Keck and Zimar drew fibers from six titanium-doped preforms of various composition on 22 July 1970. After the first fiber was heat-treated on 7 August, Keck tested a 29-m length that had broken off. Its loss was the lowest yet, 17 dB/k. Keck and Zimar drew fibers from six titanium-doped preforms of various composition on 22 July 1970. After the first fiber was heat-treated on 7 August, Keck tested a 29-m length that had broken off. Its loss was the lowest yet, 17 dB/km, so after he recorded the number in his notebook, Keck wrote “Whoopee!” The short length of the fiber limited acc. Fiber communication's two main challenges were making glass so pure it absorbed or scattered very little light, and drawing it into light-guiding fibers with a high-index core and a lower-index cladding. There were two possible starting points: well-developed optical glasses that required extensive purification; or fused silica (SiO2), which was ex. The same materials were available when Maurer got a small budget to spend time studying fibers. The job got off to a slow start. After some investigation, he decided to make a single-mode fiber with help from Frank Zimar, a Ph.D. experimental chemist in the development group who had joined Corning in 1945. Zimar had built a furnace for an earlier s. After Keck arrived in January 1968, he and Schultz tried drawing rod-in-tube fibers, but found that heating the glass and drawing it into fibers drove oxygen from the titanium-doped core, forming light-absorbing Ti3+color centers. Heat-treating the fibers removed the color centers, but took time and left fragile fibers behind. Then they thought of. Keck and Maurer had already written a paper on their fiber work, focusing on bending and intrinsic losses in several hundred meters of earlier single-mode fibers with losses of 60–70 dB/km to avoid questions about materials and fiber processing. They added mention of a fiber with “approximately 20 dB/km” of loss before it appeared in the 15 Novembe.