My company designs and manufactures the equipment that consolidates many lower-bandwidth signals (phone calls, data traffic) into fiber optic pipelines for efficient transport.
From your house, or single phone line, you are tied into your neighborhood trunk line, which is then combined with other neighborhood trunk lines, into a single optical fiber in the central office (CO - usually a small, square building with no windows). We make the gear that transfers traffic from one CO to another CO, so you can imagine we need a medium that will allow for all of those consolidated, individual phone/data lines.
Fiber optic cabling is simply super-pure glass surrounded by reflective cladding and a protective outer layer. To move data through it, a laser fires light waves at one end and the waves are measured at the other end to receive the information. It would be nearly impossible to shoot the laser in a straight line through a cable, and so the reflective cladding allows it to bounce around on its way to the destination.
As you can imagine, there are lots of opportunities for the signal to degrade along the way. It will fade over a long enough distance, it can come apart with lots of refraction. One way to correct that refraction is to employ a Raman laser, which is aimed against the stream, and basically negates the secondary (refracted) light waves, leaving a more pure signal.
Why did I waste a post on all of this nerd talk? Because when I learned about the Raman laser, I looked it up in Wikipedia and found out that this state-of-the-art correction technique was actually developed in 1928 by a gentleman named Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman.
Crazy!
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