Enter “optical fiber.” In 1964, researcher Charles Kao (now Sir Kao),

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 illuminate surgery—could be used to guide many “colors,” or frequencies, of laser beams.

But Kao pointed out that for this guidance to occur without significant loss, the glass had to be much purer than anything then available; his work was purely theoretical.

Kao's work got Corning interested in the idea of optical fiber. In 1965, Corning was in the glass business but not the telecommunications business. Telecommunications companies were using copper lines to transmit the electrical pulses that carried voice calls and data between cities and into homes.
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To make it worthwhile for those companies—a potentially huge new group of customers—to replace their copper lines with glass fiber, Corning would have to show that the fiber was much better at conveying data.

But at the time, there was no glass strand that could transmit light more than about 15 centimeters before the signal fell off. Corning needed to figure out how to create glass that could transmit a signal not for centimeters but for many miles.