Dr.
Robert D. Maurer (born
July 20, 1924) is an American industrial physicist noted for his leadership in the invention
of optical fiber. In 1979, Maurer was elected
a member of the National Academy of Engineering for
contributions to the technology of low-loss fibers for optical communication. Maurer
was born either in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, or
by other accounts in Richmond Heights, Missouri.
In 1943 he enlisted in the United States Army Reserve and
began studies at the University of Arkansas. He
was quickly called up for active service, and studied preengineering for about
one year at the Huntsville, Texas, state
college. In 1944 he shipped overseas with the 99th infantry division for
combat in France and Belgium along the German border. He was wounded by a landmine, spending more than 20 months in the hospital before
receiving a disability discharge with Purple Heart. Supported by the GI Bill, Maurer returned in 1946 to the University of Arkansas to
study chemical engineering, but
quickly switched to physics. He graduated with a B.S. in
physics in 1948, then performed graduate work at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, where he measured second sound velocity in liquid helium. He took his orals in summer 1951, and graduated
with a physics PhD in the winter class. In 1952 Maurer joined the physics
department of Corning Glass Works,
becoming manager of its applied physics group in 1960, and ultimately research
fellow in 1978. He retired from Corning Incorporated in
1989. Around 1966 Maurer learned of Charles K. Kao's pioneering work in optical fibers at
the Standard Telephones and Cables company
in the United Kingdom, and initiated a project to develop such fibers at
Corning. In 1970 Maurer and his colleagues Donald Keck and Peter C. Schultz designed and produced the first fiber
with optical losses low enough for use in telecommunications by a novel process
of depositing titania-doped silica inside a quartz tube using a
flame-hydrolysis process and sintering, then fusing it to draw into fiber. They
demonstrated optical loss as low as 20 dB/km, which for the first time
indicated a practical technology. Maurer is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering (1979) and inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame (1993), and a fellow of the American Ceramic Society, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and American Physical Society,
and has received numerous honors including the American Institute of Physics'
1978 Prize for Industrial Physics, the 1978 IEEE Morris N.
Liebmann Memorial Award, the Swedish Academy of Engineering's 1979 L.M. Ericsson
International Prize for Telecommunications, an honorary LL.D. Degree from
the University of Arkansas in
1980, the Industrial Research Institute's
1986 Achievement Award, the 1987 John Tyndall Award from IEEE Lasers and
Electro-Optics Society and Optical Society of America, the 1989 Naval Research Laboratory Citation,
the American Physics Society's
1989 International
Prize for New Materials, the 1999 Charles Stark Draper Prize,
the 2000 National Medal of Technology,
and the 2007 NEC C&C Prize.