more difficult to envision than the old signal-corps sailors, standing on the deck of a Navy ship, flashing away in Morse code with a big light to another ship on the horizon. But here's where it gets truly amazing.

One laser, flashing light into one fiber, can send 130,000 simultaneous phone conversations down the fiber. That single channel carries that amount of information -- not just the words of all of those conversations, but also the tone, the volume, and the emotion, not to mention the phone number -- by flashing on and off 10 billion times a second.

Through a marvelously ingenious effort at packaging, single strands of fiber now routinely carry not just one channel of light, but 40 channels. That is, one thin strand of optical fiber can receive and transmit light from 40 lasers at the same time. Each of those lasers emits a slightly different color light, so the fiber can carry them without confusing them. A single strand of fiber can carry more than 5 million simultaneous phone conversations (or emails, Web pages, or corporate-data streams).

When a fiber is carrying 40 channels of light, it is sending 400 billion distinct flashes of light -- on! off on! off -- a second. How many is 400 billion pulses? To live for 400 billion seconds, you'd have to live to be 12,684 years old.

Four-hundred billion flashes a second, through a single thread.

The Creative Mind-Set: The Yenta of Sullivan Park

Dana Bookbinder, who earned a PhD from MIT in 1982, has a personality that is equal parts Robin Williams and Barbra Streisand. He likes doing "chemistry magic" shows for kids, he is constantly playing whatever audience he has for a groaning laugh, and he routinely circles Sullivan Park dispensing impossibly rich chocolate truffles that he has risen at 5 AM to make. He can also tell you -- chemically speaking -- why chocolate is so appealing. "It's caffeine without a methyl group attached."

Like Ellison, Bookbinder is a hands-on bench chemist, a man who likes to "mix stuff up in the lab, see it with my own eyes. Why is it behaving that way? I make a joke about myself: I think like an atom. If I were an atom, and I looked around, what would I see? What would I want to bond with?"